Bania Sinai Garcia Sanchez received her undergraduate degree at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico and an MA in Amerindian Studies and Bilingual Education at the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, Mexico. Thanks to the Wadsworth International Fellowship she will continue her training with a PhD in anthropology at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, supervised by Dr. Mark Sicoli. Read the previous entry in the series.
My name is Bania Sinaí García Sánchez and I come from a Zapotec indigenous community located in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca. I completed my undergraduate degree in Linguistics and Hispanic Literature at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. During my undergraduate years I wrote a research thesis entitled, “Towards an interpretation of the figure of the Zapotec mother in a portrait of my mother by Andrés Henestrosa”. I received my master’s degree in Amerindian Studies and Bilingual Education from the Autonomous University of Querétaro and wrote my Master’s thesis entitled, “Wedding Advice among the Zapotec Women of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec: A Discourse Genre.”
I have made it a priority to learn to speak my heritage language, to keep it, protect it, and preserve it. I have studied Zapotec as a second language for two years at the Language School of the Autonomous University of Oaxaca. I have also conducted fieldwork in my community and have collected legends and myths from oral traditions, interviewed women on ritual practice, made video recordings and taken photographs of the traditions of the people in the community, our festivals, and our rites. I have also investigated the discourse, pragmatics, semantics, and the use of verbs in advice given by women, and other speech genres. I hosted a literary workshop of Zapotec indigenous literature in the Faculty of Languages in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec of the Autonomous University of Oaxaca, where I taught two semesters of Zapotec oral traditions.
I applied to the Ph.D. program in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Virginia because I believe studying there will provide me with the necessary skills to analyze, document, and share my indigenous language of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which will strengthen the vitality of my culture. The University of Virginia is unique for its linguistic anthropology faculty who specialize in language and cognition and documenting language as culture, and for its faculty across the subfields who are dedicated to participatory and community-based research methods. I believe it is the ideal environment for me to pursue my goals of understanding the Zapotec language as lived experience in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
Figure 1. Grassridge Rockshelter, as viewed from the northern entrance to the site, with Dr. Collins on the right.
In 2015 Dr. Benjamin Collins was awarded a Post-Ph.D. Research Grant to aid research on “Late MIS 3 Behavioral Diversity: The View from Grassridge Rockshelter, Eastern Cape, South Africa”. Recently Dr. Collins reached out to Wenner-Gren to share an update from the field.
2018 Fieldwork Update from Grassridge Rockshelter, Eastern Cape, South Africa
Dr. Benjamin Collins and Dr. Christopher Ames are leading Wenner-Gren Foundation-funded research at Grassridge Rockshelter that explores the dynamic between hunter-gather behavioral diversity, social network formation, and regional-scale climatic variability during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene in southern Africa. This research forms the core component of the Grassridge Archaeological and Paleoenvironmental Project (GAPP), which focuses on the understudied interior grasslands region of South Africa. Collins and Ames are currently focusing research on Grassridge Rockshelter, a multicomponent site with human occupations dating to the Late Pleistocene (~40,000 years ago and earlier), the early Holocene (~11,600 years ago), and the mid-Holocene (~7,000 years ago). Their ongoing research is collaborative and multidisciplinary – bringing together a variety of perspectives to reconstruct past human technologies and behaviors, and to develop high-resolution paleoenvironmental and geochronological records.
Figure 2. Dr. Ames collecting sediment samples at Grassridge Rockshelter.
Past technologies and behaviors are explored through stone tool analysis, analysis of symbolic artifacts, such as beads and pendants, and the analysis of the animal remains. Dr. Jayne Wilkins and Ms Ayanda Mdludlu are leading the stone tool analysis, with preliminary results suggesting a diverse range of stone tool manufacturing strategies during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene occupations at Grassridge. These strategies exhibit more differences than similarities in comparison with other contemporaneous sites in southern Africa, and are indicative of greater diversity in technological behaviors during these periods than previously thought.
Shell beads are ubiquitous within the Holocene occupations at Grassridge. Ongoing analysis of these symbolic artifacts, conducted by Dr. Collins and Dr. April Nowell, demonstrates an abundance of ostrich eggshell beads in all stages of manufacture, as well as marine shell beads that indicate a relationship to the coast, which was at least 200 km away from the site. These results reinforce the presence of extensive social networks during the Holocene in southern Africa, and suggest that Grassridge was an important social nexus between coastal, interior, and montane landscapes.
Figure 3. Dr. Jayne Wilkins (left) and Ms Ayanda Mdludlu (right) analysing stone tools recovered from Grassridge Rockshelter at the Stone Age Laboratory in the University of Cape Town.
