Visiting Speakers – Anthropology

At St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the Anthropology program brings the world to campus through a dynamic series of visiting speakers. Each year, students have the opportunity to engage with scholars, practitioners, and community leaders working at the forefront of anthropological research and applied practice. From cultural anthropologists and archaeologists to museum professionals and public health experts, these guests share diverse perspectives on global issues, fieldwork experiences, and emerging questions in the discipline. These events spark conversation, expand worldviews, and connect classroom learning to real-world impact—deepening the Honors College experience and building bridges between students and the broader anthropological community.

SPRING 2025

Dr. Karen Nakamura, University of California, Berkeley

Anthropology Distinguished Scholar

Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, etc. are usually framed as severe mental illnesses amenable only to medical treatment. What happens when we view them as biopsychosocial disabilities and rethink them using the social model of community and care?
In this talk, Prof. Karen Nakamura (the Haas Distinguished Chair in Disability Studies at UC Berkeley and author of A Disability of the Soul) talks about her ethnography at Bethel House, an intentional community for people with psychiatric disabilities in Japan. From her fieldwork, she produced a film and book about the possibilities and limitations of rethinking how we deal with the most stigmatized of mental illnesses.

A person with short gray hair smiles outdoors, wearing a blue zip-up jacket with an orange spider logo. Tall trees and greenery are in the background.

Dr. Jatin Dua, University of Michigan

Visiting Anthropologist Program

Shipping plays a crucial role in global circulation and geopolitical imaginaries of mobility. Approximately 90% of the world’s imports and exports travel by sea on some 93,000 merchant vessels, operated by 1.25 million seafarers, carrying almost six billion tons of cargo. These contemporary shipping routes are built on longer histories of movement from land to sea that brought distant places in relation across vast spaces. Based on fieldwork conducted along these routes of maritime commerce, specifically focusing on ports and shipping lanes in the Bab-el-Mandeb, a narrow strait that separates Africa from Asia and connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, this talk explores the possibilities of an anthropology of and from the ocean. Specifically, in this talk, I explore the routing and rerouting of various cargo (from containers to livestock to toxic cargo) and the social worlds constituted on land and sea through shipping as a lens to understanding relations, connections, and disconnections linking Africa to the world. Thinking through rerouting allows for an ethnographic practice attuned not only to the frictions of contemporary life, but the ways ships and social worlds constituted through it, move forward, in unequal and haphazard ways, but forward, nonetheless.

A man with dark hair and a beard stands outdoors in front of a red and brick building, wearing a grey coat and a dark shirt.

FALL 2024

Erin H. Kimmerle, Ph.D., University of South Florida

Visiting Anthropologist

Dr. Kimmerle’s lecture is based on her recent book, WE CARRY THEIR BONES: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys. She provides a detailed account of Jim Crow America and an indictment of the reform school system as we know it with details from the science of forensic anthropology. Her lecture chronicles the extraordinary efforts taken to bring these lost children home to their families—an endeavor that created a political firestorm and a dramatic reckoning with racism and shame in the legacy of America.

A woman unveils a clay bust of a bald man with prominent ears and mustache, next to a white wall with framed photos in the background.

Professor Lisa Lucero

Visiting Speaker

The ancestral Maya in Central America subsisted as farmers for over 4,000 years without destroying their environment because of how they engaged with the it through the lens of their inclusive, non-anthropocentric worldview that resulted in a resilient, sustainable relationship. The Maya collaborated with trees, animals, reptiles, birds, soils, water, and other entities rather than trying to subjugate or control them. This collaboration provided the means for rural farmers to bring tribute to their kings in cities because of what kings provided in exchange—clean water during the five-month dry season. Kings performed ceremonies to the gods and ancestors to ensure there would be enough rain to replenish people, crops, jungle life—and the massive artificial self-cleaning reservoirs that not only provided water but also served as portals to the Underworld where the Maya communed with gods and ancestors and prayed for rain. Some portals, such as natural caves and cenotes, demanded pilgrimages as witnessed at Cara Blanca, Belize, where the Maya built ceremonial buildings, but not houses or cities. Consequently, they left a minimal human footprint. Flora and fauna thus flourished. This type of conservation, self-cleaning reservoirs, and other traditional practices hold lessons that are relevant today.