Organizer: Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Northern Illinois University
Type/Location: Hybrid / DeKalb, IL
Description:
Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University for a talk by Micah Morton, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, who will discuss his book on the Indigenous Akha community’s work to decolonize and reclaim their collective ancestral identity.
Enchanted Modernities tells the story of an Indigenous community’s work to decolonize and reclaim its collective ancestral identity. In this rich, theoretically informed ethnography, Micah F. Morton follows a transregional network of Indigenous Akha people from Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), China, and Laos as they spearhead a new movement for a pan-Akha identity. In the face of enormous historical and present-day colonialist pressures, this neo-traditionalist movement has focused on revitalizing (or “vitalizing,” in Morton’s suggestive term) Akha ancestral ways, preventing ongoing conversion to Christianity, and facilitating return conversion to the ways of the Ancestors. Morton focuses especially on the community’s work to ensure their Ancestors live on and thus remain a dynamic part of their, and their descendants’, lives.
Although modernity and its colonial legacies are often portrayed as severing or at least attenuating people’s ancestral ties, Enchanted Modernities shows that those ties persist and, in fact, are on the rise. Akha and other Indigenous ancestral and animist resurgences are blossoming despite the paradigmatic Western framing of modernity as fundamentally at odds with Ancestors and, for that matter, kinship and even religion. Morton demonstrates that modernity and modernization proceed alongside the reproduction of new and old forms of enchantment.
About the Speaker:
Micah F. Norton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University.
Originally from Philadelphia, Micah Norton is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in political anthropology, ecological anthropology, and religious studies. His work specifically focuses on borders and transnationalism, state-minority relations, social movements, religious and spiritual ecologies, religion and politics, ethnicity and nationalism, and the global Indigenous Peoples' movement.
Geographically, Dr. Norton works in Mainland Southeast Asia and its borderlands with southwest China. His research further examines various dimensions of the sociocultural impacts of China’s rise on Southeast Asia. He has also conducted work at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where Indigenous activists from around the world gather each spring for the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII).
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please register here.
To attend the event online, please register here.