Aug 4
IU news announced back home:
Mathers Museum, Glenn Black Lab Merger Yields Cultural History Powerhouse
This is a big deal for the students with whom I work, the colleagues with whom I collaborate, and the collections that I have been studying.
May 19
In a paper that I published in 2002, I drew upon unpublished ethnographic notes compiled in 1940-1941 by then University of Pennsylvania graduate student Robert R. Solenberger. Solenberger was a student of Frank G. Speck and others on the faculty at Penn. The notes that I drew upon in my paper are part of the Speck Papers at the American Philosophical Society. I have today been working on a new paper that draws upon the same unpublished manuscript by Solenberger. In 2000, when I was working on the paper mentioned above, I was able to track down Professor Solenberger in retirement in Tuscon, AZ and to speak with him on the phone about his graduate studies and the materials that I was then drawing upon.
Taking up work on a new project based on his notes, I went online tonight to see what more I could learn about Solenberger’s career. I learned that he passed away (in his 90s) a few years ago. I found various bits of information on his life, work, and history, but did not find a professional obituary. Based on the information that I pieced together tonight, I offer the following brief sketch.
Robert R. Solenberger (1916-2006) earned a M.A. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1940 with a thesis on “An Interpretation of Material on the Anthropology of East Africa Based upon Mediaeval Arabic Writers.” and was on the faculty of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bloomsburg State College (now Bloomsburg University). He published a prominent series of articles focused on the Marianas Islands, where he worked in the 1950s. (These appeared in Human Organization, Anthropological Linguistics, and Oceania, among other outlets.) During his graduate training, he participated in archaeological research at Clovis, New Mexico in 1937 (under the direction of John L. Cotter). He was a Quaker and a conscientious objector during World War II.
My sources include published works discoverable via Google Scholar and the Internet Archive, as well as the following Google discoveries:
http://www.biblerecords.com/solenberger.html
http://www.fum.org/QL/issues/0709/passages.htm
http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0302/0302notes.html
http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0707/obits.html
He appears on the AAA Honor Roll of Donors in the last years of his life, but I could find no professional obituary in a AAA publication or elsewhere. A Society of Friends memorial sketch is available.
It was an honor to speak with this anthropology elder early in 2000. I record here my thanks for his kindness and his interest in my work. I also express appreciation for his work, including the six pages of Southeastern Indian ethnography that he compiled in 1940 while on a road trip with through Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.
Rest in Peace.
(Additions and corrections to this sketch are very welcome.)
From a December 20, 2010 Mukurtu Project Press Release:
Mukurtu: An Indigenous Archive and Content Management Tool
New Website Announcement
http://www.mukurtuarchive.org
Project Director: Dr. Kimberly Christen; Director of Development: Dr. Michael Ashley; Lead Drupal Developer: Nicholas Tripcevich
In March 2010 the Mukurtu project was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start‐Up grant to produce a beta‐version of an open‐source, standards‐based community digital archive and content management platform. As the third phase of an ongoing software production project, the Mukurtu team is aware that indigenous and tribal libraries, archives and museums are underserved by both off‐the‐shelf content management systems (CMS) and open source CMS and digital archive/web production tools. Over the last decade as web technologies have diversified to include user‐generated content and more sophisticated digital archive and content management tools the specific needs of indigenous collecting institutions have been left out of mainstream productions. Based on long‐term research and collaboration with indigenous communities and collecting institutions, Mukurtu’s development and production has focused on producing a digital archive and content management tool suite that meets the expressed needs of indigenous communities globally. Specifically, Mukurtu:
The Mukurtu software tool suite is under development now with a system demonstration site planned for Spring 2011. Our informational website, development blog, and wiki are now live. These sites allow us to chronicle our development progress, provide updates and engage with users as we move forward to a full launch in August 2011.
Please visit the new site at: www.mukurtuarchive.org and follow the links to learn more about the Mukurtu project goals, development, and collaborations.
Anthropologists have reason to cheer with news from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research that the biannual symposium proceedings published by the Foundation as an extension of the journal Current Anthropology will now be made available in open access form. Wenner-Gren Foundation President Leslie Aiello describes the move and the rationale behind it in a [toll wall protected] contribution to the latest issue of Current Anthropology [volume 51, page 727, December 2010] See: DOI: 10.1086/657920.
