Fellows: 2013-14

Gillian Goslinga is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Science in Society at Wesleyan University where she also serves as Faculty Advisor for the student-run Wesleyan Long Lane Farm Collective. Her research interests converge around phenomena that vex modern metaphysics and nature-culture classifications, such as virgin birth beliefs (claims of conception without biological causality), spirit possession (bodies without psychological unity), gestational surrogacy (the parsing of biological motherhood) and agential nature (nature claimed to listen and respond to humans).  She is interested in what these transgressions reveal about the cultural politics surrounding life and its facts as these play out in contact zones between the modern and the non-modern.  Her earlier work concerned epistemologies of embodiment in a U.S. gestational surrogacy arrangement.  Her current book project, Virgin Birth in South India: The Order of Things and the Making of Life, is based on a decade long engagement with the virgin birth claims of devotees of the Tamil god Paandimuniswaran of Madurai.  Rather than dismissing these claims as nescience, this work rethinks the ontological politics of biologism and naturalism, the paradigms that have dominated the social sciences since the 19^th century.  Her research at the COE continues this exploration of ontological politics in nature-culture arrangements that are decidedly non-modern.  Professor Goslinga’s latest publication is “Spirited Encounters: Notes on the Politics and Poetics of the Uncanny in Anthropology” (Anthropological Theory, Spring issue 2013). 

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, PhD. is Professor Emerita, Dpt. of Anthropology at Smith College and founded Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration (SCBR; www.centrosachmama.org  in 3 languages) in the Peruvian High Amazon in 2009, which she directs. She was born in France and raised in Tangier, Morocco. She came to the US to do her University studies. She has spent years in India and Peru working with indigenous peoples and with farmers. She was a research associate at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) in Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University, for several years in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Along with the Harvard economist Stephen A. Marglin, she has directed several research projects questioning the dominance of the modern paradigm of knowledge. She has authored as well as edited twelve books and published over 50 articles.

In 1993 she decided for political and moral reasons that she could no longer engage in classical anthropological fieldwork and ever since then has been invited to collaborate with activist/intellectual groups in Peru and Bolivia and with one of them, PRATEC, has published The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development. (Zed Books & St. Martin press, 1998). Her latest book based on her work in Peru is entitled Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World (Oxford U. Pr, New York< 2011)www.smith.edu/anthro/faculty_apffel-marglin.php