Initial results from the study of the animal remains, led by Dr. Jerome Reynard, Thomas Beard, and Amy Smith, demonstrate a greater diversity of bovids than expected during the Holocene, and suggest changes in hunting strategies and local environments between the early and mid-Holocene occupations. This research also contributes to the development of a high-resolution paleoenvironmental record, with the data from the animal remains being combined with information from stable isotope analyses of recovered animal teeth, pollen and phytoliths extracted from the sediments, and an examination of the site formation processes. Stable isotope research by Dr. Judith Sealy tracks the proportions of C3 and C4 grasses through the early and mid-Holocene and will provide key information on past environmental conditions at Grassridge. Pollen and phytoliths are being studied by Dr. Carlos Cordova and the data indicate substantial differences in the local environments during the different occupations, as well as providing insight on human use of plants within the shelter, especially as firewood. The microbotanical research also contributes to the study of site formation processes, which Dr. Ames combines with stratigraphic and sedimentological analyses to reconstruct the sequence of site formation processes. The data indicate a variable presence of water and flooding in the shelter at the end of the Late Pleistocene, as well as intensive human activity and hearth construction during the mid-Holocene.
Figure 4. Ms Amy Smith (left), Mr. Thomas Beard (centre), and Dr. Jerome Reynard (right) studying animal bones recovered from Grassridge Rockshelter at the University of Witwatersrand.
GAPP is refining the chronological resolution of the occupational sequence at Grassridge through radiocarbon analysis, Uranium-Thorium analysis, and Optically Stimulated Luminescence. In collaboration with Dr. Emma Loftus, a suite of radiocarbon age estimates have been analysed from Grassridge, which have been fundamental in identifying the early and mid-Holocene occupations. Dr. Robyn Pickering is further contributing to the developing the chronological resolution of the sequence by applying Uranium-Thorium dating techniques to estimate the age of a flowstone that separates the Pleistocene and Holocene deposits, information that will also provide unique insights into the local environment and site formation processes during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Dr. Luke Gliganic is leading the Optically Stimulated Luminescence analysis, which will clarify the Late Pleistocene occupational sequence at Grassridge, as these occupations are beyond the limit of radiocarbon dating.
Initial results and ongoing analyses provide valuable insight into the archaeology and paleoenvironments preserved in the rich archive from Grassridge Rockshelter, and are furnishing a detailed, multi-faceted understanding of life in the interior grasslands of southern Africa over the past 40,000 years. These data point to a record of changing local environments and human lifeways over time that, as more analyses are completed, will inform our understanding of human-environment dynamics during periods of rapid and profound climate change. As this new information is compared to, and contextualized within, the broader southern African record, it will shed light on social network formation and human adaptation to climate variability at local, regional, and subcontinental scales from the end of the Late Pleistocene through the mid-Holocene.
While a doctoral student at the University of California, Riverside, California, Kirby Farah received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to aid research on “Creating and Maintaining an Elite Identity: A Study of Elite Domestic Practices at Postclassic Xaltocan,” supervised by Dr. Wendy Ashmore. Two years later Dr. Farah had the opportunity to return to the field when she received an Engaged Anthropology Grant to carry out her project, “Middle Postclassic Ritual Spaces and Implements: A Museum Exhibit at Xaltocan, Mexico”.
My Wenner Gren funded dissertation research, conducted between July 2014 and June 2015, focused on the everyday lives and identity practices of the Postclassic (A.D. 900-1521) leaders of Xaltocan, Mexico. From the outset, this project was informed by community engagement. I collaborated with local Xaltocan residents to outline a set of research objectives that prioritized transparency and rapid dissemination of research results. We also worked together to design research questions that would glean locally-relevant knowledge about Xaltocan’s prehispanic past. This might include knowledge that (1) contributes to cultivating local pride, (2) is of general interest to the local community, or (3) adds perspective to issues facing Xaltocan (and other Basin of Mexico communities) today. Too often we as archaeologists dive into our projects with our own research questions in mind, rarely taking into consideration whether or not the topics we focus on are important to local communities. Collaborating early on creates avenues for integrating topics that emphasize our interests as researchers as well as the interests of the communities most impacted by our work.
Xaltocan Museum
Among other things, my conversations with community members revealed a particular interest in the lives and practices of Xaltocan’s Postclassic rulers, an understudied topic at Xaltocan. There was also a strong interest in understanding the cultural practices that distinguished Xaltocan from other Postclassic Basin of Mexico polities. In order to address these topics and to learn more about the nature of leadership and community identity at Postclassic Xaltocan, I conducted excavations at Cerrito Central, a large mound located near the modern town center. These excavations recovered the remains of successive monumental buildings that likely served as the residences of Xaltocan’s Postclassic leaders. Data collected from in and around these buildings, which dated to roughly the Early (AD 900-1240), Middle (AD 1240-1350), and Late Postclassic (1350-1521), provided a better understanding of the ways in which leadership strategies shifted over time and in response to changing local and regional dynamics.
Joel and Isidro mix soil, water, and cactus sap to create cement to build the replicas.
