Yannis Hamilakis
Fields of the Future Research Fellow, February–May 2021

Yannis Hamilakis is Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and professor of Modern Greek studies at Brown. His main research and teaching interests are the socio-politics of the past; the body and bodily senses; the archaeology of eating and drinking; the ontology and materiality of photography, archaeology, and nationalism; archaeological ethnography; and critical pedagogy in archaeology. His main geographical research focus has been Greece and the Aegean, and although much of his fieldwork is to do with the prehistoric (Neolithic and Bronze Age) Aegean, he is equally interested in the archaeology of the contemporary. In fact, many of his projects are multi-temporal. From 2007 to 2010 he directed the archaeological ethnography project at Kalaureia (Poros) Greece, and since 2010 he has co-directed a major new field project, the Koutroulou Magoula Archaeology and Archaeological Ethnography Project. This centers around the excavation of an important Middle Neolithic tell site in central Greece but also includes ethnography, as well as a range of art projects, including a theatre-archaeology program. In 2016, he started a project on the archaeology and archaeological ethnography of contemporary migration, focusing on the border island of Lesvos. Based on this work, he recently co-curated the exhibition Transient Matter: Assemblages of Migration in the Mediterranean, hosted at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.

Cherubim Quizon
Visiting Fellow, February–May 2021

Cherubim Quizon is associate professor of anthropology at Seton Hall University. She studies the knowledge systems and social formations embedded in the textiles and dress of the Bagobo in the highlands of Mindanao using ethnography that critically engages with US colonial-era museum collections. She co-edited an influential centenary volume “World’s Fair 1904” (Philippine Studies, Ateneo de Manila Press, 2004) reframing the living display of Filipinos at St. Louis. She recast phenomenological perspectives of Indigenous interlocutors in works that include contributions to the Fowler Museum’s Weavers’ Stories project (2010) and more recently in “The Weaver’s House: Ethnography, Translation, and Video in the Highlands of Mindanao” in Visual Anthropology Review (2019). She explored the ironies that arise when Indigenous semantic categories of cloth and dress collide with that of the state, non-government organizations, tourists, anthropologists, and other outsiders in “Dressing the Lumad Body” (Humanities Diliman, 2012) and “The Color Purple” (in Cosmopolitanism and Tourism, edited by Robert Shepherd, Lexington Press, 2017), among others. She is collaborating on a praxis-based assessment of a landmark law governing Indigenous peoples in the Philippines (https://ipra-ph.org/). Her current project marks a materialist turn: the cultural history of cloth made with banana fiber (Musa sp.), the signature thread used by Bagobo, other Mindanao groups, as well as in weavers in the Ryukyus, Japan. Engaging in a “hyperlocal” inquiry into these breathtaking ikat-patterned textiles, she asks what may be learned through a “material culture of proof” that looks beyond a single tradition or community. Entitled “Going bananas: mixed methods research on Musa sp. and other unspun fibers in Mindanao and Okinawan textiles,” she examines similarities and distinctions between these textile traditions that combine ikat or resist-dye work on unspun banana fiber, a rare confluence of techniques. She will draw on her prior work on the geographical distribution of this cloth, ethnobotanical studies of Mindanao dyeplants, and early twentieth-century museum collections in the US to evaluate the feasibility of mixed methods and nondestructive analysis as a means of generating new questions about heritage cloth.

Yasuko Tsuchikane
Visiting Fellow, January–March 2021

Yasuko Tsuchikane is an adjunct assistant professor of art history at the Cooper Union, and she also teaches at Waseda University and Sophia University, Tokyo. She has focused her research on twentieth-century intellectual, socio-political, and ideo-religious discourses on the premodern visual and material cultures of Japan and Asia at large. Her aim is to reposition them in modernity and examine their global complication in various areas that have tended to escape standard art historical investigations, but retain their enduring and changing cultural presence, such as ceramic three-dimensional objects, architectural paintings for religious institutions, and calligraphy. Selected publications include “Picasso as Other: Koyama Fujio and Polemics of Postwar Japanese Ceramics” (Review of Japanese Culture and Society, 2014); “Rescuing Temples and Empowering Art: Naiki Jinzaburō and the Rise of Civic Initiatives in Meiji Kyoto,” in Kyoto Visual Culture in the Early Edo and Meiji Periods: The Arts of Reinvention (Routledge, 2016); and “Defining Modernity in Japanese Sculpture: Two Waves of Italian Impact on Casting Techniques,” in Finding Lost Wax: the Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of Medardo Rosso (Brill, 2020). In 2015 and 2016, she served as a fellow at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in Norwich, UK. She holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University.