Anthropologists from throughout the United States will come to Yale on Saturday, May 18, to pay tribute to Harold C. Conklin, the Franklin Muzzy Crosby Professor of the Human Environment, at a symposium marking his retirement from the Yale faculty.
The event will be held 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, 170 Whitney Ave. -- where Professor Conklin has been curator of anthropology for the past 22 years. The symposium is free and open to the public.
Featured speakers and their topics will be: Eugene Ammarell of Marlboro College, "Reconsidering Indigenous Knowledge: Who Are the 'Experts' and Who Are the 'Folk'?"; Michael R. Dove of the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, "Dialogue in the Work of Harold C. Conklin"; Rosemary Gianno, "People of the Lake and Forest: The Semelai of Tasek Bera"; Joel Kuipers of George Washington University, "Manufacturing Marginality in Colonial and Post-Colonial Indonesia: A Sumbanese Example"; Alfred McCoy of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, "Native Informants: Interviews with Warlords, Colonels, Medium and Murderer as Transformative Experiences in the Process of Field Work"; Raymond McDermott of Stanford University, "Uses of Ethnography"; and Paul Taylor of the Smithsonian Institution, "Indonesia in Museums: The Hobby, Science and Art of Collecting."
Professor Conklin has done ethnographic, linguistic and ethnobiological studies in Southeast Asia and in Central and North America. He is best known for his analysis of the systems of shifting cultivation in the Philippines and his studies of the Ifugao people there. A member of the faculty since 1962, he holds a Ph.D. from Yale 1955 and has served as chair of the anthropology department and director of graduate studies. His professional affiliations include membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Anthropological Association.