2008-09 Feinberg Series: Mexican Days of the Dead
Please join us for a guest lecture by Professor David Carrasco, the Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America at Harvard Divinity School and the author of many books, including City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization. His lecture is titled "Mexican Days of the Dead: From the Aztec City of Sacrifice to Chicano/a Murals."
Drawing on twenty years of research in the excavations and archives associated with the sites of Teotihuacan and Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Professor Carrasco's work explores ritual violence and sacred space. His work makes special emphasis on the religious dimensions of Latino experience: mestizaje, the myth of Aztlan, transculturation, and La Virgen de Guadalupe.
This lecture is part of the Feinberg Lecture Series hosted by the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The 2008-09 Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series will take as its theme "Measuring the Value of Human Life," which will engage scholarship in history, bioethics, legal studies, the arts, and other realms to explore how value has been ascribed to human lives in courtrooms, labs, archives, boardrooms, and universities. Public lectures, panels, and film screenings will consider subjects ranging from the role of war and sacrifice in ancient societies to contemporary reparations movements. Events will examine efforts to compensate individuals and families for lives and limbs lost on the battlefield and in the workplace. We will consider attempts (from the religious to the technological) to purchase eternal life, and reflect on ways in which historians have measured and valued life stories. In sum, this exciting series investigates the many and varied approaches to the questions, what is life worth?
This event is free and open to the public.
