Religion

Erin Durban and Lucinda Ramberg, two feminist, queer, postcolonial scholars, will have a conversation about queer anthropology: What does it mean to queer anthropology? How can we do anthropology, as well as ethnographic methods more broadly, in a queer way and for queer purposes?

Erin Durban, a scholar of queer anthropology, will discuss their book The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti. Evangelical Christians and members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement have vied for influence in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Each side accuses the other of serving foreign interests. Yet each proposes future foreign interventions on behalf of their respective causes despite the country’s traumatic past with European colonialism and American imperialism. As Durban shows, two discourses dominate discussions of intervention.

According to a letter from the apostle Paul, Christ-followers in the Roman colonial town of Corinth in the midst of assembly were speaking in tongues which no one could understand. This talk is an experiment, bringing together recent analyses of speaking in tongues or glossolalia in South Korea (Nicholas Harkness) with a critique of the violence of language by Afro-Caribbean poet M. NourbeSe Philip.

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs program on Global Health and Medicine presents Professor Lucinda Ramberg, sociocultural and medical anthropologist at Cornell University

Fair trade, microfinance, impact investing, social entrepreneurship, decolonized philanthropy: as the crisis of neoliberal order has multiplied in recent decades, so too have projects to represent global capitalism as a vehicle for feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial solidarities. What is the history of these projects? Whose interests do they serve? And, for critics of racialized economic violence and labor expropriation, how should we relate to shiny promises that “humanitarian” capitalism might still be achieved?

Baianas de acarajé are primarily middle-aged, or senior Black women street vendors from the Northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia who wear headwraps, colorful beaded necklaces, and wide skirts, and sell typical Bahian foods with culinary origins in West Africa, most famously acarajé, a fried black-eyed pea fritter that gives them their name.

Kate Soules, PhD, Executive Director of the Religion and Education Collaborative

Commencement reception for seniors and their families for the departments of Dance, Theatre, Classics & Classical Studies, Literary Studies, Philosophy, Religion, and Education Studies.

“This talk will focus on the ideas and processes that went into creation of the multimodal digital monograph A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022). I will emphasize that successful digital composition requires a close connection between the argument one wishes to make regarding one’s topic (in my case the relationship between Islam and time) and possibilities available in digital representation. I will also expand beyond my own published work to share examples of how projects of various historical scales can put digital tools to use for quite different ends.”

The Vermont Humanities Council and the Ilsley Library present Michael Puett, professor of Chinese history at Harvard, and journalist Christine Gross-Loh, who will speak about their new book, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Hosted by the East Asian Studies program, the History Department, and the Religion Department.