DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Asli Zengin

Rutgers University

Book Abstract:

Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World

In Violent Intimacies, Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality. She shows how cisheteronormativity forms a connective tissue among neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, nationalist religiosity and authoritarian management of social difference. As much as trans people are shaped by these processes, they also transform them in intimate ways. Transness in Turkey provides an insightful site for developing new perspectives on statecraft, securitization and surveillance, family and kin-making, urban geography, and political life. Zengin offers the concept of violent intimacies to theorize this entangled world of the trans everyday where violence and intimacy are co-constitutive. Violent intimacies emerge from trans people’s everyday interactions with the police, religious and medical institutions, street life, family and kinship, and trans femicides and funerals. The dynamic of violent intimacies prompts new understandings of violence and intimacy and the world-making struggles of trans people in a Middle Eastern context.

Bio:

Aslı Zengin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Before joining Rutgers, she held postdoctoral positions at Brown, Harvard, and Brandeis Universities. Her first book, Intimacy of Power: Women Prostitutes, Sex Work and Violence in İstanbul (Iktidarin Mahremiyeti: Istanbul’da Hayat Kadinlari, Seks Isciligi ve Siddet), was published in Turkish. Her new book, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World is recently published by Duke University Press. Her research lies at the intersection of ethnography of sex/gender non-conforming lives and deaths; medico-legal regimes of sex, gender and sexuality; critical studies of violence and sovereignty; politics of mourning and grief; as well as transnational feminist and LGBTQ movements in the Middle East with a special focus on Turkey. 

 

 

April 14th

Chelsea Fisher

The University of South Carolina

Cows, cowboys, and legacies of colonial ranching in the Yucatec Maya landscape: Insights from archaeology at Hacienda Cetelac

Cattle ranching occupies a complicated place in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Ranching is at once an empowering subsistence strategy for Indigenous Maya farmers, as well as a major driver of deforestation and land dispossession. In this presentation, I trace these complex dynamics back to their origins in the colonial period, when the development of cattle estates first accelerated across the Yucatán Peninsula. Drawing on recent archaeological investigations at the 18th-19th century ranching estate of Hacienda Cetelac, I will talk about the people and animals involved in the early transformative stages of colonial ranching, and examine how the legacies of colonial ranching continue to shape environmental justice conflicts in Yucatán today.

 

April 28th

Karen Strier

University of Wisconsin - Madison

 The Limits of Resilience: A 40-year perspective on the future of the world’s most peaceful primate

Field data on the behavioral ecology and demography of wild primate populations are essential to informed conservation and management programs for endangered species. However, they are not enough to save our primates. Here, I share insights gained from more than four decades of research with one of the last remaining populations of the Critically Endangered Northern Muriqui (Brachyteles hypoxanthus) in a small fragment of the Atlantic Forest of southeastern Brazil. Among the most important of these is that muriquis live in remarkably peaceful, egalitarian societies, and that males stay in their natal groups for life while females disperse prior to puberty. These distinctive behavioral features are highly resilient, despite variable ecological and demographic conditions over time and space. Distinguishing such conservative behavioral patterns from more flexible ones represents a new priority for conservation and management action plans for muriquis and other endangered primates.

 

 

 

May 12th

Barbra Meek

University of Michigan

 

 

 

 

 

 

Past Events

September 30th

Rachel Carmody

Harvard University

Gut microbiome plasticity and human adaptability in changing environments

The gut microbiome responds rapidly to dietary change and other ecological perturbation. Plasticity in the gut microbiome is a double-edged sword, potentially lending humans some extra-genomic capacity for adaptation to environmental change while also creating opportunities for pathology if the gut microbiome departs from profiles to which our physiology has adapted. In this talk, I'll discuss recent work probing the benefits and costs of gut microbial plasticity for human physiology and highlight key opportunities for future research.

  

October 21st

Carolyn Rouse

Princeton University

A Type of Freedom: The Meaning of Low White Life Expectancies in the US.

Americans see longer life expectancies as an indication of economic and social progress. But are they? If white life expectancies in the United States are plateauing, and in some cases lower than in many so-called “developing countries,” then what does that say about American progress? This talk explores the meaning of life and death in a white rural community where the average life expectancy is 74. The talk focuses on how the concept of freedom shapes political subjectivities and choice in ways that increase rates of morbidity and early mortality. A 35-minute work-in-progress film will be included in the talk.

  

October 28th

Miki Makihara

Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York

 Rapa Nui Voice, Stance, and Subjectivities 

Language has become a desired object of attention in many indigenous and other minority communities around the world. Yet the objectives and challenges of language revitalization and reclamation efforts are sometimes misrecognized and experienced differently by individual speakers, families, language and political activists, and nation-states. Based on interviews with language activists and three decades of accompanying the Rapa Nui community’s (aka Easter Island, a Polynesian island in Chile) efforts in language maintenance and revitalization, we reflect upon the shifting stancemaking positions that have developed in the community. These include (a) how language activists have come to center attention on a variety of Rapa Nui language, that some have called maitaki  (‘clean and beautiful’) speech, as central to the community’s commitment to genealogical continuity, land reclamation, and community building through language structuration and cherishing, (b) how community members have developed the practices of, and intimacy with, everyday syncretic bilingual ways of speaking but have been persuaded to appreciate the cherished Rapa Nui language, and (c) how the democratizing Chilean state’s evolving stance toward indigenous groups (pueblos originarios) and multiculturalism has come to elevate cherishing the Rapa Nui language, but has fallen short of  supporting revitalization efforts in meaningful ways.