Date/Time
Date(s) - 30/10/2024
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Location
LR Wilson Hall Room# 3001

Dr. Stephen Berquist: Taming the Flow: Population movement, politics, and the production of hydropolitical knowledge in the Late Pre-Hispanic Andes
Postdoctoral Research fellow, University of Warsaw. Center for Andean Studies
Research Association at Archaeology Centre of the University of Toronto

Stephen Berquist, PhD (Anthropology, University of Toronto, ‘22), specializes in environmental anthropology, urbanism, and political histories of the Indigenous Andes. He has also conducted ethnography in the United States and Canada and collaborated on archaeological projects in Lebanon, Cambodia, and the U.S.A.

Temperature and precipitation fluctuations, frequent flash floods, volcanic eruptions, and devastating El Niño events make the Andean Region one of the most unstable environments in the world. To mediate these conditions, Andean peoples have developed what I term “anticipatory infrastructures,” that include a range of mechanisms to stabilize the effects of climatic fluctuations. To contemporary Indigenous communities, such fluctuations manifest the terrakuna and apukuna, earth-beings and sacred peaks. Quechua peoples in southern Peru thus refer to irrigation practices as “teaching water,” emphasizing the necessity of socializing a capricious earth-being before entering into relations with it.

Upcoming Speaker Series:

Friday, November 15, 2024 – 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Location: LR Wilson Hall Rm # 1003
Dr. Alex Khasnabish (Professor of Anthropology, Mount Saint Vincent University)
Talk Title: Black Pills in Clown World: Anthropology at the End of the World

Friday, November 22, 2024 – 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Location: LR Wilson Hall Rm # 1003
Dr. Paul Szpak (Associate Professor of Anthropology, Trent University)
Talk Title: The Landscape of Llama Husbandry in the Andes before the Arrival of the Europeans

Friday, December 6, 2024 – 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Location: LR Wilson Hall Rm # 1003
Jacquie Fisher (CRM Archaeologist)
Talk Title: Full Circle? – How to Look at CRM Archaeology Through a Different Lens