Ruth Toulson

Professor of Anthropology, Maryland Institute College of Art

Throughout history, dead bodies have been exhumed to rewrite the past. Their burial places have justified redrawing the boundaries of nations. And preserved bodies have made visible the continuing relevance of their ideological regimes. Multiple authors have probed the corpse’s power as a potent political symbol. But much of the existing literature on necropolitics has an exclusive focus on contexts of violent regime change. And the dead bodies these authors describe are either those of political leaders or of “the dead” understood as an undifferentiated mass. In Singapore, in contrast, anthropologist, Ruth E. Toulson, argues that the manipulation of corpses is a quotidian strategy of political power, part of the everyday actions of a stable state. What’s more, the corpses this state puts to
its use are those of ordinary people, whose unremarkable deaths are marked in what seem initially to be unremarkable ways. This is the necropolitics of the ordinary.

In this seminar, drawing on her work as a mortician, Toulson takes you behind the scenes in the Singaporean world of death. She argues that Singapore’s funeral parlors, crematoria, and columbaria are charged sites of the politic. But how this comes to be is a puzzle, for the state has little interest in legislating ritual and grief. What is the mechanism for this politicization? It happens, she suggests, not in the form of top-down policy but via the relationships that are possible only here, the tripart relationships between the bereaved, death-workers, and the corpse.

Ruth E. Toulson is a cultural anthropologist. She teaches in the Division of Liberal Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland. She is the editor, with Zahra Newby, of The Materiality of Mourning: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives (Routledge 2018) and the author of multiple articles and book chapters on death, grieving, and material culture, which draw on her research in the funeral industry in Southeast Asia and Mainland China. Her current book project draws on multi-year fieldwork in Chinese funeral parlors in Singapore, where she worked as a mortician, to examine the causes and consequences of rapid transformation in the way death is ritualized and grieved.

Co-sponsored by the Religious Studies Program.

This Gatty lecture will take place in person at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom.

Lunch will be served.

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi

Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

What does it mean to think Southeast Asia archipelagically? What points of connection and convergence does an archipelagic method enable? In this talk, Dr. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi offers notes on an archipelagic praxis for Southeast Asian studies. Putting the Vietnamese concept of nước, which means water/country/homeland, in conversation with Pacific Islander and Palestinian understandings of the archipelago, Dr. Gandhi traces the postwar migration of Vietnamese refugees to Guam and Israel-Palestine in order to unpack what she calls the "refugee settler condition": the fraught positionality of refugee subjects whose resettlement in a settler colonial state is predicated on the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. This talk probes the decolonial politics of nước as routed through archipelagic epistemologies, theorizing emergent forms of refugee-Indigenous solidarity.

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA (Tovaangar). Her work engages critical refugee studies, settler colonial and Indigenous studies, and transpacific studies. She is the author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine, which was published open access by University of California Press in April 2022. In summer 2022, Dr. Gandhi organized a public history exhibit based on this book's research entitled Remembering Saigon: From Vietnam to Guam. She is currently co-editing an anthology, Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, with Vinh Nguyen, as well as working on a second book project, tentatively entitled Revisiting the Southern Question: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South. Dr. Gandhi hosts a podcast, Distorted Footprints, through her Critical Refugee Studies class.

Co-sponsored by the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP).

This Gatty lecture will take place in person at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom.

Lunch will be served.

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Charnvit Kasetsiri

Professor Emeritus, Pridi Banomyong International College, Thammasat University, Bangkok

A comparative studies of the two longest reigns of King Chulalongkorn of Siam and King Bhumibol of Thailand.

Charnvit Kasetsiri is a Professor Emeritus of Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand, born 1941; he is a prominent historian and Thai Studies scholar. After obtaining his bachelor’s degree in Diplomacy with Honor from Thammasat, 1963, he pursued his 1967 M.A. in Diplomacy and World Affairs at Occidental College, Los Angeles, California, under a Rockefeller scholarship and his 1972 Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History at Cornell University.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History.

This Gatty lecture will take place in person at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom.

Lunch will be served.

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

War in space is not inevitable. Outer space is not ‘wild west.’ There are fundamental rules of international law that govern all space activities, including military space activities. Outer space must be used for the benefit and interest of all states and for peaceful purposes. Outer space must be explored and used in accordance with international law, including the Charter of the United Nations, in the interest of maintaining international peace and security. However, the sources of international legal principles and rules applicable to all space activities are varied and thus they create a complex legal regime governing outer space.

Professor Ram Jakhu's lecture will address key principles of international law, which must be understood and studied from a neutral perspective and applied effectively. He explains that this is necessary to uphold the rule of law and avoid the use of force in outer space not only to maintain international peace and security but also to assure unprecedented benefits of outer space to the entire humanity.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here

About the Speaker

Professor Ram S. Jakhu is a tenured Professor at the Institute of Air and Space Law, Faculty of Law, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. For the last four decades, he has been teaching and conducting research in international space law and public international law. He held several positions, including the Director of the McGill Institute of Air and Space Law, and the first Director of the Master of Space Studies Program of the International Space University, France.

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the Gender and Security Sector Lab and the Department of Science and Technology Studies.

Featuring a post-screening panel discussion panel discussing indigenous rights in the Brazil US and will follow the film and includes Wendy Wolford (Global Development), Renata Marques Leitao (College of Human Ecology), and Eric T. Cheyfitz (American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program).

Check out the trailer below.

Pizza will be served. Showing will begin right away.

Co-sponsored by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS) and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIIS) along with collaboration by Cornell Cinema and the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs.

The feature documentary debut of director Alex Pritz (“My Dear Kyrgyzstan”), THE TERRITORY follows the vital, inspiring fight of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people of Brazil to defend their land from non-Indigenous farmers intent on colonizing their protected territory in the Amazon rainforest. Co-produced by the Uru-eu-wau-wau community, the film draws on intimate access to both the Indigenous perspective and the farmers who want their land to chronicle a conflict that has profound implications for the survival of a people and the planet.

Partially shot by the Uru-eu-wau-wau people and filmed over the course of several years, THE TERRITORY offers an authentic portrait of an Indigenous community’s daily life and struggles. With its breathtaking cinematography showcasing the dramatic landscape and richly textured sound design, the film brings audiences deep into the precious ecosystem they are fighting to protect.

Since the Uru-eu-wau-wau were first contacted by the Brazilian government in 1981, their territory has become an island of green rainforest surrounded by denuded farms and ranches — the results of four decades of unchecked deforestation. The community has faced environmentally destructive and often violent incursions into their sovereign territory by nonnatives seeking to exploit the land. Illegal logging and land clearing incursions have become more frequent and more brazen over the years.

Inside Uru-eu-wau-wau territory, there are fewer than 200 people, including elders and children, to defend nearly 7,000 square miles of rainforest. On the edges of the protected lands, a network of farmers organizes to stake their claims through official channels, while individual land-grabbers begin clear-cutting swaths of rainforest for themselves. With the community’s survival at stake, Bitaté Uru-eu-wau-wau and Neidinha Bandeira — a young Indigenous leader and his female mentor — must find new ways to protect the rainforest from encroaching invaders. But rather than rely on others to tell their story, the Uru-eu-wau-wau take control of the narrative and create their own news media team to bring the world the truth.

More on the film at:

https://films.nationalgeographic.com/the-territory

The Territory Trailer (2022)