Rice University Anthropology

04/28/2026

On Monday, we had a lively discussion of our Professor Gokce Gunel's new book, Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations (Duke University Press).

Many thanks to our wonderful discussants, Dr. Nana Osei-Opare, Dr. Joseph Campana, and Dr. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, and to everyone who joined us for the book launch!

04/28/2026

Last Friday, our department successfully wrapped up the Capstone & Thesis Presentations! 🎉

It was an inspiring afternoon celebrating the hard work, creativity, and growth of our undergraduate students. A huge round of applause to all our presenters, and thank you to everyone who joined us!

04/22/2026

JOIN US and the Department of Religion & Program in Science and Technology Studies for a Brown Bag Talk “From Talking Tools to Metahumans: Social Interaction, Semiotic Skill, and the Authority of AI Chatbots” with Webb Keane, George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, on Thursday, April 23, at 12:00pm in Sewall 570 and Zoom.

Click the link to register for the Zoom meeting: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/av04HmoGReawJBog0SkzyA #/registration

What does it take to turn a tool into a talking tool and that into an authority, even a divinity? AI and AI-endowed chatbots are celebrated as useful tools. But the dramatic utopian and dystopian responses they can provoke suggest something far more. As the so-called "Turing Test "suggested long ago, our inferences about these properties arise from AI's role as an interlocutor in social interaction. The more sophisticated the semiotic skills of chatbots trained on LLMs become, the more that AI generated texts can seem, for many users, to harbor uncanny insights or transcendental knowledge whose sources are inexplicable, possibly even divine--or metahuman. What are the concrete practices that make metahumans more than just the objects of beliefs and propositions? Treating AI as a metahuman is just an extreme case of something more general, the projection of authority onto enigmatic technology. Not merely a product of imagination or ideology, this authority emerges from the pragmatics of social interaction. What makes this character of AI seem intuitively real is due, in part, to the ways humans and metahumans address one another on semiotically unequal grounds.

Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a visiting fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, twice a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and has taught at the School for Criticism and Theory, Cornell. His writings cover a range of topics in social, cultural, and linguistic theory and the ethnography and history of Southeast Asia. He is the author of four books, and co-author or co-editor of two others. The latest, Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination, is about the ethical dilemmas posed by people’s interactions with entities that challenge the line between human and non-human, including cyborgs, certain animals, and AI chatbots.

04/15/2026

JOIN US for a Brown Bag Talk “An Archaeology of Civil Rights in the 20th Century: The Visionary Pragmatism of Race Women” with Anna Agbe-Davies, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on Friday, April 17, at 12:00pm in Sewall 570 and Zoom.

Click the link to register for the Zoom meeting: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/U4m7qy8zR2Ot6Cdx2kNaFg #/registration

The civil rights movement of the 20th century is often understood in terms of singular, remarkable events and politically-prominent (often male) protagonists; archaeology offers a new lens on this critical moment in US history. Artifacts and archives associated with African American women, often called “Race Women” by their contemporaries, engaged in the struggle for equal rights reveal how the demands of daily life both reflected and shaped their efforts. The two archaeological sites at the center of this book—one institutional and one family-owned, one in Chicago and one in the Piedmont of North Carolina—represent households run by and occupied by women, allowing a focus on their specific perspectives and experiences. Their full citizenship undermined by prevailing racial and gender ideologies, Race Women—collectively and individually—sought to create a society that acknowledged their humanity. I use archival and archaeological evidence from the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls and the Pauli Murray Family Home to explore the circumstances that prompted their activism, as well as the day-to-day actions that Race Women took to remake America.

Anna Agbe-Davies is an archaeologist of the historical and contemporary past with research interests ranging from the 17th through the 21st centuries. Agbe-Davies's first book, To***co, Pipes, and Race: Little Tubes of Mighty Power, examines craft production on plantations and the origins of racialized slavery in 17th-century Virginia. Her current book project examines self-fashioning and rights work at two sites associated with Black women: The Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls in Chicago and the Pauli Murray Family home in Durham, NC. She is interested in how meaning is made in the past and in the present—and what we do with the past in the present. She spends a lot of time thinking about what we're doing when we do archaeology.

