Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz, (Visiting Scholar, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University), who will discuss the relationship between the elite class and nature through close analysis of the Philippines fine arts.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

Known as the ‘master of Philippine sunlight,’ Fernando Amorsolo is the painter most associated with the Philippine landscape and Philippine pastoral, bringing to both a decided innocence, if not sunlit grace. More than merely formal experimentation with light, however, Amorsolo is canonical because of the distinctly national-pastoral conceptions his work elaborates. Juan Luna, Fernando Amorsolo, and Fernando Zóbel de Ayala are regularly recognized as the three masters of Philippine fine arts. Their works dominate the Philippine canon and, by extension, elite notions of Philippine art. However Amorsolo’s particularizing of the (tropical) place of the Philippines separates him from his colleagues.

An anti-colonial, nationalistic celebration of precolonial, inherent “goodness”—a vision of a simple kind of goodness that I argue is explicitly tied to nature—charged Amorsolo’s works as well as his popular national reception. The American colonial period during the 1920s-30s sparked a wave of national nostalgia for the Filipino pastoral life, with Tagalog songs and Spanish poetry eulogizing the simple, happy barrio life that seemed to be increasingly receding. Amorsolo was part of this wave, which drew on the thwarted independence struggle of the Philippine Revolution, societal reaction to and cultural dislocations across the transition from Spanish to American colonialism, and ongoing political debates surrounding independence. Yet, despite round praise for his “democratic” art and celebration of the common Filipino, Amorsolo’s idea of goodness has deep connection to an underlying elitism in Philippine society and contributes to Amorsolo’s appeal among the elite class. In particular, his elitist vision of the good as grounded in nature had consequences for human relationships with the natural environment, while also being itself a result of existing class relationships with nature. This talk seeks to analyze the relationship between the elite class and nature through close analysis of Amorsolo’s landscape and genre painting.

About the Speaker

Originally from the Philippines, Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz is an Associate at Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge and a Visiting Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She was also formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and earned her Ph.D. in Southeast Asian and International History at Yale University. Her broad research interests center on global intellectual history and Southeast Asian environmental and social history. Her first book, Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912, published by Columbia University Press in June 2020, charts the emplotment of ‘place’ in the proto-national thought and revolutionary organising of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Filipino thinkers. Her current research analyzes the co-constitution of class and relationships with the natural environment over the 19th to the 20th centuries in the Philippines. Her research has appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and Philippine Studies, among other publications.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Viola Lasmana, (ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow / South and Southeast Asian American Studies Postdoctoral Associate, Department of American Studies, Rutgers University-New Brunswick), who will discuss Southeast Asian feminist practices and pedagogies.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

This talk explores the possibilities of Southeast Asian feminist practices and pedagogies through a discussion of transnational Indonesian and Vietnamese experimental documentaries, Children of Srikandi (Children of Srikandi Collective, 2012) and Surname Viet Given Name Nam (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989). Exploding the documentary form and subverting representation, these works activate a poetics of collaboration and generate what Lasmana calls a shadow imagination, enabling new ways of articulating marginalized women's lives beyond the specter of the nation.

About the Speaker

Viola Lasmana is an Emerging Voices Fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and a South and Southeast Asian American Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where she is also affiliated with Global Asias and Asian Languages and Cultures. She received her PhD in English from the University of Southern California with a certificate in Digital Media and Culture from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and has taught at Columbia University, USC, and Occidental College. Her work has appeared in Film Quarterly, make/shift: feminisms in motion, The Cine-Files, Visual Anthropology, Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, and more. She is currently completing a book, Shadow Imaginations: Transpacific Approaches to Post-1965 Indonesian Archives, on the reconstitution of Indonesia’s decimated cultural archive.

Talk by Sarah Thompson (Political Science, Stanford University)

In areas where traditional institutions rival the state, how does providing information regarding the quality of state services and whom they benefit induce individuals to use state fora, or continue with tradition? Findings from a combination of an experiment with 2,100 participants in Pakistan’s Newly Merged Districts who invest in state or nonstate legal aid funds and an original survey embedded within it indicate that social inequalities play a large role in determining compliance with the state’s laws. Men and women update favorably to state courts and away from a traditional method of dispute resolution after hearing about general improvements in courts’ efficiency. However, this effect for men goes away when explicitly making clear that women, who remain subjugated to men in the traditional system, will have equal rights in state proceedings. This study provides novel evidence on political behavior from 142 Pashtun villages in an underdeveloped and unstable area typically not accessible to researchers. My findings show that preexisting social inequalities can hinder state-building projects, and point to the distinct political preferences of men and women regarding traditional governance.

