2024-2025 Colloquia
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.
November 11th
Alice Yao
University of Chicago
The Whiteness of Milk: The High Stakes of Lactose (In)tolerance
Until a few years ago, being lactose tolerant or intolerant seemed fairly unremarkable. You were either one or the other. However, the ability to digest milk – a trait that is associated with genetic mutation enabling the production of lactase in adults - has recently been embraced by the alt-right and dairy campaigns like "milk core" and "97Milk." Fanning this controversy of the “white milk gene” are the epic discoveries in archaeology and genetics that now provide evidence for the beginnings of dairying and the diffusion of -13.910:C>T(rs4988235) genetic mutation in prehistoric Europe. And even though experts in the hard and soft sciences decry the misuse of science, the ability to digest milk remains a persistent and real biological fact. How did lactose intolerance become settled as a fact? And where will it take us to as a matter of concern? This talk examines the “whiteness” of the dairy gene as a history of an idea, one borne out of the collaboration between different disciplines from WWII to the present. I investigate its emergence as a scientific object and trace how different actors come to demonstrate its existence empirically - from bodies, gas, genes, and artifacts to data bytes. How can a gene tolerate – in the words of Latour - so many opposite signals coming from different disciplines? In this talk, I examine how archaeologists, scientists, farmer activists, and white nationalists co-exist in this space while asking how the dairy gene places anthropology’s own legacy in an unsettled racialized future.
February 17th
Asli Zengin
Rutgers University
April 14th
Chelsea Fisher
The University of South Carolina
April 28th
Karen Strier
University of Wisconsin - Madison
May 12th
Barbra Meek
University of Michigan