** Registration for in-person attendance on our Eventbrite page here is not required but appreciated **
The Journal of Anthropological Research (JAR) is honored to welcome Dr. Severin Fowles, Professor of Anthropology and American Studies, Chair of Anthropology, and Director of the Archaeology Track at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Lecture Abstract:
The history of colonialism in the American West is not just the story of how European people, animals, and technologies invaded Indigenous worlds but also of how these things were engaged, redeployed, countered, rejected, and, in some cases, embraced by native communities. In this paper, I look beyond the horses, guns, germs, and steel that have dominated materialist analyses of the colonial encounter to consider the circulation of images—or more precisely, the circulation of new understandings of what images are and how they function. My focus is on the “Biographic Tradition,” an Indigenous mode of iconographic production that rapidly spread across the Great Plains and parts of New Mexico during the early colonial period. The Biographic Tradition had a strongly archival sensibility, dominated by graphic illustrations of the exploits of specific Plains warriors. In my account of the origins and development of this tradition, two arguments are advanced: first, that the Biographic Tradition was the child of colonialism, directly influenced by European aesthetics and logics of historical depiction, and second, that such images quickly developed into their own theater of war, enacting rather than merely representing violence.
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Event is organized by JAR and co-sponsored by the UNM Department of Anthropology and the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.
About Dr. Fowles
Dr. Fowles is an anthropologist whose scholarship combines archaeological methods with perspectives drawn from Critical Indigenous Studies, Art History, Religious Studies, and New Materialist Philosophy to reimagine the history of the American West. He has directed excavations at archaeological sites spanning ten thousand years—from the camps of early foragers, to Ancestral Pueblo villages, to a Spanish colonial plaza community, to a 1960s hippie commune.
He has also directed landscape surveys, including a decade-long rock art survey of the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument and an ongoing survey of late pre-colonial and early colonial agricultural systems, the latter conducted on behalf of Picuris Pueblo in support of their struggle to reclaim land and water. Increasingly, his research emerges through formal partnerships with descendant communities. In addition to Picuris Pueblo, he maintains various collaborations with the Comanche Nation as well as the Indo-Hispano community at San Antonio del Embudo, New Mexico.
His first book, An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion (School for Advanced Research, 2013), critically examines how secular understandings of “religion” have structured archaeological accounts of non-modern Indigenous communities. Alongside Barbara Mills, he also co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Southwest Archaeology (Oxford, 2017), the widest-ranging consideration of the intellectual history and theoretical commitments of archaeology in the American Southwest.
His current writing projects include a study of the Plains Biographic Tradition entitled Comanche Afterimages: Visual Culture and History in Northern New Mexico, a synthetic volume on ten thousand years of rock art production in the American Southwest entitled Iconohistory (co-authored with Darryl Wilkinson, Lindsay Montgomery, and Benjamin Alberti), and a volume on the history of settler colonialism in the little village of San Antonio del Embudo (under development with Chicano/a Studies scholar and poet, Levi Romero).
On campus, he directs the Archaeology Track in the Barnard Anthropology Department, and teaches both introductory and upper-level courses including "Indigenous Place-Thought," "American Material Culture," "Pre-Columbian Histories of Native America," and "Laboratory Methods in Archaeology." While away from campus during the summer, he directs Barnard's field program in New Mexico, which creates an opportunity for Barnard and Columbia students to learn methods of archaeological survey, excavation, and oral history while working in collaboration with descendant communities.
Learn more here.
