Anthropologist Jessica Cattelino will give the 53rd annual Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture, “The Cultural Politics of Water in the Everglades and Beyond,” which explores the human story of the ongoing Everglades restoration project that began over a half-century ago.
“Getting the Water Right” is the motto of Everglades Restoration, which is among the world’s largest and costliest ecosystem restoration projects. In Florida and globally, getting the water right is as much a social and cultural project as it is scientific or political, Cattelino says.
Cattelino, associate professor of anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles, uses ethnographic research in the Everglades to examine the cultural politics of water, and the ways that Everglades residents—including Seminole Indians and non-Seminole farmers and ranchers, water managers, and environmentalists—value water.
Cattelino considers the distinctive forms that nature takes in settler colonial societies like the United States. She suggests that is only by doing so that we can “get the water right” in the Everglades and beyond.
The Oct. 14 lecture will be held at 7 p.m. in Lander Auditorium of Hutchison Hall on the University’s River Campus. The talk is free and open to the public.
Cattelino received her Ph.D. from New York University. Her book, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, 2008), was awarded the Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of North America.
The Morgan Lecture Series honors the memory of Lewis Henry Morgan, the distinguished 19th-century anthropologist and University of Rochester benefactor. The lecture has been presented annually since 1963. It is one of the oldest and most prestigious lecture series in anthropology in North America. Duke University Press will publish a book based on Cattelino’s lecture.
