This page provides information on various lectures and events to be held at SUCO, Hartwick College, and in the Oneonta community that anthropology students may find of interest. Please e-mail me information on any additional lectures and events.
Hartwick College will be hosting anthropologist Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld for a public lecture on “Building Sustainable Food Systems: What is the place of community?” The talk is scheduled for Monday, 27 February, 7pm in Anderson Theatre at Hartwick.
Asbtract of the talk: Rallying around local food urges people both to eat better and to invest in hometown economies. It has also provoked a backlash, with some arguing against using food miles and locality as measures of sound food systems. Implicit in this debate lurks an older controversy about the economic place of community in capitalist society. Professor Colloredo-Mansfeld investigates how feelings about belonging, local history, and economic solidarity appear in today’s local food activism. Based on his recent work helping to develop the “Piedmont Grown” brand, he will share how North Carolinians value local food—and how grassroots branding efforts extend and exploit ideas of community in order to rebuild regional food systems.
Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since 1991, he has written and taught about community economies and cultural change in the context of globalization. Much of his work has concerned indigenous peoples and provincial economies in the Ecuadorian Andes. His publications include The Native Leisure Class: Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the Andes and Fighting Like a Community: Andean Civil Society in an Era of Indigenous Uprisings. Since 2004, he has worked on local food issues in the United States, first as a member of the Regional Food Systems Working Group at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Iowa, and more recently as a founding board member of Piedmont Grown, Inc. a local food branding program for central North Carolina.