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We continue our residency program next week with Felipe Gaitan-Ammann, who will join us from Monday, October 25 to Friday, October 29. He will meet with students and faculty, visit a course, and present an informal seminar to the BGC community, in addition to delivering the Archaeological Encounters Seminar. 

Felipe Gaitan-Ammann is an anthropologist specializing in the historical archaeology of the Spanish colonies in the New World. His research draws on contemporary social theory to examine the cultural significance of a wide range of materialities associated with complex processes of ethnogenesis and identity formation in early capitalist contexts. Gaitan-Ammann’s studies have focused on the development of modern lifestyles among urban elites in the northern Andes and, more recently, on the social life of enslavers and the enslaved in late-seventeenth century Panama. His other research interests include the anthropology of early modern piracy, material culture theory, museum anthropology, and the politics of archaeological heritage in Latin America. He was a faculty member in the departments of anthropology at Brown University, the University of Chicago, and Los Andes University in Bogotá, Colombia, where he now coordinates the Center for Preventive Archaeology.


 

Classroom Visit

Monday, October 25, 1:30–4 pm
38 West 86th Street, 5th Floor Classroom

Felipe Gaitan-Ammann will join “Excavating the Empire City: An Introduction to the Historical Archaeology of New York City” with Professor Meredith Linn.


Community Coffee Hour

Monday, October 25, 4–5 pm
38 West 86th Street, 6th Floor Terrace

All students, faculty, and staff are invited to meet Felipe Gaitan-Ammann. Light refreshments will be served.


The Seminar in Archaeological Encounters
“Through the Priest’s Ear: An Entangled Story of Life and Death at the Jesuit Church of San Ignacio, 1610–2021”

Tuesday, October 26, 6–7:30 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

This event will be hybrid in format: hosted in the Lecture Hall for BGC audience members and open to the public via Zoom. Please email jen.ha@bgc.bard.edu to confirm in-person attendance.  

This seminar will examine multiple avenues of interdisciplinary research arising from a vast archaeological dataset recently recovered at the Jesuit church of San Ignacio – one of the most significant colonial buildings still standing in the historical district of Bogotá, Colombia. The evidence excavated at San Ignacio testifies to over four centuries of domestic, funerary, spiritual, and bodily practices which, in turn, mirror complex processes of identity construction in a particularly isolated urban area of the Spanish colonial empire. By exploring the analytical possibilities of this rich collection of skeletal, artifactual, and archival information, we not only suggest new developments and directions in Latin American historical archaeology, but also partake in important initiatives of memory construction currently permeating all layers of Colombian social and political life. Ultimately, this seminar explores the part that archaeological heritage could and should play in new, multilayered instances of memory-making. It addresses the uneasiness with which the effort to memorialize the physical evidence of death, either past or present, may be received and dealt with by a society deeply traumatized by war.

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Brown Bag Lunch
“Clinking Coins and Curing Spells: Rethinking the Sensescape of the Slave Trade in Spanish Colonial Panama”

Thursday, October 28, 12:15–1:15 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

This event is for BGC audiences only and hybrid in format: hosted in the Lecture Hall and accessible via Zoom. Please complete the Google Form below to RSVP.

This talk explores how a sensuous reenactment of the rich object-world of Old Panama’s slave market—one of the largest centers of human trafficking operating in Spanish America in the late 1600s—can allow us to rethink its ruins as a powerful lieu de mémoire, showcasing the difficult legacy of the transatlantic slave trade as a relevant experimental field for contemporary cultural critique.

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Upcoming 2021-22 Residencies

Monday, November 1 to Friday, November 5, 2021: Ann-Sophie Lehmann

Monday, November 29 to Friday, December 3, 2021: Hannah Baader

Monday, January 31 to Friday, February 4, 2022: Shamil Jeppie

Monday, February 14 to Friday, February 18, 2022: Claudia Swan

Monday, February 28 to Friday, March 4, 2022: Charlotte Vignon

Monday, March 14 to Friday, March 18, 2022: Paul Basu

Monday, March 21 to Friday, March 25, 2022: Lothar von Falkenhausen

Monday, March 28 to Friday, April 1, 2022: Mónica Domínguez Torres

Monday, April 4 to Friday, April 8, 2022: Alison Clarke

Monday, April 11 to Friday, April 15, 2022: Bénédicte Savoy

Monday, April 18 to Friday, April 22, 2022: Carlo Ginzburg 

 
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