[Anthropgrad] visit of Sherry Ortner

[Francesca Merlan]

Dear Anthropgrad,

from October 13 through November 6 we are going to have Professor Sherry
Ortner as our guest in Anthropology, housed in A and A but with
campus-wide activities  planned.  Many of you will  be familiar with
Sherry's work,  but below is a short biography.

She is going to be giving various seminars and two half-day postgraduate
workshops.  The titles of talks  and a public lecture will be circulated
at the start of next  semester. She will be talking about old and new
work (some of the new is on
alternative film in the US -- she lives in Los Angeles!)and themes that
have preoccupied her over the course of her career.

She wants to base post-graduate workshops on her work and yours,
post-grads.  She would like to use her 2006 book `Anthropology and
Social Theory' (see below) as something everybody has read -- so we will
make a few copies available -- and also hear from you how some of those
themes may figure in your work.

At the start of next semester we will circulate a sign-up sheet for
post-grads interested in attending the workshops. 

The dates of planned activities so far are:

October 15 (Wed): cross-campus Anthropology seminar.  

(October 16 (Thurs): Tim Taylor, Sherry's husband, is an
ethnomusicologist from the renowned UCLA music school, and he will be
giving a seminar, 4-6 PM on this date)

Oct 21 (Tues): 10-2:00 PM (or so, with lunch catered): workshop with
postgrads

Oct 23(Thurs), 5:30-7:00 PM: public lecture (Hayden Allen Tank)

Oct 28 (Tues) 10-2:PM (lunch catered etc.) workshop with postgrads



SHERRY B. ORTNER

Sherry B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA.
She received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College, and her M.A. and Ph.D.
from the University of Chicago.  Before coming to UCLA in 2004, she
taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Michigan, the
University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University. She has
received numerous grants and fellowships, including awards from the
National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation.  She has done extensive fieldwork with the Sherpas of Nepal,
on religion, politics, and the Sherpas? involvement in Himalayan
mountaineering.  Her final book on the Sherpas, Life and Death on Mt.
Everest, was awarded the J.I. Staley prize for the best anthropology
book of 2004.

In the early ?90s, Ortner switched her research to the United States.
Her first project was on the meanings and workings of ?class? in the
United States, using her own high school graduating class as her
ethnographic subjects.  She is currently working on a project on the
relationship between independent films, Hollywood movies, and American
culture.  She also publishes regularly in the areas of cultural theory
and feminist theory.  She has been elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences and has been awarded the Retzius Medal of the Society
of Anthropology and Geography of Sweden.


Books
2006.  Anthropology and Social Theory:  Culture, Power,  and the Acting
Subject.  Duke University Press.  
2003.  New Jersey Dreaming:  Capital, Culture, and the Class of ?58.
Duke University Press
1999  Life and Death on Mount Everest:  Sherpas and Himalayan
Mountaineering.  Princeton University Press.
1999  (ed.) The Fate of ?Culture?:  Geertz and Beyond.  University of
California Press.
1996  Making Gender:  The Politics and Erotics of Culture.  Beacon
Press.
1994  Culture/Power/History:  A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory
(co-edited with N.B. Dirks and G. Eley),  Princeton University Press.
1989  High Religion:  A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa
Buddhism.  Princeton University Press.
1981  Sexual Meanings:  The Cultural Construction of Gender and
Sexuality (co-edited with Harriet Whitehead), Cambridge University
Press.
1978 Sherpas through their Rituals. Cambridge University Press.


back later, Francesca