Monday, April 29th, 2019
12:00 p.m.
Anne Belk Hall, Room 342
The Department of Anthropology presents, "Slow the Senses: Ethnographic Methods for an Age of Anxiety" with Dr. Jon H. Carter an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Appalachian State University.
Carter’s talk will outline a book project made possible by the Claassen Research Enhancement Award that he received during the fall 2018. In the book, Carter asks how the teaching of ethnographic methods in our time allows students a unique path to understanding the colonial, environmental and psychological legacies of positivistic scientific practices starting in the fifteenth century. Carter will discuss the book project, plans for publication and how teaching ethnographic methods provides students with an alternative set of practices for awareness and attunement. These practices are not only research methods but the first step to rebuilding our senses in the fight against alienation, detachment and dehumanization in a time of sensory overload.
Carter is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in criminality, aesthetics and politics. His current research focuses on transnational gang communities, between the U.S. and Central America and their reinvention of political subjectivity through the deconstruction of everyday notions of law, beauty and violence. This work on a particular criminal community is the foundation for broader inquiries into the shifting moral and political embodiments that accompany our current global-economic and environmental crises. Currently, he is revising a book manuscript that examines the cultivation of criminal dream-worlds inside a national penitentiary in Honduras. A second book explores ethnographic surrealism in Latin America during the period of high modernism, and what that "minor" tradition can contribute to critical practices of ethnography in the present.
Photo submitted by Carter.
###
About the Department of Anthropology
The Department of Anthropology offers a comparative and holistic approach to the study of the human experience. The anthropological perspective provides a broad understanding of the origins as well as the meaning of physical and cultural diversity in the world — past, present and future. Learn more at https://anthro.appstate.edu.
Dr. Jon H. Carter headshot. Photo submitted.
Dr. Jon H. Carter headshot. Photo submitted.