The two supplements published in 2010 are freely available via the journal’s page at the University of Chicago Press. Formatted like the journal, these are book-sized edited collections organized thematically. Discussing the history of the Foundation’s Symposium efforts, Aiello writes:
The first Wenner-Gren Symposium was in 1952, and since then, more than 170 symposia and workshops have been sponsored by the foundation. Many of these have resulted in landmark edited volumes that have made significant contributions to the development of our field (see http://www.wennergren.org/history). In today’s electronic age, the foundation wants to ensure that its symposia continue to have a significant impact and reach the broadest possible international audience. We believe that open-access publication in Current Anthropology is the best way to achieve this goal.
This is wonderful news and a real advancement. One more reason to say thank you to Wenner-Gren for its dedication to the discipline of anthropology. Wenner-Gren joins other scholarly foundations working to advance the cause of a more just, rational, and effective system of scholarly communication.
Note: While there is not a press-release on the Foundation website regarding this shift, there is a discussion of the move to publishing the symposium in connection with the journal (rather than as edited books). This announcement also discusses several recent symposium volumes.
Congratulations to Dr. Gilley, IUB and the FNECC.
Brian Gilley, associate professor of anthropology and director of the ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies program at the University of Vermont, has been selected as the first director of the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center at Indiana University Bloomington.
Read the full IUB Press Release here.
[As noted in today’s AFS email newsletter] After a period of discussion and review, the American Folklore Society‘s Executive Board [on which I serve] has issued a public statement on recent Arizona immigration legislation. The Society will distribute this statement to relevant public officials and bodies in Arizona, and to other learned societies.
The statement reads:
The American Folklore Society, the US-based professional association for the field of folklore studies, with a membership of 2,000 people and institutions, and an annual meeting that draws more than 700 participants from around the world, has historically supported policies that prohibit discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and our field has long been concerned with the well-being of immigrant populations.
The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society takes notice of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, requiring all local law enforcement officials to investigate a person’s immigration status when there is a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the United States unlawfully, regardless of whether that person is suspected of a crime. We also take notice of Arizona House Bill 2281, that prohibits public schools in the state from offering, at any grade level, courses that advocate ethnic solidarity or cater to specific ethnic groups.
More than a century of research in the field of folklore studies (and in other fields in the humanities and social sciences) has detailed the cultural, political, and social impact of discrimination based on ethnicity, national origin, and race. Based on that research, the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society considers these laws just identified, and the ways they may be implemented, to be discriminatory.
The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society resolves that the Society will not hold a scholarly conference in the State of Arizona until such time that Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and Arizona House Bill 2281 are either repealed or struck down as constitutionally invalid and thus unenforceable by a court.
Today I received the email newsletter of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Their lead story is a big deal. Congratulations to the department on the successful conclusion of a curatorial hiring effort that has brought four new colleagues to the department. Department Chair Dan Rogers writes:
With the arrival of Gwyneira Isaac (curator, North American indigenous cultures) in early June and the arrival of Gabriela Perez Baez (curator, linguistics) in December 2009, the department has successfully concluded its search for four new curators over the past three years. (Curators Joshua Bell (globalization) and Torben Rick (human-environmental interaction) were hired in 2008.) This represents the largest influx of curatorial staff in several decades and we are delighted to bring in another generation of scholars. These hires bring the number of anthropology curators to 23.
This is great news for Smithsonian anthropology specifically and for museum anthropology generally. Congratulations and good luck to the new members of the curatorial staff.
A note of congratulations for Janice Frisch on the completion of her M.A. in Folklore. Her M.A. Thesis, recently accepted by the faculty, is titled Scrapbooks in Fabric: Memory, Identity, and the T-shirt Quilt. It is a wonderful study utilizing ethnographic methods in the study of contemporary U.S. material culture. It is particularly valuable in the ways that it situates t-shirt quilts relative to the areas of (1) dress and adornment, (2) quilts and quilt history, and (3) scrapbooking and other practices associated with hand-made memory objects. In her abstract, she writes:
Historically, in the United States, clothing that was worn beyond repair was used in quilts in order to salvage the still usable parts while creating another useful item. Modern quilters, however, generally purchase new cloth to use in their quilts rather than cutting up old clothing. Fairly recently there has been a trend towards constructing quilts out of still wearable clothing items, such as t-shirts. This form of quilting is both a continuation of past practices and an innovation. In today’s society these quilts are a medium for the expression of personal identity and memories. This thesis draws upon existing literature on body art, material culture, memory, and identity as well as original fieldwork to examine the rapidly growing phenomenon of t-shirt quilts and connect them to the larger history of quilting, dress, and collecting in the United States. [Frisch 2010:vi]
Looking ahead to her Ph.D. work, Ms. Frisch will be continuing her studies of quilting this summer at the Smithsonian and several European museums. Congratulations to her on the completion of an important M.A. study.
