The Department of Anthropology Colloquium Series

Thursday April 8^th 2010
3:00 pm in Crawford Hall 115
Reception to Follow

Select Graduate Students from the UH Department of Anthropology present,

The Anthropology Graduate Student Association Symposium

“The Fragility of Sobriety: Alcoholism in Japan”
Paul Christenson, PhD candidate (ABD), Cultural Anthropology

This research looks at alcoholism and recovery among sobriety group members in Japan and is based on ethnographic research conducted in Tokyo with Alcoholics Anonymous and Danshukai (Sobriety Association). I argue that alcoholism in Japan pathologizes established masculine gender norms of drinking and homosociality, placing Japanese men who identify as alcoholics in a struggle between medicalized conceptions of recovery/sobriety and societal expectations. Finally, I contend that alcoholism as experienced in Japan allows us to pose wider questions about the definition and treatment of illness, addiction, and recovery as it pertains to alcohol and other psychoactive substances.

“The Cultural Politics of Sentimentality in Volunteer Tourism”
Mary Conran, PhD candidate (ABD), Cultural Anthropology

Volunteer tourism, broadly defined as an activity in which people pay to volunteer in development or conservation projects, is one of the fastest growing alternative tourism markets in the world. In this paper I show how the sentimentality of the volunteer tourism encounter is a dominant aspect in most of its participant’s accounts. Ultimately, I suggest that volunteer tourism turns the embedded structural inequalities within the encounter into questions of individual morality and sentiment. Though unintentional, these foci overshadow the structural inequalities that the encounter is based on and reinforce the continued expansion of the cultural logic of neoliberalism.

“Negotiating the Burmese Past: Narratives of Identity and Diaspora”
Tani Sebro Day, M.A. candidate, Cultural Anthropology

Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among Burmese and Sino-Burman individuals in Honolulu, this study records the experiences of being a diasporic Burmese and of negotiating past identities with present immigrant statuses in the United States. The study suggests an alternative discursive genre of history that accommodates individual voices and is based on the recordation and co-interpretation of personal and historical narratives. Burmese émigrés residing in Hawai'i comprise a unique assemblage of historical narratives and embodied experiences that provide multivocal insights into the events that spurred the Burmese diaspora and the conditions they face as transnational migratory subjects in foreign semiotic systems.

“Ills of Modernity: Discourses on HIV and Toxicity in South Africa”
Tamara Luthy, M.A. candidate, Medical Anthropology

This paper focuses on a counter-discourse in South Africa which suggests that AIDS is due to malnutrition and toxic food rather than HIV. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, I discuss counter-narratives which implicate big business greed with AIDS. Malnutrition is believed to come from the ingestion of literally and figuratively contaminated food products: produce coated in pesticides and fertilize, alcohol, and GMOs. The act of linking malnutrition to AIDS symptoms allows my informants to depathologize the bodies of AIDS victims while simultaneously suggesting that urbanization and corporate business interests in South Africa cause social and physical decay.

Cosponsored with the Anthropology Graduate Student Association (AGSA)

For further information, please contact Anthropology at anthprog@hawaii.edu.

page last updated March 31, 2010