Good evening
And so here we are
When one's heart is full one's mind often isn't so I hope you'll forgive me if I read this next part
It's my privilege this evening to introduce the president of our American Anthropological Association dr. Elyse, Waterston
Dr.. Waterston is the author of six books and more than seventy articles as well as innumerable professional presentations and scholarly reports
She served as editor of North American dialogues in this founding editor of open anthropology
As well as serving on the editorial boards of numerous prestigious journals
Her work focuses on the processes and aftermath of political violence
ethnic and religious conflict
displacement and transnationalism and
processes of remembering on
diaspora cultural trauma and identity formation
And issues of enormous importance as we struggle in a world marked by the lengthening shadows of war and other forms of violence
Dr. Waterston's received many awards for a scholarship and her service including the president's award from the triple a Book of the Year award from
the International Congress of qualitative inquiry
And she will shortly be receiving an award from the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus. I hope that wasn't a secret
Career service to triple-a includes
But is certainly not limited to serving his executive program committee chair for the hundred and fourth meeting
chair of the Committee on the future of print and electronic publishing the anthropological communications committee and the strategic planning committee
The working group on israel-palestine and as a member of the Executive Board as vice president president-elect
And then as president of the American Anthropological
Association
but it impressive as all of this is and
It is very impressive
This enviable and incomplete list of accomplishments captures only part of what makes Elise so dear to all of us
It doesn't capture her heart
Her fierce loyalty and her compassion
For indefatigable spirit and her concern for others as individuals a deep humanity and empathy that informs everything she does
It has been my pleasure working with her and learning from her over the past few years
And I look forward to learning more from her this afternoon
While it is a very great privilege to introduce her it is not a privilege to succeed her in this role as she's an impossible
act to follow
Ladies and gentlemen. Please welcome dr. Elise waters
Well
Thank you very much Alex. I mean I
Didn't really want to have tears mess up my makeup, but okay. Thanks a lot
And thank you all for being here. It's a
my pleasure my true pleasure and
Before I get started with my talk. I'd like to
Extend a few thanks
first to all of you to the membership of the Association for entrusting me with this great responsibility and
It has been as I've been saying all week an incredible experience it's a hard work
it takes a lot of time and energy, but it is so worth it because
for many reasons but
Including that it is serving in these leadership roles at the Association
Provides us an opportunity to really make a difference as corny as that might sound
and also because of the relationships that I have been able to
The people I've been able to meet and then the relationships that I've been able to form
An enormous ly close bonds that will remain, so thank you to you the membership
I also would like to briefly. Thank my colleagues and
administrators at John Jay College of Criminal Justice
because
My colleagues have been very patient as I've been a little bit distracted I
Think some of them are here tonight is atiba here atiba who share there. You are and
Students, Brenda Connor Sofia Giselle and Manuel all came from New York to to this for this evening
and thank you so much, and I am I administrators because
You know they provided me the space to be able to do the work that I wanted to do here
And they appreciated the value of this kind of important leadership role
So I'm grateful to them I also want to thank all of the volunteers
that make up the triple-a in so many different capacities and
Triple a staff which I've been saying every opportunity. I have this week to say
Thank you to every each and every staff member
led by our in
Amazing idli bow so I'd like to actually clap for this staff
Thank you and finally I want to think I feel does feel a little bit like the Academy Awards
I promise I will go to a
presentation my family
And who?
May tell you this evening that they've heard enough about Triple A
You know they've appreciated it, but I appreciate all of them. Who are here tonight also
Who are my they are my rocks and especially now?
I'm going to get teary my husband Howard who is so patient
I can't you know he does deserve a medal and thank you how I love you
okay, so now I
Will begin I
Take the opportunity of this talk
to reflect on this moment of being in
Anthropology by which I mean that I as an anthropologist
thinking about our discipline and
standing without
fixity pressed against the world
will in this address
look to lift the protective cotton wool to peek at some real things the
Old-fashioned imagery
I invoke of the cotton wool is purposeful it comes from Virginia Woolf in the book of her
autobiographical writings titled
moments of being I
Choose to start with Virginia Woolf because her work was an influence
Helping bring me to anthropology in the first place
More than that to invoke
Ancestors from any discipline is to claim their relevance to our own and thus
encouraged the widened and widening view that often loses out to rigidity and
comfortable insularity of the silo
Moments of being our experiences on a purely sensual level the meaning unfolds after the experience
for wolf a moment of being comes with a shock a
Sledgehammer blow it is followed by the need to explain it
Understanding comes thereafter. It is or will become a revelation to
Speak of revelation in the profane sense of disclosure or illumination
Bringing something to light out of darkness
Might go without saying so central is it to our discipline as to the arts and philosophy
For a moment I'd like to stick with the darkness
No doubt these are dark times as
Sherry Ortner has noted the dark times have brought on what she calls dark anthropology that
focuses on the harsh dimensions of social life
How could it not? How could we not?
