2024-2025 Colloquia
September 23rd![https://heb.fas.harvard.edu/sites/projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/styles/profile_full/public/heb.harvard.edu/files/carmody_rachel.jpeg?m=1720562273&itok=HY-8Y5hp](https://heb.fas.harvard.edu/sites/projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/styles/profile_full/public/heb.harvard.edu/files/carmody_rachel.jpeg?m=1720562273&itok=HY-8Y5hp)
Rachel Carmody
Harvard University
October 21st![Carolyn Rouse](https://anthropology.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf1401/files/styles/3x4_750w_1000h/public/people/carolynrouse_9_compressed.jpg?itok=RZYx58BF)
Carolyn Rouse
Princeton University
October 28th![makihara-250x250.png](makihara-250x250.png)
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
![Photo of Alice Yao](https://anthropology.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2023-08/yao_alice.jpg)
Alice Yao
University of Chicago
February 17th![Zengin, Aslı](https://womens-studies.rutgers.edu/images/2017_Fac_Photos/Asli_Headshot.JPG)
Asli Zengin
Rutgers University
April 14th![Photo of Chelsea Fisher](https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/anthropology/images/profile_images/chelsea_fisher.jpg)
Chelsea Fisher
The University of South Carolina
April 28th![](https://www.anthropology.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/KarenStrier-photocredit-Joao-Marcos-Rosa-2-cropped-300x300.jpg)
Karen Strier
University of Wisconsin - Madison
May 12th![Barbra A. Meek](https://lsa.umich.edu/content/michigan-lsa/anthro/en/people/faculty/linguistic-faculty/bameek/jcr:content/profileImage.transform/profile_portrait/image.jpg)
Barbra Meek
University of Michigan