Tulane University

16th Annual Tulane Maya Symposium: The Ancient Maya and Collapse

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The Middle American Research Institute, in collaboration with Tulane’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Mexican Consulate in New Orleans, is proud to announce the 16th Annual Tulane Maya Symposium beginning on Thursday, February 14, and concluding on Sunday, February 17, 2019. This year’s conference The Center Could Not Hold: The Ancient Maya and Collapse will explore recent developments in Maya studies as they relate to the broader topic of collapse. Speakers and workshops will address the issue of political decline over the span of ancient Maya prehistory. These researchers will help us address the collapse in a multi-disciplinary fashion and bring attention to recent research in the region.

Registration is now open!

On Friday, February 15, at 6:00 PM, the keynote address will be given by Jeremy A. Sabloff, External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute and Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, of the University of Pennsylvania. In his talk Is ‘€œCollapse‘€ a Useful Term in Understanding Pre-Columbian Maya History?, Dr. Sabloff considers how the term ‘€œcollapse‘€ has, in recent years, become quite controversial, and argues that there is good reason to question the utility of this loaded word going forward. This keynote talk will focus on understandings of the late 8th and early 9th centuries CE cultural processes and environmental events in the Maya Lowlands that culminated in what has often been seen as a political collapse. Moreover, the talk will examine whether such understanding can help illuminate comparable trends at other times in Maya history and in other complex societies in general.

Since 2002, the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University has hosted a weekend of talks and workshops dedicated to the study of the Maya civilization of Mexico and Central America. This yearly meeting has called upon scholars from a wide spectrum of specialties including archaeology, art history, cultural anthropology, epigraphy, history, and linguistics to elucidate the many facets of this fascinating Mesoamerican culture. In developing a broad approach to the subject matter, the conference aims to draw the interest of a wide ranging group of participants from the expert to the beginner.

To view the schedule, registration, and additional information, please visit the Tulane Maya Symposium website.

CANCELED 2019 Maya Symposium Educator Workshop

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The Stone Center for Latin American Studies, in collaboration with the Middle American Research Institute, will host an educator workshop in conjunction with the 16th Annual Tulane Maya Symposium on Sunday, February 17, 2019. The K-12 Educator Workshop will focus on a basic introduction to Maya archaeology and cultural heritage of the Maya today. The workshop includes a tour of the Middle American Research Institute’s main gallery Faces of the Maya: Profiles in Continuity and Resilience.

Registration for educators is now available. The registration fee includes the tour of the main gallery, the educator workshop, and lunch.

The 16th Annual Tulane Maya Symposium The Center Could Not Hold: The Ancient Maya and Collapse will explore recent developments in Maya studies as they relate to the broader topic of collapse. Speakers and workshops will address the issue of political decline over the span of ancient Maya prehistory. These researchers will help us address the collapse in a multi-disciplinary fashion and bring attention to recent research in the region. Since 2002, the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University has hosted a weekend of talks and workshops dedicated to the study of the Maya civilization of Mexico and Central America. This yearly meeting has called upon scholars from a wide spectrum of specialties including archaeology, art history, cultural anthropology, epigraphy, history, and linguistics to elucidate the many facets of this fascinating Mesoamerican culture. In developing a broad approach to the subject matter, the conference aims to draw the interest of a wide ranging group of participants from the expert to the beginner.

TEACHER WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

Sunday, February 17, 2019

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Tour of the MARI Main Gallery

12:00 PM
Lunch

1:45 PM – 3:15 PM
Introduction to Maya Archaeology

3:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Maya Cultural Heritage Management

For more information about the symposium, visit the Tulane Maya Symposium homepage.

Art History Graduate Association to host Aaron M. Hyman for talk on Colonial Cuzco's Aesthetic of Sameness

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Join the Art History Graduate Association at Tulane University in welcoming Aaron M. Hyman who will present his research in a talk titled Colonial Cuzco’s Aesthetic of Sameness on Monday, February 18, at 6:00 PM.

Aaron M. Hyman, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, is a historian of the art of the Spanish Empire, with a focus on the long seventeenth century in colonial Latin America and the Southern Netherlands. His interests include paradigms of artistic authorship and collaboration, the transmission and circulation of objects, and early modern print culture. Though his primary aim is to situate works of art within the historical conditions of their making and viewing, he is equally interested in the historiographic conditions that have limited art historical understanding or obscured and excluded objects from the historical record. His work often draws on post-colonial and literary theory to expand or complicate the boundaries of traditional art historical scholarship.

