News
In July CLACS was awarded Title VI status ($250,000 anually for four years) from the US Department of Education as a National Resources Center (NRC) for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
May 2006: Jeffrey Gould, CLACS Director and Rudy Professor of History, gives lecture at Chile's Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano
Link to article (in Spanish).
April 27, 2006: CLACS WINS FLAS FELLOWSHIP GRANT
Dear Colleagues and Students,
Good news! We are very pleased to inform you that CLACS have been
awarded $194,500 annually for FLAS FELLOWSHIP GRANTS for the FY 2006-09.
This funding provides for 6 academic year and 5 summer fellowships.
FLAS APPLICATION PROCEDURES
The US Department of Education Free Teacher Workshops
planned for the upcoming summer. Information about the workshops can be found at http://www.t2tweb.us/Workshops/Schedule.asp and we would deeply appreciate you sharing this with appropriate audiences.
Please note that the topic of the July 31 & August 1 workshop in Los
Angeles and the August 3 & 4 workshop in Washington DC is foreign
language instruction.
We appreciate your assistance with informing people about these great opportunities! Many thanks!
Karla Ver Bryck Block
karla.verbryckblock@ed.gov
New website for the Central American and Mexican Video Archive (CAMVA) project. Click here!
- Released October 5th, 2005
Thanks to a recent grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Indiana University is beginning the creation of the Central American and Mexican Video Archive (CAMVA) this week. The $600,000 Technological and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access grant will assist the university over the next four years in creating an unprecedented digital archive of raw footage, videos and films for use in classrooms throughout the United States, Mexico and Central America, and everywhere in the world via the Internet.
Because of land loss, immigration and civil war, the rural peoples of Central America and Mexico have undergone a rapid socio-cultural transition. The archive is being designed to create an audio-visual history of peasants, Indians and rural migrants. In addition to IU, Project CAMVA will include a consortium of resea institutions from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico.
Starting immediately, Project CAMVA hopes to provide cultural and historical benchmarks on which future studies can be measured. In Mexico, the focus will be footage of anthropological studies dealing with the people in Oaxaca, Veracruz and Chiapas. In Nicaragua, the archive will provide access to raw video and film footage from the 1970s and 1980s. In El Salvador over sixty reels of film detailing the rural-based guerrilla struggle of the 1970s and 1980s will be processed.
“It is highly important to recognize that the overwhelming majority of the rural people of Central America and Mexico have not left written records, and therefore, these audio-visual archives can play a crucial role in allowing scholars and policy makers to understand the cultural roots of the new immigrants, their present cultural universe, and their evolving worldviews and practices” says Jeff Gould, co-director.
Project CAMVA is being headed by Jeffrey Gould, director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Rudy Professor of History, and Kris Brancolini director of the Digital Library Project. The project is also co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of History and Memory, whose co-directors are Chancellor's Professor John Bodnar and Mendel Professor Daniel James.
Spring Conference/Workshop April 6 & 7, 2006:
Acting on Indigenous Rights, Acting out Indigenous Rites: A Forum on Minority Languages and Cultures in Latin America
Sponsor: Indiana University College of Arts and Humanities Institute
“Acting on Indigenous Rights, Acting out Indigenous Rites,” will be an international forum on indigenous politics, identity formation, and cultural expression in Latin America. The conference is intended to be a space of creative engagement between indigenous community leaders, indigenous intellectuals from the region, and US scholars working on issues that span the divide of indigenous politics and indigenous performance. The main question to be explored in the conference is the following: How is acting on indigenous rights tied to performative enactments of indigenous rites?
By multiple standards – among academics, policy-makers, and community-based actors – the struggle for recognition of indigenous cultures, languages, and forms of collective self-expression is one of the most pressing issues in contemporary Latin America. In the political arena this is witnessed in the region-wide expansion of social movements oriented toward indigenous rights and sub-national ethnic identity formation. In several cases national governments have responded with multicultural constitutional reforms in order to rewrite such ethnic groups back into their nation’s histories and conceptualize the region’s future as a multicultural and multilingual one. The increasing importance of indigenous recognition is also evident in the way global indigenous rights forums (for example at the Organization of American States and the United Nations) and international advocacy organizations provide the necessary leverage for local indigenous advocates to press their cause with their respective states.
While clearly oriented toward the domain of law and policy, indigenous rights struggles are by no means exclusively legalistic or institutional in terms of the modes of expression indigenous advocates use to gain recognition. Overtly political action is frequently complemented by a symbolic politics of “acting out” indigenous identities through very visible and verbal forms of cultural self-expression. These enactments of identity may take various forms that include the strategic use of indigenous languages, religious/ceremonial practices, traditional dress, and (musical or oratory) performances among non-indigenous audiences or in front of state and international officials. Increasingly, such enactments of indigenous culture and languages are performed in those political and public settings that have historically been the least accepting of indigenous self-expression (i.e. governmental offices, school classrooms, congressional auditoriums, the streets of national capitals, and so on).
Because enactments of indigenous language and culture are never simply symbolic veneers, we seek to look beyond the "spectacle" of indigenous performance. Acting out indigenous identities in public, while clearly symbolically charged, is also a means to act on a series of rights claims that indigenous representatives seek to insert into spaces that have been historically hostile to them. The strategic use of indigenous language in political arenas has a direct corollary in the struggle to establish bilingual educational policies and to gain constitutional recognition of indigenous languages as part of the nation’s linguistic patrimony; practicing indigenous rituals within the national public sphere has its corollary in indigenous demands for a guarantee of greater religious freedoms; performing musical traditions in front of non-indigenous audiences has its corollary in the struggle for the legal protection of indigenous cultural patrimony. Thus, the conference participants seek to explore the relation between acting on and acting out indigenous identities, to investigate the multiple ways in which such actions cohere in the practice and politicization of native languages and cultures.
IU speakers:
Daniel Suslak, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Anya Royce, Chancellors’ Professor of Anthropology
Shane Greene, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
John Mcdowell, Professor of Folklore
Jeffrey Gould, Rudy Professor of History; Director of CLACS
Francisco Tandioy ( Colombia), CLACS Instructor
Invited speakers:
Adolfo Juep (Peru) is a member of the Awajún people of Peru’s northern Amazon and has been actively involved in indigenous organizing and bilingual educational since the 1960s.
Edaena Saynes ( Mexico) is a Zapotec-Mexican scholar with a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona.
Luis Alberto Yamberla ( Ecuador) is director of the Inti Raymi Cultural Center in Ecuador and a leading promoter of cultural performances within his community.
Maria Elena Garcia , Sarah Lawrence College
Antonio Lucero, Temple University
Keynote speaker:
Charles Hale, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas; Vice-President of the Latin American Studies Association.