Excavations at Cerrito Central recovered important data concerning the everyday practices of Xaltocan’s leaders throughout the Postclassic. However many of the most interesting findings were associated with the Middle Postclassic, the periods during which Xaltocan reached peak political prominence in the region. In particular, the recovery of two ritual spaces—one private and one public—revealed the various practices and implements used by Xaltocan’s leaders to interact with the gods.
The private ritual space was a small room that contained the remains of five successive altars. The altars and the wall foundations surrounding the room were lined along the surface with ceramic fragments. The public area was an open patio just north of the altar room. The patio contained the remains of a ceremonial hearth—which also incorporated ceramic fragments—and a large ritual deposit. Thus, in both spaces ceramic fragments were used to mark or outline ritual space. Both spaces were also associated with burning practices. The private rituals involved the use of censers and braziers to contain smoking copal resin, whereas the public ritual involved an open fire that burned in the ceremonial hearth. Combined, these findings provide evidence for a complex ritual program at Xaltocan that involved ritual symbols that have not been observed elsewhere in the Basin of Mexico.
Image of the museum exhibit with all three vitrines and information plaques.
I concluded that the ritual features and implements recovered in these Middle Postclassic contexts spoke to the research questions we designed. The ritual practices of Xaltocan’s leaders reflect their political and religious role in the community. Furthermore, the use of ceramic fragments to outline ritual spaces reflects a culturally distinctive practice that may have been unique to Xaltocan. In order to make these findings more accessible to the local community, I returned to Xaltocan in 2017 to install a permanent museum exhibit that would showcase our recent findings and provide detailed information about their significance. This exhibit was funded by a Wenner-Gren Engaged Anthropology grant. The exhibit was designed to showcase the Middle Postclassic ritual implements of Xaltocan’s rulers and to teach visitors about the nature of ritual practice during the Postclassic. As a permanent installation, the exhibit will serve as a learning tool for generations to come.
Vitrine containing the objects recovered from the ritual deposit.
The exhibit includes artifacts recovered from Middle Postclassic ritual contexts as well as replicas of some of the ritual features. These artifacts and features are contained in three large vitrines. The first vitrine contains a replica of one of the altars recovered in the private room, the second contains a replica of the ceremonial hearth, and the third contains the reconstructed artifacts recovered from a ritual deposit. A plaque with detailed descriptions of the features and objects accompanies each vitrine. A map of the excavation area is also included, which allows visitors to understand the spatial relationships of the objects on display. The exhibit also includes a large informational panel that outlines the nature ritual practice at Xaltocan and in the Basin of Mexico, with special focus on the New Fire ceremony. The second and third vitrines contain the remnants of a public ritual that may have been an early version of the New Fire ceremony, which would become one of the most important state-sponsored rituals of the Aztecs.
Kirby Farah speaks to opening ceremony attendees about the exhibit.
The exhibit was completed in August 2017 and we held an opening ceremony to mark the event. Attendees included government officials and members of local cultural and educational institutions, but most attendees were children and families from Xaltocan. I kicked off the event with an introduction to the exhibit and the directors of the local museum and cultural center also spoke. I was also happy to welcome most members of the original excavation team, who spoke about their experiences and answered questions. As a follow-up to the success of the opening ceremony and the exhibit, a symposium is being planned form summer 2019. The symposium will be future-focused, and address the relationship between local patrimony and archaeological research at Xaltocan.
The Wenner-Gren Foundation is excited to announce the return of the New York Academy of Sciences lecture series which will be kicking off on September 24th at 5:45 PMat itsnew location, Roosevelt House, 47-49 E 65th St, New York, NY 10065.Carolyn Rouse, Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University will be presenting, “The Inner Lives of Passively Suicidal Americans: Why Racism Isn’t Just Bad for Black People”. Julie Livingston, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, will act as discussant.
Please note: the lecture begins at 6:30 PM, and while the event is free to attend pre-registration is required for entry into the building. You may also register by phone, 212-298-8640 or 212-298-8600. Early registration is strongly recommended since seating is limited. For the buffet supper, registration is also required. If you will be registering for an event for the first time, the New York Academy of Sciences will ask you first to set up a user account with them. Registration is free and does not require divulging personal or financial information.
Again please also note that the NYAS lecture series is no longer being held at the offices of The Wenner-Gren Foundation. All talks in this series take place at Roosevelt House, 47-49 E 65th St, New York, NY 10065.
Inequalities are increasing locally and globally on a vast scale. At the same time that these disparities, which are experienced by racialized groups, certain nationalities, by women, poor people, immigrants and the elderly, are explained by media and politicians as the natural and unavoidable order of things. How are we to understand these relationships between untold wealth and growing immiseration? How do we understand the way the stories about inequality are told? Who has access to information about the production of inequality? Who is able to contest its production?