Much of Hyman’s scholarship participates in art history’s recent global reorientation. He is currently at work on his first book, which treats the ways New World artists used European prints within their artistic practices during the colonial period. This book will represent the first monographic treatment of the scores of Latin American objects derived from European prints, a key topic in colonial Latin American art history and one with theoretical ramifications within an increasingly globalized field of art historical inquiry. The project focuses on works of art in both Mexico and Peru made after prints by Peter Paul Rubens, an artist who has come to define the art historical standards of early modern authorship, and who thus serves as a lens through which to understand the wide range of artists who reconstituted his printed compositions in oil and stone across the Americas.

For more information email artdept@tulane.edu.

The Liberace of Lucha Libre: An Evening with American-born Mexican luchador Cassandro

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Join the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, the Newcomb Art Museum, Amigos de los Amigos, and krewedelusion in welcoming American-born Mexican luchador Saúl Armendáriz, or Cassandro, on Wednesday, February 20, 7:00 PM, in the Freeman Auditorium. Cassandro will speak about his personal story of growing up and training as a lucha libre in México. He became one of the first openly gay exóticos (a wrestler who dresses in a flamboyant style), and later he had the honor of being the first exótico to win a championship title.

Cassandro will speak about how he negotiated his gay identity and overcame adversity in the world of professional Mexican wrestling. He will also share his experiences outside of wrestling, as an LGBTQ activist, circuit speaker, and most recently as the subject of a feature documentary, Cassandro, The Exótico which received critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2018.

This event is free and open to the public. Parader and performer Antonio Garza will moderate.

For more information contact: New Orleans Center for the Gulf South via email dfrazier@tulane.edu, by phone (504-314-2889), or visit the event website.

Sponsored by: Newcomb Art Museum, Amigos de los Amigos, krewedelusion, and The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South.

Life without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay

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Join the Environmental Studies Program and the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University in welcoming Daniel Renfrew, West Virginia University, who will giving a talk titled Life without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay on Thursday, February 21 at 5:00 PM in the Stone Auditorium as part of the EVST Focus on the Environment (FOTE) Speaker Series.

Life without Lead examines the social, political and environmental dimensions of a devastating lead poisoning epidemic. Drawing from a political ecology of health perspective, Daniel Renfrew situates the Uruguayan lead contamination crisis in relation to neoliberal reform, globalization, and the resurgence of the political Left in Latin America. He traces the rise of an environmental social justice movement and the local and transnational circulation of environmental ideologies and contested science. Through fine-grained ethnographic analysis, this book shows how combating contamination intersected with class politics, explores the relationship of lead poisoning to poverty, and debates the best way to identify and manage an unprecedented local environmental health problem.

Daniel Renfrew is an associate professor of Anthropology. He received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Binghamton University, State University of New York in 2007. Dr. Renfrew joined the WVU faculty in Fall 2008 after a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Towson University. Dr. Renfrew’s research interests span the environmental, urban, critical medical and political anthropology sub-fields, and his research draws from and contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on political ecology, social movements, science and technology studies, and Latin American studies. His research has focused in particular on anthropological and political ecological analyses of environmental conflicts.

In Celebration of Black History Month and Carnaval: African and indigenous presence in Boricua culture

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In celebration of Black History Month, the New Orleans Jazz Museum is proud to kick off Mardi Gras Mambo with a lecture by curatorial assistant Ilyanette M. Bernabel entitled Carnaval: The African and Indigenous Presence in Boricua Culture on Friday, February 22, 2019, 2:00 – 3:00 PM. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Bernabel will be presenting the research of her exhibition Carnival in Puerto Rico: Connections to the Homeland. The exhibition explores carnival traditions in Puerto Rico and its connection to Africa. This lecture will focus on the Carnival masked characters called Vejigantes, their unique cultural history from Spain to the Caribbean island, and the infamous musical and dance styles of bomba y plena. The goal of the lecture is to bring awareness to the similarities of two cultures as they relate to the spiritual aspect of masking.

The lecture will be followed by a performance from The Bombazo Dance Company.

Photo: Vejigante mask (made out of coconut and branches) worn for Carnival in Loiza, Puerto Rico.