In the midst of this boom of writing and thinking and worrying about the end of the world brought on by anthropogenic climate catastrophes, Ethnographic Terminalia presents Aeolian Politics. It is indeed the end of time for glaciers that have withstood thousands of years, cycling through periods of freeze and thaw.
It is the end of time for entire species extinguished at such an alarming rate that even the most hardened observer of the ‘news’ must be a little shaken and perturbed.
It is in this moment that we have enthusiastically collaborated with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer to translate their work, Aeolian Politics, into an exhibition. We all inhabit the weather world, regardless of the little shelters built to insulate us from the elements. The banal familiarity of the seasons as they wash over us no longer require studied effort to estrange them. Strange weather is here. The force of this world—which we re-engineered through centuries of mining, fossil-fuel burning, over-fishing, agro-industrial growth, and so on—imposes itself upon our everyday so that we must make a constant effort to make the strange familiar and pretend that everything will be okay. At times the veneer of a stable and predictable life seems terribly thin.
We welcome you to explore the Windhouse, a gallery within a gallery, caught up in an airy torrent of wind politics where the materiality of Zapotec words invoke the weird familiarity of wind in the weather world.
[Bio c. 2017] Craig Campbell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. He received his PhD in Sociology (Theory and Culture) from the University of Alberta in 2009. He is actively involved in producing works that span the range of expository writing, art exhibition, and curation. These function as companion works to a thematic interest in archives, photography, documents, and the anxious territory of actuality. Craig Campbell’s ethnographic, historical, and regional interests include: Siberia, Central Siberia, Indigenous Siberians, Evenki, Evenkiia, Reindeer hunting and herding, Travel and mobility, Socialist colonialism, early forms of Sovietization, and the circumpolar...
https://ok.ubc.ca/
Fiona P. McDonald completed her PhD (2014) in the Department of Anthropology at University College London (UCL) in visual anthropology & material culture (Supervisors: Professor Susanne Kuechler and Professor Christopher Pinney). Her dissertation is entitled, Charting Material Memories: a visual and material ethnography of the transformations of woollen blankets in contemporary art, craft, and Indigenous regalia in Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the United States . This project was undertaken as both an historic and contemporary visual and material ethnography of the material nature and transformations of woollen (trade) blankets that were produced in the United Kingdom since the seventeenth century....
https://ok.ubc.ca/
[Bio c. 2017] Trudi is an artist and anthropologist. She works with cultural practices of media and archives. Her current research interests include the role of entropy within archives, and helping to re-establish connections between contemporary photography practices, camera obscuras. She received an interdisciplinary PhD in Anthropology and Visual Art from University of Victoria, Canada. Trudi's artistic and academic practices are platforms to address the significance of photography by breaking it down to its fundamental properties. Her work explores the way that places like National Parks are maintained through photography; the relationships between archives and photography; and the structure of...
http://www.sfu.ca/siat.html
Stephanie Takaragawa is an Associate Dean of the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Chapman University (Orange, CA). She received a PhD from Temple University (2006) in the Anthropology of Visual Communication emphasizing visual and media representations cross-culturally through art, performance and museum exhibitions. Her current research looks at representations of Japanese-American internment discourses at the interpretive centers now built at the Manzanar Relocation Center in California and Heart Mountain in Cody, Wyoming. Stephanie’s areas of interest are in the anthropology of visual communication, museum studies, the intersection of art and...
[Bio c. 2018] I am an Associate Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. I am an anthropologist with a PhD in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia and an MA in the Anthropology of Media from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies. As the director of the Making Culture Lab, my research explores the role of digital technology in the documentation and safeguarding of cultural heritage, and the mediation of culture, history, objects, and subjects in new forms. My video and multimedia works investigate documentary methodologies to...
http://www.sfu.ca/siat.html
[Bio c. 2016] Dominic Boyer is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS, culturesofenergy.org), the first research center in the world designed specifically to promote research on the energy/environment nexus in the arts, humanities and social sciences. He is part of the editorial collective of the journal Cultural Anthropology (2015-2018) and also edits Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge, a book series for Cornell University Press. His research interests include media, knowledge, energy and power. His most recent monograph is The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in...
http://www.rice.edu/
Cymene Howe is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and a core faculty member in the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences. She is the author of Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua (Duke 2013), co-editor of 21st Century Sexualities (Routledge 2009) and has published numerous articles and book chapters in anthropology and transdisciplinary texts. In a multi-year collaborative research project with Dominic Boyer in Southern Mexico she has followed the political and social contingencies of renewable energy development, paying special attention to the material, multi-species and political/ecological effects of wind...
http://www.rice.edu/
[Quoted from Poetry Translation Center 2015] Victor Terán. Víctor Terán is the most personal poet of the Zapotec Isthmus of Oaxaca, México. He was born in Juchitán de Zaragoza in 1958. His work has been published extensively in magazines and anthologies throughout Mexico. Since 2000, he has also appeared in anthologies in Italy and the United States (Reversible Monuments, Copper Canyon: 2002; Words of the True Peoples, U Texas P: 2005). A three-time recipient of the national fellowship for writers of indigenous languages, his first book, Diixda; Xieeña (Barefoot Words) was republished in 1997 by Ediciones Bi’cu’ Nisa. His books...