Sarah Thompson is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University. She utilizes causal inference methods (particularly field experiments and quasi-experimental methods) to research the politics of women and indigenous groups in South Asia and Latin America. She also works closely with policymakers in the field. Her dissertation examines why individuals choose traditional forms of governance over the state, and the impacts this has on security and access to justice.

Gatty Lecture Series and the Visual Culture Colloquium

Join us for a talk by Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, (Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art, McGill University), who will discuss the work of reformist monk Buddhadasa Bhikkhu.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served, and this event is co-sponsored by the Department of History of Art. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

The temple as exhibitionary complex, the sangha as art public, the filmic as animistic apparatus: these emergent conjectures in the study of Thai visual modernity take religious grammar as a regenerative ground for aesthetic and social form. Building on such interventions, this talk approaches the work of reformist monk Buddhadasa Bhikkhu (1906–1993) as the basis for reconsidering some of contemporary art’s key concepts: the installative, the participatory, and the mediatic. Conceived as an art gallery and movie screening hall, Buddhadasa’s Spiritual Theater (ca. 1962–1972) introduced a visual and soteriological pedagogy that privileged aniconic visuality in a bid not only to rationalize Buddhist teaching, but also to promote a distinctly religious media economy. Buddhadasa’s interest was in the generativity of intermedial translations, whether monks painting murals enlarged from ink paintings, villagers making copies of sculptural reliefs from the stupas at Sanchi, or disciples turning art history slide lectures into interactive performances. Where history written under the sign of the avant-garde often pursues novelty, the Spiritual Theater deforms this model through reproduction and reenactment. Such operations open up to the contemporary not as a matter of accelerated succession, but as entropic ecology.

About the Speaker

Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at McGill University. Previously, he was Curator at Singapore Art Museum and Visiting Lecturer at National University of Singapore. His current book project develops a postsecular approach to Philippine and Thai modernisms, focusing on how artists made a case for abstraction as a testing ground for various forms of aesthetic, moral, and religious conviction. A second project brings together histories of climate control, art conservation, and conceptual art in the tropics to address questions about ontologies of art in an age of environmental crisis. His writing has appeared in Aperture, Artforum, British Art Studies, MoMA Post, and Oxford Art Journal.

History of a Timely Idea

What do we mean when we talk about environmental justice? Usually, we mean the crucial struggle against specific forms of injustice: dirty factories in poor, Black-majority neighborhoods; unequal access to green space; radioactive waste seeping into Native water supplies; the poisoning of Latinx farm workers; the flight of refugees from drought, famine, fires, and storms.

Aaron Sachs, Professor of History at Cornell University, will discuss how environmental justice can also offer a radical, positive vision of collective thriving—as a historical perspective reveals. The idea of environmental justice, connecting the common good to the protection of common, shared environments, goes back centuries. This talk will use the lens of history to reconsider the ways in which environmental justice could shape our common future.

About the speaker

Dr. Aaron Sachs is a Professor of History at Cornell University. His general focus is on nature and culture. He examines how ideas about nature have changed over time and how those changes have mattered in the Western world. He is writing a book called Environmental Justice: History of a Timely Idea, which explores a theme he has worked on since 1995, when he published a pamphlet for the Worldwatch Institute entitled Eco-Justice: Linking Human Rights and the Environment. He was also the founder and coordinator of the Cornell Roundtable on Environmental Studies Topics (CREST), which for a decade brought together faculty and graduate students across all the environmental disciplines on campus.

Host

Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Politics and Protest: Historical, Sociological, and Political Perspectives

Drawing from first-hand experience and research into the U.S. nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s and the Iraq antiwar movement of 2002-09, David Cortright (University of Notre Dame) will discuss the challenge of attempting to evaluate if policy is shaped by social movements against war and nuclear weapons.

By examining specific episodes and social action campaigns and their impacts, he will review, and in some cases contest, historical and political interpretations of these events. His arguments will engage sociological debates on the boundaries between civil resistance movements and engagement in institutional politics and include a set of conclusions on strategies for peace and disarmament action.