Often inequality and equality are researched and discussed in isolation. Yet, anthropological research in archeology, linguistics, human biology, and socio-cultural anthropology has the capacity to both document the grim actualities of the current conjuncture and to show how inequality is linked to systems of production, distribution and domination. Both in the past and present the issues of the equality and inequality are inextricably linked and connected to the way the way disparities are explained, legitimated, and turned into the taken-for-granted.
This lecture series takes a global perspective on the entanglements of wealth, poverty, and inequality as well as the popularization of narratives of inevitable disparity and the silencing of struggles for social justice and equality. Speakers will explore these entanglement including the human experience and materiality of equality, their mediation through different channels of communication, their ideological justifications through concepts of race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, hereditary, class and status, and the punitive power to enforce these ideas through incarceration, surveillance, criminalization. We ask how knowledge about power and inequality empowers resistance and struggle.
About the Speakers:
Carolyn Rouse is a professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University whose work explores how evidence is used to make particular claims about race and social inequality. She is the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam (Univ.of California Press 2004) Uncertain Suffering: Racial Healthcare Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease (Univ. of California Press 2009) and Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment (NYUPress 2016). In 2016 she created the Ethnographic Data Visualization Lab (VizE Lab): a medium for examining complex ethnographic data. One current project brings together 60 years of biological data with 60 years of social scientific data to study epigenetic effects on physical development. In addition, Rouse is a filmmaker who has produced, directed, and/or edited a number of documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998), and Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought (2015).
Julie Livingston is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, where she is also affiliated with the Anthropology Department. She is interested in the human body as a moral condition and mode of consciousness, in care as a social practice, and in taxonomy and relationships that upend or complicate it. Her work is at the intersection of history, anthropology, and public health. A MacArthur fellow, Julie Livingston is the author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic(Duke University Press, 2012), Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press 2005), and numerous articles and essays on topics including aging, disability, disgust, suicide, and medical photography. She is currently working on two new projects. The first deals with the problem of growth and consumption as seen from southern Africa. The second is an ethnographic project on co-morbidity and aging in New York.
A dinner and wine reception will precede the talk. Buffet dinner begins at 5:45 PM. ($20 contribution for dinner guests/free for students).
The Wenner-Gren Foundation has a new online system to accept applications for all of its research grants, conference/workshop grants, and fellowships. We will now accept all materials (e.g., application forms, CVs, project bibliographies) exclusively online; applicants no longer need to mail us printed duplicates.
To get started, please review the Grant Program descriptions on our website and verify that you meet all program and application season pre-requisites. Then follow the instructions on the Access the Online Application page to initiate a submission.
To access the online application, you must first establish an account with SurveyMonkey Apply by submitting an email address that will serve as your primary means of contact. Once you have established an account and verified that you are eligible for the current season and program, you can begin filling out the Grant Application Form. You can save and edit application responses multiple times, up until the application deadline. Be careful not to submit your application before you are ready to; once you have, you will longer be able to edit content. (Please note: It’s a good idea to begin your application several weeks in advance of the program deadline. Make every effort to avoid putting off your submission until the last moment, when the website may be less responsive due to applicant traffic).
For more information, visit the Programs section of the Wenner-Gren Foundation website.
Back in 2014 when Karen Allen was a doctoral student at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, she received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to aid research on “Sustainable Development in Costa Rica: Understanding Values, Land Use Decisions, and Market-based Mechanisms for Conservation,” supervised by Dr. Ted Gragson. Dr. Allen was then able to return to the field in 2018 after receiving an Engaged Anthropology Grant to carry out her project, “Fostering Conservation Ethic Through Dialogue in the Bellbird Biological Corridor, Costa Rica”.
Notes from a brainstorming session in Costa de Pajaros
This project entailed coordinating and carrying out two workshops in the Bellbird Biological Corridor, Costa Rica. This is a mixed-use area and is part of Costa Rica’s relatively new biological corridor network (www.cbpc.org). The national network system as a whole aims to foster ecological connectivity and sustainable development across the country (www.sinac.go.cr/EN-US/correbiolo). The purpose of these workshops was to strengthen the connections between the conservation organizations that oversee the Bellbird Biological Corridor, and the people who live within the corridor. This project grew directly out of Wenner-Gren funded dissertation research, where I investigated the ways in which conservation policy influences land-use decisions within the corridor. It became clear early on in my research that very few people had actually heard of the Bellbird Biological Corridor, and the boundaries and objectives of the corridor where not clear. I devised these workshops with a dual purpose: to provide information about corridor objectives and the conservation imperatives, and to foster dialogue about the broader sustainable development objectives. Further, this process built the foundation, and the social capital needed to continue similar efforts into the near future.
