Time: June 26, 14:00-16:15, 2010
Place: National Museum of Ethnology
Admission: Free (reservation required / first come, first served up to 450)
Language: English/Japanese (with simultaneous interpretation)

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Reception:
17:00-18:30 Minpaku Restaurant
Admission: 5,000 yen (includes food and drinks)
*reservation required / first come, first served up to 100

Reservations:
E-mail: clifford.min@idc.minpaku.ac.jp
Fax:06-6878-8479
International Cooperation Unit, National Museum of Ethnology
10-1 Senri Expo Park, Suita, Osaka 565-8511

Lecturer: James Clifford, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz
Greetings: SUDO Kenichi, Director-General, National Museum of Ethnology
Moderator: YOSHIDA Kenji, Professor, National Museum of Ethnology
Panelists: James Clifford
KISHIGAMI Nobuhiro, Professor, National Museum of Ethnology
OTA Yoshinobu, Professor, University of Kyushu

Abstract
This lecture will draw on research recently conducted in Kodiak Alaska at the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository. The museum is a Native administered cultural center engaged in a variety of heritage renewal programs. In 2008 a collection of ceremonial masks from the Kodiak region--acquired in 1870 by a young French linguist and stored ever since in a French provincial museum--returned on loan to the Alutiiq Museum. These very rare masks, of enormous iconic value for a culture that had been devastated by Russian and United States colonization, play a new role in the process of “heritage” revival. The talk describes (with photographic illustrations) the masks' return, and it explores the second life of heritage in which these repatriated artifacts are now major actors. General questions concerning the politics of heritage and indigenous renewal are discussed: differing visions of authenticity and historicity; colonial legacies and indigenous futures; complex relations with capitalism and post-modern formations of identity. The talk argues that the meanings of the masks today, the ruptures and continuities they embody, are ambivalent, productive and unfinished.

Profile
James Clifford was born in 1945. He is a world-renowned cultural critic and “post-modern” anthropologist whose work has challenged conventional academic norms and methods, contributing to postcolonial critiques of Euro-centric epistemologies. He received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, and has taught since 1978 in the interdisciplinary History of Consciousness doctoral program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has also served as a visiting professor of anthropology at University College London and Yale University. Throughout his professional career, Dr. Clifford has published books and essays that are widely translated and frequently cited in many areas of the arts and culture. They include Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Co-edited with George Marcus, University of California Press, 1986), The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988), and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1997).

Another program with James Clifford

I-House Academy / I-House Ushiba Fellowship Public Lecture
Traditional Futures: New Indigenous Politics and the Question of Global History

Lecturer: James Clifford, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz
Moderator: OTA Yoshinobu, Professor, University of Kyushu
Organizer: International House of Japan
Date & Time: Wednesday, June 23, 7:00pm-8:30pm
Venue: Iwasaki Koyata Memorial Hall, International House of Japan
Admission: 1,000yen (Students: 500yen, IHJ Members: Free)
Language: English / Japanese (with simulataneous translation)

Reservations:
E-mail: program@i-house.or.jp
Tel:03-3470-3211
Fax:03-3470-3170
International House of Japan
5-11-16 Roppongi, Minatoku, Tokyo 106-0032