My own work testifies to that focus
Perhaps it's simply that I came of age in anthropology during the 1980s in midtown Manhattan at the CUNY Graduate Center. I
Don't think that's it
rather it's the dark times themselves the disorder and the hunger the
massacres and the slaughterers the political catastrophes and moral disasters
that bring outrage and
Sometimes despair and that beg to be identified
studied
revealed and
understood
Even as the times they are a-changin the dark times in the broadest sense are not new as Hannah Arendt
observed
Darkness comes Arendt argued when light is extinguished and
Light is extinguished by the cover-ups
the cotton-wool of
purposeful
office keishon and
pointless trivia that make it almost impossible
For people to see what is going on
She observed and I quote
When we think of dark times and a people living and moving in them we have to take this camouflage
emanating from and spread by the
establishment or the system into account
Nothing of this is new either a wrench remarked over a half-century ago. I
came to
anthropology to help me understand the dark times in New York that I began observing as a Brooklyn schoolteacher in the
1970s
the subjective
experiences of the long dark times of poverty in America were never only
about depression and hopelessness
Though that was there, too
But about the human capacity to adopt
adapt create
craft
connect
suffer
sometimes Sarat survive and sometimes not
Amidst the conditions of a world that limits the opportunities for some
while enhancing them for others I
Did not understand what I was seeing
until anthropology showed me that looking is not necessarily seeing and
seeing is not necessarily perceiving and
perceiving as
understanding as
illumination is a central goal of the discipline even if we fall short in reaching it I
Also learned that our
discipline at different points in its history is
Implicated in the long dark times which behooves us to be consistently vigilant
Attentive to the privileges we may enjoy end
May look to conceal
From my vantage point the present-day world is hemorrhaging from
ubiquitous war
poverty economic and resource inequality economic collapses
environmental crisis power abuses and other forms of brutality and dehumanization
including the pathologies of xenophobia racism and sexism
The mass of humanity is managed contained and controlled by means of economic and ideological
dominance and
Which is or can be enforced by violent means such as war pre-emptive or otherwise
imprisonment and
outright
displacement of people from their homes
If these observations are true, and I think they are this is morally corrupt
inhumane and
Unsustainable a condition that has the potential to overwhelm the world
Even as human beings everywhere
manage within the interstate sty seas to engage what Ortner describes as
everyday projects of care and love even happiness
Demonstrating the remarkable resilience of some kind of life force or energy
All this adds up to
serious responsibilities for the anthropologist
to be introspective
to think in dark times
to avoid the trivial and
to participate in envisioning an alternative world
It gay engaging these activities without
exaggerated
self-importance
These responsibilities comprise the four storeys of my title let me explain
The writer and critic Vivian Gornick has a compact book on writing titled the situation and the story
Gornick explains the distinction between these twin aspects of a narrative
The situation is the context or circumstance sometimes the plot?
The story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer
the insight
The wisdom the thing one has come to say in
the remainder of this talk
The situation's I depict
are inspired by texts
particularly those produced by Hannah Arendt or by others about her work and
They are rooted in my own work and experiences in anthropology including as triple a president
by means of these situations, I will attempt to unravel some meanings of being introspective of
thinking of
the trivial and of envisioning
Warnock's stories the things I have come to say to this audience of
anthropologists in these times
In Hannah Arendt's men in dark times she plots the life careers of various poets and
political philosophers amidst terrible violence's
Bertolt Brecht's intellectual and political
biography is at the center of a Rentz book which borrows its famous title from the
dramatists poem to posterity
As a rent explains the poem is about those who live in dark times, which is Breck's phrase who ate
between battles and slept among murderers
Where speech betrayed them to the slaughterer and led those who remained to offer an urgent plea?
remember us with forbearance a
Rent does remember Brecht with forbearance though
She also acknowledges his particular lapses in judgment
What sets Brecht apart from the others? She argues is his conch and?
admission of the absurdity and decadence of personal progress and ambition
Alongside the suffering of others
The situation is Breck's germany of the 1930s and Arendt describes the poets acuity
He realized how deadly ridiculous it would be to measure the flood of events with the yardstick of individual aspirations
to meet for instance the international catastrophe of unemployment with a desire to make a career and
with reflections of one's own success and failure or
To confront the catastrophe of war with the ideal of a well-rounded
Personality or to go into exile with complaints about lost fame or a broken up life
What of us then as
Anthropologists in these times how will we pass the time that has given us on earth?