Presentation by Bellbird Biological Corridor coordinator in Santa Rosa
The workshops took place in two different towns within the corridor. I chose the towns in collaboration with corridor organizations based on the strength of their past interactions with these towns, as well as my experiences and connections in each place. Because the towns were quite dissimilar (one was a coastal fishing village, and another a mountain agrarian village), the workshops were a bit different in each locale. In the fishing village, Costa de Pájaros, I organized and hosted a three-hour workshop in conjunction with the Asociación de Mujeres Mariposas del Golfo. We publicized this workshop through the community organizations, as the Asociación de Mujeres (women’s association) decided that it would be best to focus on integrating the various organizations in the region. There were approximately thirty to thirty-five people in attendance. This workshop began with an introduction to the Bellbird Biological Corridor, given by the current corridor director. We then split into groups, where they used maps of the corridor, and maps of the region, to identify social-ecological challenges and potential solutions. Each group presented a summary of their discussion. We then talked about particular initiatives that already exist in the corridor, and forged connections between the people who wanted to pursue those initiatives further and those coordinating the initiatives. We also made a “wish-list” of ideas that might be possible to undertake in the future.
Presentation on behalf of the Sendero Pacifico in Santa Rosa
In the second workshop, in Santa Rosa, we followed a similar format, but included a few more presentations. We publicized this workshop by visiting all houses in the town of Santa Rosa (approximately fifty) and explaining the purpose of the workshop. The local Asociación de Desarrollo (community development organization) decided that it would be good to make the workshop longer (about four hours) and include a few more presentations on different initiatives in the region. In total, we had approximately thirty-five people from Santa Rosa attending the workshop. In addition, three corridor representatives came to speak about the corridor initiative, and four representatives came from the neighboring community of San Luis to share their experiences with the Sendero Pacífico, a trail network (senderopacifico.net). There is a possibility of extending this trail network to Santa Rosa, and several people spoke to that effect. We also examined the social-ecological challenges in the region with this group, and established several follow-up initiatives for future collaboration. As in the first workshop, we spent time reviewing the initiatives that already exist in the region, and brainstorming future possibilities and collaborations. And of course, both workshops concluded with a shared meal – arroz con pollo!
View of Santa Rosa from above
Some of the more exciting things to come out of these workshops were the new ideas and connections that emerged. The organization leaders that I worked with have since commented to me that they have continued to contact people they met at the meetings. Further, we have begun to brainstorm future engaged projects that came out of these experiences. People seemed excited and motivated by the workshops and it is inspiring for me to see these events as the direct output of many years of more theoretical dissertation research. I see many possibilities for future engagement, and I plan to continue this work in the future.
While a doctoral student at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, Evren Dincer received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to aid research on “The Reindustrialization of the U.S.: An Ethnography of Auto Workers in the American Rust Belt,” supervised by Dr. Shelley Feldman. In 2017 Dr. Dincer received an Engaged Anthropology Grant to aid engaged activities on “Situating Auto Work: Engaging with Community in the Rust Belt,” 2017, Buffalo, NY.
Thanks to the grant provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, I spent eight weeks in Buffalo, New York in the summer of 2017 between June 20 and August 16. During this stay, I accomplished two goals: revisiting my field site and organizing an international conference.
As for the first goal, I revisited the plant I conducted my original fieldwork, General Motors’ Powertrain Plant in Tonawanda, a suburb of Buffalo. I held a total of eight meetings with workers, union leaders as well as members of management to share my findings. These meetings occurred at the union hall (3), company management suite (1) and at the plant (2). I also organized two meetings outside the plant at Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations’ downtown Buffalo offıce. During these meetings I shared my findings focusing exclusively on three issues:
1. The issue of generational transition that occurred on the shop floor and its current trajectory. The generational transition in the unionized auto industry constituted the backbone of my dissertation. It basically explains the dynamics of workforce change in a protected labor market, which is largely called internal labor market in the literature. In the post-2008 crisis this meant the gradual replacement of the aging workforce with higher wages and extensive benefit packages with a younger workforce with less pay and limited healthcare. I shared the details of my findings in these meetings and we discussed the trajectory since I left the field site in 2015.
2. The second issue was the issue of space surrounding the plant, which is another central element of my dissertation. The trajectory of organized labor and their everyday lives in the Rust Belt is a critical issue to understand the shop floor relations as well as the larger context of organized labor today. During our meetings I shared findings from my work as well as from the literature on the Rust Belt to enable a better understanding of the condition of work today.
3. The third issue was NAFTA, which was a highly contentious issue at the time and continues to be so today. I had addressed competitive pressures in my dissertation, therefore parts of our meetings focusing on NAFTA featured discussions on NAFTA’s effects on the auto industry in the U.S. and its competitive nature. Workers, especially in the context of Trump’s victory, were quite sensitive to the role of Mexico. Given that about 40% of the UAW (United Auto Workers) represented workers who voted for Trump in 2016, it was difficult yet important to address the trade relations between the two countries.
