Ecological practices of daily life have taken on new urgency and approaches as consumer citizens increasingly voice awareness of environmental sustainability in China. This lecture will focus on "everyday ecologies"--personal engagement with social and material worlds to negotiate well-being. 

Professor Nancy Chen is Chair of the Anthropology Department and an affiliate of East Asian Studies and Feminist Studies at UC/Santa Cruz. Her research interests include Chinese biotechnology, food and medicine, and alternative healing practices. She is author or editor of six books, including China Urban. 

Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the UK Confucius Institute. 

Dr. Jeffrey Mantz will go through the basics of NSF applications, talk about specific programs, and give some general grant writing advice. Mantz is Program Director in Cultural Anthropology and Human Subjects Research Officer at the National Science Foundation, where he has served since 2012. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and has previously taught at George Mason University, Cornell University, California State University at Stanislaus, and Vassar College. His own research takes him to the Caribbean and Central Africa, where he explores issues related to inequality, resource extraction, and commodity supply chains.

Comparing ethnographic and agricultural data collected from two neighboring Biangai villages (Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea), one engaged in a small-scale conservation effort and the other stakeholders in a large industrial gold mine, this paper analyzes the linkages between alternative development regimes, agricultural transformation and human-environmental relations. Working the land is not simply about production, but also about knowing the landscape and its products as nodes in human social relations. Mining regimes disentangle the multi-species networks experienced in the garden, and reassemble them into other spaces. Thus, in the mining inspired transformations of agricultural practices, Biangai are also transforming how they experience their own multi-species community – its past, present and future.

Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology Colloquium Series.

The works of African descendant women describing our own experiences has always been the most reliable source for my developing a coherent theoretical dialogue about women in captivity and beyond. Black Feminist Archaeology, therefore, demonstrates through an analysis of the material past a method to positively enhance the texture and depth of how we understand the experiences of captive African peoples and further creates an archaeology that can be directly linked to the larger quest for social and political justice.

This talk demonstrates how plant remains can be used to trace food pathways in the modern day. The plant is peaches and the talk will examine pits recovered from a Mission period archaeological site located on Sapelo Island, one of the Georgia Sea Islands, where UK Dept of Anthropology archaeologist Dr. R. Jefferies is conducting excavations and research.