These are questions more basic prior to the ones about reflexivity
Which are about the politics and poetics of representation that?
anthropologists in good conscience must confront
Such as the anthropologists right ability and reasons for speaking on behalf of others
The basic questions, I posed are more akin to issues raised by
anthropologist Faye Harrison and
Others of the decolonizing generation, but still they come prior to confrontations with assumptions
underlying anthropology's key concepts and methodologies
That is because the person must first must begin first by confronting their own
motivations beliefs
prejudices and commitments before moving into the realm of the vocation of anthropology and
the disciplines imperfections
Operating in the world as it exists
not as she may want it to be the person who becomes an anthropologist must come to terms with the
Contradictions that she will inevitably face
considering we are here in this world and at this time as
intellectuals affiliated with academic or other equivalent institutions and
Considering our roles and responsibilities in them we must recognize that we are all
liberal subjects who operate within the logics of the larger system
Whether it is comfortable to admit or not this means that certain of our actions and activities
contribute to the production and
reproduction of the status quo
However, radical we may think ourselves to be in our workaday activities. We are
reformists not revolutionaries
Some may consider this an accusation or condemnation
It is not it is simply a call to acknowledge in the first instance that no one is outside
the absurdity of
Individual aspiration as long as they are living in this world
Those who are comfortably settled into
Aspirational goals only must come to see the decadence
Those who imagine they are outside the absurdity must own up to the advantages they enjoy from it
the story here is the unmasking of
self-delusion
Necessary to the act of becoming an anthropologist who is honest
We will still make mistakes
But with the honesty that comes with introspection we are more likely to be remembered with forbearance
The political scientist Roger Berkowitz
Explains that a Reince notion of the darkness is that which is hidden in plain sight?
There are the tragedies to which Brecht refers in to posterity?
written on the eve of the Second World War in 1939
and those that came after including genocide the purges and war war a
Rents concerned with catastrophes and their human toll
Tended to focus on how these could come to be in the first place and she held the conviction that by understanding
This which is necessary but insufficient knowledge?
The will to resist
Might be perfected
All the terrible things the hunger
massacres
slaughterers were real enough Arendt observed and took place in public
There was nothing secret or mysterious about it, although not easy to perceive
thus a
central question follows how can Horrors appear in public discourse and yet remain hidden a
Rent offers this explanation. It was covered up not by realities
But by the highly efficient talk and double-talk of nearly all official representatives who?
without interruption and in many ingenious
variations
explained away
Unpleasant facts and justified concerns, and that's a quote from a rent
The realities are out there
But light is required to see them
The basic physics of light applies equally well to the metaphor here
Without light there is no seeing
This leads to the next question, which is centered on the processes required for illuminating aspects of reality?
for a rent the key process is
thinking
About which she offers the deep of reflections the deepest of thinking with
implications for philosophy history and politics
She identified the absence of thinking to show the dangers of its lack for example
She insisted that Edith a Sherman's most notable characteristic was his thought Liss miss
Her great tome the life of the mind unfinished and published posthumously
begins with an epigraph quoting Heidegger on what thinking does not do and
She insisted that thinking is not reasoning, which makes sense as Berkowitz explains
Reason reasons it does not think
the normalization of terror and torture
Shows how ordinary men can reason themselves into justifying. What ought to be unthinkable unthinkable
to assert faith in reason in the face of its rampant violation is to ignore the facts of our times a
Person thinks by means of a soundless
solitary
internal dialogue
Whereby he examines what he says and what he does
something akin to conscience a silent intercourse that
some people never initiate a
Rent observed that the inability to think is an ever-present possibility for everybody
anthropologists included it is not enough for
Anthropologists to be social critics though that role is essential to exposing the realities that are hidden in plain sight
it
May even be that the ability to create critique is more likely to be found among thinkers though not
Necessarily it may also be that the central method of anthropology is
Helpful in facilitating the process of thinking in contrast to hurried
purposeful activity the slow pace of
participant observation
Gives chance for things to reveal themselves in their secret meaning again those
Experiences at the sensual level the meanings of which unfold later
For a rent
Thinking always has the potential to be politically relevant as she remarked it was for herself
Whenever I transcend the limits of my own lifespan and begin to reflect on this past
Judging it and this future forming projects of the will
Thinking ceases to be a politically marginal activity
The story here is that the anthropologists responsibility to illuminate
requires thinking in dark times and
Thinking in dark times requires the anthropologist to grapple with his own conscience to refuse
loyalty to any
Rigid ideology doctrine or dogma and to find new ways to make sense out of the situation
It is then he may offer something creative to the world
In a powerful essay titled a lying world order deception and the rhetoric of terror
Philosopher peg Birmingham details a rents engagement with the problem of deception
Which opens the door to the possibility of a lying world order and even the threat of?