Regarding the second goal, I organized an international conference on economic development in Buffalo.[1] In my dissertation, one of the central points and contributions to the literature on labor was to highlight the key connection between the shop floor and the socio-economic urban environment it is surrounded by. Labor-management relations in the unionized sectors were traditionally defined by internal labor markets which defined job progressions, formal pay and fringe benefit policies. Such policies shielded the internal labor market from outside effects for decades, such isolation was best visible in the auto industry until the 2008 Recession. However, following the recession the generational transition I mentioned above took place, and I showed how it was only possible with a long-term and in depth economic deterioration in the Rust Belt in general and the Buffalo metro area in particular. This conference, therefore, focused on the issues of economic development in Buffalo since the Great Recession in 2008 to help my interlocutors at the plant and outside to better situate their experiences and economic position with respect to the urban environment they reside and live in.
The grant provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation helped me share my findings, reconnect with my interlocutors, and organize a professional workshop. However, it also helped me observe some of the recent developments (particularly the collective bargaining process in 2015 and the national elections of 2016) and the effects of these developments on labor in the U.S. today.
[1] The conference took place on August 14 and 15. The first day featured three sessions and took place at Cornell University’s downtown Buffalo premises, while the second day featured one session and took place at UAW Local 774’s union hall. The link to the program, titles and the list of participants can be found here: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/buffalo/worker-institute/events
Dilmurad Yusupov received his undergraduate degree from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University), Russia and an MA in Economics at the Graduate School of Economics, Waseda University, Japan. Thanks to the Wadsworth International Fellowship he will continue his training with a PhD in anthropology at the University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom, supervised by Dr. Magnus Marsden.
My research project deals with disability in Uzbekistan, where it is conflated with physical dysfunction caused by various impairments and state efforts are directed towards returning disabled people to ‘normal’ condition through medical rehabilitation. Current practices have been largely influenced by Soviet disability policies based on institutionalization and segregation. The purpose of my study is to explore the potential that community-based approaches hold for promoting inclusive development as an alternative to placing disabled people into specialized care institutions.
Through an approach based on participatory action research with adults with physical, sensory and learning impairments and critical ethnography, my goal is to understand how Soviet disability policies and practices, Islamic culture in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and related cultural stereotypes about disabled people shape current understandings of disability. I am also deeply interested in learning how existing formal/ informal community networks in Uzbekistan promote or prevent social inclusion of disabled people.
As an economist by training, I used to practice quantitative research and hold a positivist worldview. But after working with disabled people at grassroots levels on various projects implemented by Japanese international organizations in Uzbekistan, I gained an understanding of how economics, with its numerous assumptions about human lives and focus on numbers, can produce a distorted reality. This prompted me to undertake a PhD at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex where I could receive postgraduate training in anthropology and participatory research methods.
Drawing on social and medical anthropology, my research project adopts a constructivist paradigm. After completing a comprehensive literature review on relevant research approaches and methods, I have embraced critical ethnography and view disability not as a medical but as a culturally and socially constructed concept. In Uzbekistan, anthropological education and research is heavily underrepresented and its potential is underestimated. Therefore, through this research and world-class training in anthropology, I aim to contribute to national academia and advance applied anthropology as a means to promote social development in Uzbekistan.
After the success of our three previous editions, in 2018 the 4th AIBR International Conference of Anthropology will take place in Granada (Spain). AIBR’s yearly conference has become a meaningful and necessary gathering for anthropologists from many parts of the world, but specially from Iberoamerica (Spain, Portugal, and Latin America). This year we will meet around the general theme “Dialogues, Encounters, and Stories from the Souths”. This is a special edition of the Conference where we aim to bring together research, narratives and testimonies from non-Western scholars. We want to bring to the spotlight anthropology as it is practiced in countries and by scholars who situate themselves outside mainstream anthropological theory and practice. Focusing on narratives from the Souths brings us an opportunity to recognize diverse genres of research, writing, and scholarship coming from places and universities that are rarely mentioned in the top rated scientific journals of our discipline.
In the 4th AIBR International Conference we continue to build on the experience of our previous editions. In 2015, the II Conference was held in Barcelona, with sponsorship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, where a total of 876 delegates met and 140 panels took place. The high turnout in Madrid (1st edition), Barcelona (2nd edition) and Puerto Vallarta (3rd edition) and the positive feedback received from the Conference participants showed that it was necessary to create further spaces for dialogue within Iberoamerican anthropology. In 2017 we were able to cross the Ocean. The Puerto Vallarta edition (Mexico) brought together scholars from 28 different countries. The 4th edition of this conference will be jointly organized by AIBR (Network of Iberoamerican Anthropologists) and the University of Granada (Department of Social Anthropology and Institute of Migrations). The conference aims to create a space that combines a range of traditional and innovative forms of dissemination of knowledge to inspire discussion and debate.
