Special Graduate Course Spring 2017: Making Indigenous Space along the Pacific Rim

This special course will be offered this term only, by our visiting Andrews Fellow, Michael Hathaway (bio below).

ASAN 620 Making an Indigenous Space Along the Pacific Rim: 

National and International Struggles from the 1960s-present

This graduate class explores the formation of an indigenous space as part of national and transnational actions between places located along the Pacific Rim. We will read materials and watch film clips from such places such as Japan, China, Canada, the US, Hawai’i, Australia, New Zealand and others to gain a better understanding of not only the comparative differences, but also the connections in forging new relationships within and beyond the nation-state. As Dorothy Hodgson argues, the template of indigenous rights was born in the Americas, and yet as groups from around the world, such as Africa, engaged in these platforms, this transformed the texture of indigeneity itself. This class extends that exploration, looking at the diverse ways that people in the Pacific Rim both engage their own neighboring social worlds and those across the waters in order to expand indigenous futures.

BIO: MICHAEL HATHAWAY (Visiting Andrews Fellow, Spring 2017)

Michael Hathaway is an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. His first book, Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China (University of California Press, 2013), explores how environmentalism was refashioned in China, not only by conservationists, but also by rural villagers and even animals. It also examines the ways that the politics of indigeneity and nature conservation emerged in China, and reflects on how these dynamics can illuminate struggles elsewhere.

His second major project examines the global commodity chain of the matsutake, one of the world’s most expensive mushrooms, following it from the highlands of the Tibetan Plateau to the markets of urban Japan. He works with other members of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group, looking at the social worlds this mushroom engenders in Canada, the United States, China, and Japan.

His work appears in The Journal of Asian Studies, Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Conservation and Society, and Humanities as well as several books. His research has been supported by the Toyota Foundation (Japan); Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada); and the Social Science Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and Environmental Protection Agency.