Science on the Edge Lectures: Anthropologists Reflect on Ripley's Believe It or Not!

How do anthropologists understand cultural difference in today's world?  What sort of considerations and responsibilities go into representing unfamiliar people and things to the general public?  In this symposium, three anthropologists address these questions by drawing upon their research in Africa (Rwanda), Asia (Japan) and the Pacific Islands (Papua New Guinea)—all places that have been and continue to be rendered exotic for American audiences.

Kristin Doughty is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Rochester. She has been conducting ethnographic research in Rwanda since 2002 into issues of reconciliation, law, and more recently, electrification. Her book, Remediation in Rwanda: Grassroots Legal Forums (2016, University of Pennsylvania Press, Ethnography of Political Violence Series) examines how Rwandans navigated the combination of harmony and punishment in local courts purportedly designed to rebuild the social fabric in the wake of the 1994 genocide. She is currently conducting ongoing ethnographic research on the cultural politics of energy and unity in post-genocide Rwanda, with a focus on methane extraction in Lake Kivu, funded by the National Science Foundation and Wenner Gren Foundation. 

Robert J. Foster is Professor of Anthropology and Visual & Cultural Studies and Richard L. Turner Professor of Humanities at the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA.  His research interests include globalization, corporations, commercial media, museums and material culture.  He is the author of Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia (Cambridge, 1995);Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption and Media in Papua New Guinea (Indiana, 2002); and Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea (Palgrave, 2008).  His current projects include a comparative study of the moral and cultural economy of mobile phones in Papua New Guinea and Fiji funded by the Australian Research Council (with Prof. Heather Horst).

 Hirokazu Miyazaki is Professor of Anthropology, John S. Knight Professor of International Studies and Director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University.  He has conducted ethnographic field research in Fiji, Japan and the U.S. and has published extensively on theories of exchange, futurity, and hope. His books include The Economy of Hope (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance (University of  California Press, 2013) and The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge (Stanford University Press, 2004).