Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology

An Old Art Form for New Occasions:  

Tlingit Totem Poles at the Dawn of the New Millennium

Shepard Krech III Lecture
Sergei Kan

DATE: Thursday, April 10, 2014
TIME: 5:30 p.m.
LOCATION: Salomon Center, Room 001
Brown University Main Green

Until fairly recently totem poles carved and raised by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska were used mainly to depict the heraldic crests of the matrilineal kinship groups.  Some poles stood in front of the large lineage-owned winter houses or inside of them, serving as corner posts.  Other poles contained the cremated remains of the leaders and prominent members of the group whose crest they bore, or simply memorialized them.  In the last decades, however, Tlingit carvers have been creating poles that reflect the new identities and experiences of their people.  Drawing on his own ethnographic research and published sources, Sergei Kan (Dartmouth College) will speak about a number of these new poles, including those carved by his friend George J. Bennett in memory of Southeast Alaska Native Veterans and the Wellbriety Pole carved by Wayne Price for the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium.  The ceremonies of raising these poles will also be discussed.   

Prof. Kan was born in Russia and emigrated to the United States in 1974.  He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1982.  He taught at the University of Michigan in the 1980s and has been at Dartmouth College since 1989.  He is currently Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies.  He is the author of numerous articles and several books and edited volumes on the culture and history of the Tlingit people of Alaska, Native Americans, and history of Russian and American anthropology.  His books include Symbolic Immortality: the Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century (1989) (recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award), Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity Through Two Centuries (1999), Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist (2009) and Vincent Soboleff: a Russian-American Photographer in Tlingit Country (2013).

 

 

 Sponsored by the Friends of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and donors to the Shepard Krech III Lecture fund.


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Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology
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