FUTURE MARGARET MEADS TO GATHER AT MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE FOR FIVE COLLEGE ANTHROPOLOGY CONFERENCE

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. -- More than twenty-five Five College students of anthropology will gather at Mount Holyoke College on April 13 for a day that will feature their formal presentations about topics as diverse as the peoples and practices of the world. The talks are open to the public and will be held at the Willits-Hallowell Center from 9 AM to 3 PM.

The students, eleven of whom are enrolled at Mount Holyoke, will give talks based on their research and independent work on such intriguing topics as the following: authenticity and the corporate bottom line in Nashville's country music industry; maternity benefits for self-employed women in Gujarat, India; how human actions facilitate the transmission of cholera; the meaning of music in the context of the kurova guva ceremony among the Shona in Zimbabwe; Quechua-Lamista spirituality and biodiversity; the health issue of childhood diarrhea in the Andes; irrigation systems as vessels for power in Peru; prosthesis and transformation: the conversion to Christianity among Nepali leprosy patients; and romance in India and the United States: the social construction of romance and its complicity in the construction of gender roles.

Rene Rothman '91, the conference's keynote speaker, will give a talk titled "Walking between Worlds: The Strange and Wonderful Ways of the Anthropologist" at 9:15 AM. After graduating from MHC with a degree in anthropology, Rothman went on to earn a doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of California at Santa Cruz. While a student at Mount Holyoke, she completed research on contemporary ritual practices among local Episcopalians and Neopagans and on ways that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered populations challenge Americans' "strictly bipolar notions" of gender, she said. As a graduate student, Rothman, who has studied modern dance and the martial art aikido, focused her research on the anthropology of dance. She is currently a lecturer in cultural anthropology and world cultures at San Jose State University, where she teaches a course on the anthropology of dance, and at the University of Santa Cruz.

The Five College anthropology conference, an annual event, was last held at Mount Holyoke in April 1996. Says Lynn Morgan, a professor of anthropology at the College, "Abstracts are continuing to come in, and students are very enthusiastic about the conference. I'm very excited about how this event is shaping up."