Research, Training & Collaboration : Lectures

Occasional Lecture Series

Land, Truth, Water: Finding the ≠Khomani Bushmen of the Southern Kalahari

by Professor Hugh Brody (Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies, University of the Fraser Valley)

1pm - 2:15pm, 16 March, 2010
Seminar Room, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Downing Street

All are welcome, and feel free to bring your lunch.

In 1996, a small group of Bushmen, known as the ≠Khomani San, launched a claim to South Africa's second most important National Park. This was one of the first such land claims in Africa, and led to research, negotiation and, in 1999, a settlement.

A set of research projects - recording oral histories, mapping relationships to land and resources, filming with the community - put together the land claim, and then monitored its consequences. In this lecture, Hugh Brody, who co-ordinated the research projects with the ≠Khomani San from 1997-2008, will describe the process and invite discussion of how the results of such work can have maximum value, both for the people who told the stories and made the claim, and for those who wish to draw on and analyse the materials.

Professor Brody is the Canada Reseach Chair in Aboriginal Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley and an Associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. He has worked with governments and indigenous communities on land claims issues in Canada and South Africa since the 1970s. He was an adviser to the Mackenzie Pipeline Inquiry, a member of the World Bank's Morse Commission and chairman of the Snake River Independent Review, all of which involved encounters between large-scale development and indigenous communities.

Click here to download an A4 poster advertising Professor Brody's forthcoming lecture.

Ifugao oral epics: Reflections on living traditions and cultural heritage in the Philippines

by Dr Maria Vladimirovna Stanyukovich (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, St Petersburg, Russia)

1pm - 2:15pm, 13 October, 2009
Seminar Room, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Downing Street

All are welcome, and feel free to bring your lunch.

Dr Maria Vladimirovna Stanyukovich is Chair of the Department of Australia, Oceania and Indonesia at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Science, St Petersburg, Russia. She has been working on the epic oral traditions of the Philippines for over 30 years, and has also conducted fieldwork in the Altai Republic, Uzbekistan, Dagestan, Cuba, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

Dr Stanyukovich is in Cambridge to work with Civilizations in Contact, a Research Project within the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, funded by the Golden Web Foundation.