The American Anthropological Association is officially celebrating Anthropology Day on February 20, 2025. Anthropology Day is a day for anthropologists to celebrate our discipline while sharing it with the world around us.
On Friday, February 21, the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University will host an event in celebration of Anthropology Day. This will be the sixth annual Anthropology Day celebration hosted by HRAF in collaboration with undergraduates from the University of Connecticut. Matthew Longcore, Director of Membership and Outreach at HRAF, teaches Anthropology at UConn and is the faculty advisor for the UConn Stamford Anthropology Society.
UConn students have been invited to New Haven for a day exploring anthropology and cross-cultural research. We will begin our day with a visit to the HRAF offices at 755 Prospect Street. There will be a presentation on cross-cultural research from President Carol Ember followed by a discussion about the Melvin Ember Internship with current interns Seb Wang Gaouette and Jacqueline Heitmann.
Following the visit to HRAF, the group will take a tour of the historic Yale University campus. Afterwards the group will have lunch at Yorkside Pizza. New Haven is well-known for its legendary pizza restaurants. Yorkside Pizza, a family operation since 1969, has served generations of Yale students. The day will conclude with a visit to the Yale University Art Gallery followed by coffee at Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea on York Street in downtown New Haven.
February 21st is opening day at the art gallery for David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive, a major traveling retrospective exhibition that spans the seven decades of work – from the 1950s to the 2010s – of South African photographer David Goldblatt. The son of Jewish Lithuanian parents who fled to South Africa to escape religious oppression, Goldblatt was an outsider in a nation ruled by white Christians. He captured scenes of life in South Africa under apartheid and post-apartheid.
In an article for EYEMAZING, a non-profit foundation and independent photography organization based in Amsterdam, Clayton Maxwell writes:
“He was also a white man in a racially segregated society. Not a part of the white Christian leadership and not a part of the black majority, Goldblatt is a South African outsider, yet one who is devoted to his country – so much so that he did not leave when the violence became extreme in the 1980s, a time when many white non-supporters of apartheid chose to leave.”
Maxwell compares the photographic style of Goldblatt to that of an ethnographic documentarian:
“Goldblatt works like a photographic anthropologist, and his life-long oeuvre serves as a multi-layered ethnography of South Africa: the land, the architecture, the Afrikaans landowners, black nomadic farmers, wealthy suburbanites, black migrant workers… His vision of South African is dynamic and comprehensive.”
Many thanks to UConn students for joining us in celebration of Anthropology Day 2025. We will post a reflection with photos after the event.
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