ESHE, the European Society for the study of Human Evolution, promotes the broad field of research which investigates how humans evolved both biologically and culturally. Contributing disciplines typically include hominin palaeontology and palaeogenetics; comparative and functional studies of extant primates, using both morphological and molecular evidence; Palaeolithic archaeology; and applied studies of stable isotopes, dating, taphonomy, palaeoecology and palaeogeography.
ESHE aims to stimulate communication and scientific cooperation between scientists, and to improve public understanding of human evolution. Core activities of the society are: the organization of yearly meetings with a scientific programme, as well as a public-outreach event; encouraging and helping the development of international and interdisciplinary research proposals and projects, and initiating and supporting activities which increase the public visibility of human evolution studies.
The ESHE annual conference brings together an average of over 350 experts and graduate students that present the most recent research in human evolution and adaptation in Plio-Pleistocene contexts, including results from biological-physical research, archaeology, geoarchaeology, zooarchaeology, earth sciences, aDNA, isotopes, etc.
This 21st IPPA Congress will gather indigenous Indo-Pacific and other, mainly “Western”, scholars to discuss diverse themes in Indo-Pacific prehistory. As per IPPA procedure, convenors will organize sessions around topical themes in Indo-Pacific archaeology, cultural heritage, natural science, comparative linguistics, cultural anthropology and biological anthropology and genetics. The IPPA region extends W-E from Pakistan to Easter Island, and N-S from Siberia to Australasia. Conference topics can concern any part of this area.
IPPA congresses run every 4 years in collaboration with in-country institutions, most recently at Angkor with the Royal Academy of Cambodia and Khmer Archaeological Society in 2014. Past co-sponsors include the Institute of Archaeology in Hanoi (late 2009), the Philippines National Museum and University of the Philippines in Manila (2006), Academia Sinica in Taipei (2002), and the National Museum of Malaysia in Melaka (1998). The 21st Congress in 2018 is co-organised with the Hue Monuments Conservation Centre and the Institute of Archaeology in the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences.
Image 1: Small-Scale garbage collectors use customized equipment to reach hard to reach low-income neighbourhoods at affordable rates. How could these services be integrated into official waste management systems.
In 2012 Jacob Doherty received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to aid research on ”Keep Kampala Clean: Disposability, Environmentalism, and Garbage in Urban Uganda,” supervised by Dr. James Ferguson. In 2018 Dr. Doherty was able to return to his fieldsite when he was awarded an Engaged Anthropology Grant which gave him the opportunity to carry out his project, “Wasted Opportunities: Designs to Recognize Informal Waste Infrastructures in Kampala, Uganda”.
Using a small cart he designed and built himself, Didas collects rubbish from households throughout Banda, a mixed-income neighborhood in Uganda’s capital city, Kampala. Filling a vital gap in waste management, he collects from houses large and small, rich and poor, from hostels housing dozens of students at the nearby university who benefit from the customized services he provides to mutli-occupancy households who cannot afford regular collection by private firms. For the last year however, he has been working under the cover of darkness, serving his clients at night to avoid the attention of representatives of a large private firm awarded a contract to serve Banda by the city government. Mistaking their contract for sole territorial rights to the neighborhood’s rubbish, they have impounded Didas’s equipment and threatened to take him to court. This fits with a broader pattern in Kampala, where small-scale garbage collectors who provide critical infrastructural services are being criminalized, paradoxically, in the name of cleaning of the city.
Image 2: Using recycled plastics, ECOaction created a mobile art gallery to stage a pop-up exhibit. Background: art installation by Reagan Kandole.
Didas was one of my key collaborators on “Wasted Opportunities: Designs to Recognize Informal Waste Infrastructures in Kampala, Uganda,” an exhibition I co-organized with ECOaction, a community organization based in Banda that works to tackle Kampala’s environmental and employment challenges by using waste to generate new livelihoods. Lead by eco-artist Reagan Kandole, who I first met while conducting dissertation fieldwork in Kampala, ECOaction has been in Banda for five years, engaging small scale garbage collectors, informal plastic recyclers, and young people in the community. Together, we spent a month organizing a pop-up exhibition highlighting the contributions these small scale waste managers make to keeping Kampala clean, and proposing new designs that offer an alternative to criminalization by integrating these services into the city’s official waste stream.
Waste on the Ground: Scenes from Kampala
Image 3: Photo elicitation image: “Sometimes it smells badly, because there are many things, different things, which they throw there. When you are eating and you feel a bad smell, you can’t get a good appetite. I feel uncomfortable because you can even catch some diseases from there because there are so many things in there.”
The first part of the exhibition featured photos taken as part of a photo-elicitation I conducted as part of my ethnographic work. Twenty residents of Kampala were given disposable cameras and asked to take photographs of their city. Prompted to photograph places that make them happy, relaxed, and proud, and places that make them fearful, ashamed, or uncomfortable, places that are changing quickly for good or for bad, as well as how they dispose of rubbish in the areas where they live, participants captured a side of Kampala that is rarely visually represented. After printing the images, they became the basis for a conversation, where the photographers explained what they had seen and captured. Neither a celebration nor an expose, the images showed the Kampala of everyday life, capturing the problem of waste for urban residents, and the ways that garbage is handled in low-income communities.
