Speaker: Nicholas Barron, Ph.D., University of Nevada, Las Vegas

In this fourth installment of the Fall 2024 Proseminar Series, hosted by the Department of Anthropology, our own Barron will deliver his talk, "Lessons in Safe Logic: Reassessing Anthropological and Liberal Imaginings of Termination."

Building upon recent efforts to assess the history of anthropology in light of renewed calls for disciplinary decolonization, Barron will discuss examines the role of the US anthropologists in the infamous policy period known as Termination. Contextualizing the activism of the applied anthropologist John H. Provinse against the backdrop of broader shifts in post-WWII, US liberalism, this talk will illustrate how Provinse's support for Termination in the late 1940s reflected an embattled conception of Indian-US relations.

Such a perspective contrasted with and was ultimately overshadowed by the assimilatory sentiments that would become institutionalized in the Termination policies of the 1950s. Barron will examine how Provinse provides an analytical opening from which to explore the discipline's relationship with Termination as well as the affordances and limitations of liberal anthropological activism. Leading to further speculative assessments of the discipline's many pasts.