04/07/2026

JOIN US and the Program in Science and Technology Studies for a Brown Bag Talk “Disability Worlds in the Shadow of Ableism” with Faye Ginsburg, Kriser Professor of Anthropology at New York University, Co-director of the Center for Disability Studies, on Friday, April 10, at 12:00pm in Sewall 570 and Zoom.

Click the link to register for the Zoom meeting: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/0tBPhM_IS2CN0fGhFazzqQ #/registration

This talk chronicles and theorizes the histories and everyday practices of disability arts activists in NYC over a decade, exploring projects created by people with diverse bodyminds who are producing new cultural imaginaries centered on disability experiences and aesthetics. Working across a dizzying array of genres, they reframe the very concept of artistry itself. The research for Living Otherwise preceded and coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic when many activities shifted online, creating unexpected challenges and opportunities in the disability arts world, offering unanticipated resources, and models for “living otherwise.” This vibrant aspect of New York’s “disability world” is now at risk, given the extreme ableism that characterizes the Trump regime; at the same time, disabled artists have been at the forefront of the resistance to efforts to undermine their creative and world-changing work.

Faye Ginsburg is David Kriser Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She is cofounder of the NYU Center for Disability Studies and the Center for Media, Culture & History. She is author of Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community, coauthor of Disability Worlds (2024) and co-editor of How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (2025), along with other books.

* Sponsored by Program in Science and Technology Studies.

04/06/2026

Published!

Our Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Anthropology, Dr. Ilana Gershon, co-authored "Living Under Contract: An LPE Analysis of American Democracy," with Amy J. Cohen, published in The University of Chicago Law Review (Vol. 93, Issue 2).

Read the article here: https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/living-under-contract-lpe-analysis-american-democracy

04/03/2026

In our graduate course, "Anthropological Directions: from the Second World War to the Present," taught by Professor Cymene Howe, we had an outdoor class to discuss Tim Ingold's book chapter "To journey along a way of life: Maps, wayfinding and navigation." Our class walked around the campus to understand the reading experientially, joined by Professor Howe's lovely puppy.

03/31/2026

The Ethnographic Design Co. Lab at Rice University closed the semester with a screening of Daughter of the Light, welcoming its award-winning Tibetan filmmaker, Khashem Gyal, for an evening that drew nearly 80 attendees.

A conversation with Professors Cymene Howe and Huatse Gyal followed, rounding out a memorable night of film and dialogue.

03/31/2026

We had a fun and inspiring Ethnographic Design Co.Lab workshop with our professors, Cymene Howe and Vivian Lu, where we got hands-on crafting collages.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the EDC workshop.

03/25/2026

Our professors Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer joined the panel "Storytelling in a Time of Transition" at this year's South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin.

Together with filmmaker Sara Dosa and UT Austin associate professor Craig Campbell, they explored how researchers and filmmakers can turn complex environmental change into stories that connect with audiences.

Read the full article here: https://news.rice.edu/news/2026/climate-storytelling-ai-innovation-rice-researchers-take-global-challenges-sxsw

03/25/2026

JOIN US for the last two Ethnographic Co.Lab workshops of the semester.

The first event is a collage workshop co-led by our own Professor Vivian Lu and Cymene Howe.

On the same evening, we invite Tibetan filmmaker Khashem Gyal to screen his award-winning film Daughter of the Light at Rice Cinema. The screening will run from 6-8 pm, with a reception and light refreshments at 5:30 pm.

Register via QR code.

03/24/2026

Our undergraduate student Max Scholl is featured in Rice News for building a space for critical thinking beyond the classroom. As co-founder of the Rice Critical Humanities Collective (RCHC), he brings students together across disciplines to engage questions of culture, politics, and knowledge.

Read the full article here:

Through research, national collaborations and a student-led collective, English and anthropology major Max Scholl is creating space for critical conversations on campus.