This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology 

The border is the shared topos of the anthropologist, the historian, the archaeologist, the artist, the musician and the poet, as they all bring into dialogue the past and future with the present, the inside with the outside, the particular with the general, ideas with the senses. This lecture explores border and trauma spaces through a journey of antiphonic witnessing and memory as a way of (re)establishing a self-reflexive relationship with the past that changes the positioning of the present. Drawing on 30 years of conscious and unconscious fieldwork, writing, teaching and practicing multimedia public anthropology, I reflect on my own antinomic subject position in my discipline as a so called “native,” or “indigenous” ethnographer and also as a diasporic, American-trained, post-Boasian anthropologist.

C. Nadia Seremetakis is Professor of cultural anthropology and the author of seven books including poetry. She is best known for her ethnographies The Senses Still, The Last Word: Women Death Divination, and Sensing the Everyday, written in two languages. Born and raised in Greece, she studied and taught in New York where she lived for more than two decades and later joined the University of the Peloponnese.  She has conducted fieldwork in various parts of the world and to this day  she divides her life between USA and Europe.