Register to attend the lecture and reception.

About the Speaker

David Cortright is professor emeritus of the practice at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Previously, Cortright was the director of policy studies at the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and director of the institute’s Peace Accords Matrix project, the largest existing collection of implementation data on intrastate peace agreements.

Cortright has written widely about nonviolent social change, nuclear disarmament, and the use of multilateral sanctions and incentives as tools of international peacemaking. He has provided research services to the foreign ministries of Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, and has served as consultant or advisor to agencies of the United Nations, the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the International Peace Academy, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Hosts and Sponsors

This event is a University Lecture hosted by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Elliott Prasse-Freeman, (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore), who will discuss grassroots political activism in Myanmar.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

For decades, the outside world mostly knew Myanmar as the site of a valiant human rights struggle against an oppressive military regime, predominantly through the figure of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. And yet, a closer look at Burmese grassroots sentiments reveals a significant schism between elite human rights cosmopolitans and subaltern Burmese subjects maneuvering under brutal and negligent governance. While elites have endorsed human rights logics, subalterns are ambivalent, often going so far as to refuse rights themselves, seeing in them no more than empty promises. Such alternative perspectives became apparent during Burma’s much-lauded decade-long “transition” from military rule that began in 2011, a period of massive change that saw an explosion of political and social activism. How then do people conduct politics when they lack the legally and symbolically stabilizing force of “rights” to guarantee their incursions against injustice? In this presentation, Elliott Prasse-Freeman describes his recent book on the topic, in which he documents grassroots political activists who advocate for workers and peasants across Burma, covering not only the so-called “democratic transition” from 2011-2021, but it also the February 2021 military coup that ended that experiment and the ongoing mass uprising against it. Taking the reader from protest camps, to flop houses, to prisons, and presenting practices as varied as courtroom immolation, occult cursing ceremonies, and land reoccupations, the talk shows how Burmese subaltern politics compel us to reconsider how rights frameworks operate everywhere.

About the Speaker

Elliott Prasse-Freeman, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Myanmar, and his recently published book (Rights Refused, Stanford University Press) foucses on Burmese subaltern political thought as adduced from an extended ethnography of activism and contentious politics in the country's semi-authoritarian setting. Prasse-Freeman also has a book project on Rohingya ethnogenesis and political subjectivity amidst dislocation and mass violence. His work has appeared in journals such as American Ethnologist, Current Anthropology, Journal of Peasant Studies, Public Culture, and Comparative Studies in Society and History, and he's part of the editorial team at Anthropological Theory, a journal you should consider submitting to.

Talk by Sahana Ghosh (Anthropology, National University of Singapore)

This talk draws on my book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (2023). It explores how national security practices produce differentiated risks, fundamentally gendered, across a transnational and highly unequal terrain of mobilities across the India-Bangladesh borderlands. Bordering unfolds with a thousand tiny cuts: here the (re)production of masculinity, risk, and national value in agrarian economies occurs with the criminalization of the borderlands and its residents as deserving of violent policing and social reprobation. The talk centers the reflections, decisions, jokes, and critiques of young Bengali men as they come of age and contemplate such a horizon of gendered risks and inequalities.

Sahana Ghosh is a social anthropologist broadly interested in forms and experiences of inequality produced through the intersection of mobility, policing, and gender in our contemporary world. She uses ethnography and feminist approaches to study a range of concerns, such as borders and borderlands, the mobility of people and goods, citizenship, refuge, and neighborliness, the national security state, agrarian change, spatial history, transnational kinship, and the political economy of gendered labor. Ghosh conducts research in India and Bangladesh. Her first book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the India-Bangladesh Borderlands, chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the meaning and management of threat and security in relation to mobility. This book recasts a singular focus on border fences and migrants as border-crossers and shows, instead, that postcolonial bordering materializes through multiple forms of violence and devaluation in agrarian, borderland lives. It is under contract with Atelier: Ethnography in the 21st Century, a book series at the University of California Press. Ghosh’s academic writing and photo essays have been published in the American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Economic and Political Weekly, Gender, Place, and Culture, among others. She also contributes to podcasts, op-eds, and photo essays to engage in broader public debates on these topics. She received her Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Before joining NUS, Ghosh was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University, and the Watson Institute at Brown University. She also holds an MPhil in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA and MA in English Literature from Delhi University and Jadavpur University, respectively.