Integrating Small Scale Garbage Collectors
The second part of the exhibition included photographs of Didas in action collecting garbage from Banda alongside a model we developed together with Isaac, an ECOaction team member who is a designer and craftsman. The model offered one possible future for an integrated community waste management system in Kampala. It put small-scale collectors at the centre of a system that maximizes the reuse and recycling of waste materials, minimizes the volume of waste needing disposal at a sanitary landfill, and reduces the carbon footprint, fuel usage, and expense of collecting garbage, while creating new resources for use in a variety of community enterprises.
Image 4: The model showing an integrated waste management system for Banda, centered on small-scale collectors and waste re-use projects.
Around the world, cities are experimenting with a new way to simultaneously improve urban waste management and support the livelihoods of the urban poor. From Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Pune, India and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, small scale ‘informal’ garbage collectors have organized themselves in innovative new ways to demand inclusion in official solid waste management strategies, in turn, improving urban cleanliness and sanitation, while improving the livelihoods and capacities of marginalized urban populations. While not organized to the same extent, Small scale collectors are a fact of life in most Kampala neighborhoods. Recognizing this fact, this model proposes integrating them into official systems in a way that is mutually beneficial to the citizens who are their clients, government, private companies, small-scale collectors themselves, and to the environment.
The model shows the movement of waste from households, hostels, and local businesses to a community sorting facility where garbage collectors will be able to safely and hygienically sort waste into appropriate categories driven by local markets and community projects: plastic, metal, and paper recycling, urban farming, chicken, goat and other animal rearing, bio-mass briquette production, composting, and plastic bottle architecture projects. These projects bring income into the community, by linking household waste directly to industries and activities that repurpose it. The remaining waste would be taken to a skip situated at a roadside for easy collection, saving the capital-intensive trucks from time spent idling.
ECOaction Plastic Collectors
Image 5: ECOaction team members interviewing a plastic collector.
The third part of the exhibition highlighted ECOaction Plastic Collectors, new initiative that aims to foster co-operation among plastic collectors in Banda community so they can improve the services they deliver, maximize their earnings from collecting, improve their working conditions, overcome discrimination, and save money to invest in new projects and in their families’ health and education. The exhibition featured portraits and biographies of eight plastic collectors, written in collaboration with Arnold, Fiona, and Zahara, three young ECOaction members who learned how to conduct and write up life-history interviews.
Image 6: A workshop discussing the possibility of forming a co-operative to facilitate pooling collected materials and a scheme to save collectors’ earnings.
Plastic Collectors remove tons of recyclable material from the waste stream on a daily basis, providing the basic inputs for recycling factories in Kampala, protecting Uganda’s waterways and soils from plastic contamination, and reducing the global need for new raw resources. Despite their enormous contribution to the urban and the global environment, they face a number of significant challenges in their work. Foremost is the low price they receive for their collections. While at the top of the value chain, prices are set by global markets, within Kampala small-scale collectors are unable to benefit from economies of scale and so sell their materials at half the possible price to brokers. Through co-operation, ECOaction Plastic Collectors seek to overcome this challenge by gathering individuals’ collections together, collectively investing in transportation, and selling directly to factories by the ton instead of individually selling to brokers by the kilo.
Image 7: ECOaction Plastic Collectors attending the exhibition read their biographies.
Along with these displays, staged on a mobile art gallery designed and built by the ECOaction team using recycled plastic, the exhibition also included two stunning art installations by Reagan as well as demonstrations of ECOactions other livelihood projects: an urban farm, an eco-salon, a tailoring workshop, an animal rearing project, and their signature construction projects using plastic bottles.
Trust the Process
Image 8: Plastic collectors check the weight on scales as their collections are pooled together to sell.
While the exhibition itself was successful – attracting an invited audience representing the municipal government, NGOs, artists, architects, educators, academics, and local community leaders – the month-long process of organizing and preparing it was the more fully engaging activity. In the build up to the event, ECOaction and I organized discussion workshops with plastic recyclers and residents of Banda, learned new skills ranging from welding to interviewing, deepened relationships among plastic collectors often distrustful of one another and between collectors and the broader community, and laid the groundwork for two new initiatives that ECOaction will develop over the coming year: a pilot project testing the uses of a co-operative model for plastic collectors and a business plan to engage in plastic construction and education projects with schools throughout the city.
Bania Sinai Garcia Sanchez received her undergraduate degree at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico and an MA in Amerindian Studies and Bilingual Education at the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, Mexico. Thanks to the Wadsworth International Fellowship she will continue her training with a PhD in anthropology at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, supervised by Dr. Mark Sicoli. Read the previous entry in the series. 
