November 15, 2024 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm ET
Machmer E24

Guest Lecture

Anthropology Colloquium:

“There Are Eyes Everywhere Here, It's a Trap of Them”

Alissa M Jordan, PhD
Associate Director, Center for Experimental Ethnography
University of Pennsylvania

Friday, November 15, 2024 from 2:30 – 4:00 pm
UMass Machmer E-24

In her forthcoming book Atlas of Nanm, Dr. Alissa Jordan examines how women in rural Haiti care for and manage the body's crucial openings – mouths, eyes, skin, wombs, and even dreams – through which life forces known as nanm flow in and out. Through their experiences protecting these openings and managing these flows, women become vital theorists of how nanm moves through bodies and communities, developing sophisticated frameworks for understanding life, death, and healing. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in Arcahaie, Haiti, this talk focuses specifically on eyes (jè) as powerful organs capable of both nurturing and destroying life. Through close analysis of infant care practices, dream-vision, and accusations of "evil eye," we will look at how women negotiate between the necessity of shared care and the dangers of unchecked desire. Part academic-lecture, part experimental film screening, we will examine different modes of vision for women in Haitian Vodou – from the physical eyes that must be cleaned each morning, to the dream-visions that allow healers to diagnose illness, to the "clear eyes" (jè kle) that perceive the workings of an invisible world. Eyes, we learn, become a crucial bodily portal through which women theorize embodiment, power, and survival amidst sustained precarity.