It is not quite over, but this academic year was one in which a large number of students with whom I work have undergone the rite of passage known as the Ph.D. qualifying exams. All of the following folks have experienced great success in this process and are now moving onward into their dissertation research.
Nicky Belle (Anthropology)
Gabrielle Berlinger (Folklore)
Zilia Estrada (Folklore)
Jill Hemming-Austin (Folklore)
Hsin-wen Hsu (Ethnomusicology)
Suzanne Ingalsbe (Folklore)
Selina Morales (Folklore)
Jodine (Jody) Perkins (Folklore)
Jim Seaver (History)
In just over a week, Sarah Gordon (Folklore) will complete her own exams and join this platoon of distinguished colleagues traveling into dissertation land. Congratulations to each and all.
In April 2008, I had the honor of participating in a symposium organized for the spring meeting of the American Philosophical Society held at the APS’s campus in Philadelphia. The APS Library holds many archival collections of great relevance to my research and its Phillips Fund has been a crucial source of support for my work and for that of students with whom I work. The symposium was titled: “Cultural Subjects and Objects: The Legacy of Franz Boas and Its Futures in Anthropology, Academe, and Human Rights” and it was organized on behalf of the membership by Carol Greenhouse and timed to commemorate the sesquicentennial of Franz Boas’ birth. Boas’ papers are curated by the APS and they are absolutely crucial sources for the history of anthropology and American intellectual and political life more broadly. The APS thus has a long history of engagement with Boas’ work.
Professor Greenhouse generously recruited me to the symposium relatively late in the planning process, after a previously committed (and much more senior and distinguished) scholar needed to withdraw from participation for personal reasons. This was a wonderful opportunity for me. I was eager to reflect upon the contemporary salience of Boas’ work for my own and attendance at an APS meeting is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I was able to share my reflections with an audience that included not only distinguished anthropologists such as Ward Goodenough and Regna Darnell but also the leaders of intellectual life in the United States more broadly. It was simply amazing to be listened to respectfully by a hall full of APS members and to be asked questions by scholars of such breadth and sophistication. Howard Gardner was among those who posed questions after my talk and, because I was speaking of a legal questions, Judith Resnik and Judge David S. Tatel were among the jurists who kindly invited me to join them for lunch to struggle with making sense of cultural property issues and to discuss cases in American Indian law. As a speaker at the conference, I was a guest of the society and was able to enjoy other presentations on the program. I heard amazing presentations on a staggering range of topics. The most memorable was by Bonnie L. Bassler, a molecular biologist whose presentation on cell to cell communication in bacteria was a revelation and a demonstration of how good an effective teacher can be. (She went on to make a similar presentation as a TED Talk in February 2009.)
The Boas Symposium included a moving introduction by Professor Greenhouse and four presentations. Lee Baker spoke on “Franz Boas and His “Conspiracy” to Destroy the White Race.” James A. Boon presented “On Alternating Boasians: Generational Connections.” Nicholas B. Dirks offered “Reflections on Fieldwork in University Administration: The Liberal Arts in Global Perspective.” My own presentation was titled “Boasian Ethnography and Contemporary Intellectual Property Debates.”
I am recalling all of this history now because I am happy to report that the symposium has now been published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. It appears in the April 2010 issue, which is volume 154, number 1. While the Proceedings eventually appear in JSTOR, they are available freely and immediately online from the APS website. The APS publication staff does a wonderful job editing the Proceedings and they are beautifully produced. Articles are provided to the world (open access!) in PDF format. (The titles of Professors Baker and Dirks presentations are somewhat changed in publication.)
My thanks go to the members and officers of the APS, as well as to Professor Greenhouse, for including me in these efforts. If anyone is interested in my own paper, it can be found here (pdf). It is my first real attempt at discussing intellectual property issues in light of my Oklahoma ethnography and Boasian work on “incorporeal property.”
Shreds and Patches 