DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

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.