Campus News

Noted anthropologist to speak on University of Georgia campus in March

Noted anthropologist to speak on University of Georgia campus in March

Athens, Ga. – J. Stephen Lansing, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona with a joint appointment in ecology and evolutionary biology, will deliver a lecture and show a new film he directed during a visit to the University of Georgia campus March 15-16.

Lansing, also a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, will screen his film Voyagers on the Ring of Fire at 5 p.m. on Monday, March 15, in Room N106 of the Instructional Plaza located on the lower level between the psychology and journalism buildings.

He will deliver a lecture the next day, March 16, at 4:30 p.m. in the same venue. His talk is entitled “Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali.”

Both events are free and open to the public.

Voyagers on the Ring of Fire, which was released in 2009, is a 47-minute anthropological film about genes, languages and the Austronesian expansion. Produced for the National Science Foundation, the film was directed by Lansing.

In addition to his other duties, Lansing is also director of Yayasan Somia Pretiwi, an Indonesian foundation promoting collaborative research on environmental problems in the tropics.

He has been a Fulbright Fellow, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a lecturer at Udayana University and a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Lansing is the author of Evil in the Morning of the World: Phenomenological Approaches to a Balinese Community; The Three Worlds of Bali, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali;The Balinese and Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali. His documentary films include The Three Worlds of Bali, The Goddess and the Computer and a segment of The Sacred Balance.

Lansing’s visit is sponsored by the department of anthropology in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. For more information, call 706/542-3922.