totalitarianism
There are falsehoods and errors that are not truth, but they are also not lies
There are truths of reason a square has four sides for example
And there are factual truths that that the latter Arendt argues is
Contingent that is the unfolding of reality is not inevitable
two dangers lurk lurk around the political facts of lying and truth
One is the danger of conflating opinion with truth?
Birmingham
the best way to destroy
Factual truths is to reduce them to so many opinions, which can then be easily dismissed as just another opinion
Open to dispute contest and interpretation
The logical extension of this date danger is pervasive. I have seen it in my classroom sometimes an interpersonal
conversation and of course on the national political scene with the blatantly truth and
trust-busting absurdity of
alternative facts
The second is what Birmingham calls
radical
Deception which goes beyond the deliberate lie to in Arendt words and a new variation
To the old art of lying that of lying the truth the deliberate conversion of a lie
Into a reality
both Arendt and Birmingham offers examples
From a rent the Nazis destroyed Germany to show they were right
When they said the German people were fighting for it's very existence
Which was at the outside outset a pure lie?
They instituted chaos in order to show that they were right when they said
That Europe had only the alternative between Nazi rule and chaos
from Birmingham the George W Bush
Administration's claimed that al-qaeda is operating out of Iraq which at the outside
Outset was a lie used to justify the invasion of Iraq, but now because of the war is a true statement
There is more
for a rent the blanketing of public space with pointless trivia is
Purposeful political deception
Originating with and spread by the system as she put it because it camouflages
Trivia functions like a lie because it hides something by pretence affectation or exaggeration
It is not necessarily equivalent to the deliberate lie or the political lie
And it is not radical deception
but nevertheless it shares with those forms of lying the result which is distortion and
Distortion makes it difficult to distinguish between truth and a lie
Since
Anthropologists are not separate and apart from the system, but are deeply embedded in it
The story here is that we have a responsibility
to avoid
producing and
disseminating trivia
This responsibility is sometimes easier said than done
Given that anthropologists are trained in and taught to celebrate a particular canon some parts of which may not be as
significant as all that and
Which makes it difficult for other perhaps more important voices to rise out of obscurity?
Then there are the pressures to prove one's worth which for those in the academy today
sometimes means dismissing others to demonstrate one's originality and
generally means producing more material not necessarily better knowledge
There is also the challenge of sorting through the clutter of one's research to pull out
What is significant and knowing why it is so I?
Trust I'm not alone in struggling with these issues or being disturbed by what sometimes seem like Pro funk turi
Exercises that yield the obvious or simply empty
abstraction
So what is it? We need to know in these dark times for me as for many anthropologists
It is to understand the driving forces behind the horror
the moving parts of power and it's relevant elements and which
Strategic projects of the will need to be formed to oppose it
By means of historical political economy and the comparative approach
Anthropology offers a way towards that understanding though without guarantee we'll get it right
for as long as the world keeps going ours is a
constant and persistent challenge to connect those parts of the past that are
responsible for shaping the present and to expose power by means of evidence
argument and narrative no trivial task
It is no accident that I invoke Hannah Arendt at this moment and in this country still the most powerful nation in the world I
Am NOT alone in turning to a rent for guidance in these dark times
Sales of her books are reported to have skyrocketed in the United States since the November 2016 election
reflecting worries about the slippery slope of ideological racism mass incarceration
the denial of reality
Lying the truth alongside attacks on the media the ever-present ever-growing militarism the hyper
nationalism and the
enforced oblivion of over 65 million refugees
Arendt scholarship on power was centered on its political dimensions for her
the power that makes human beings
superfluous
That transforms them into something less than human is by her definition
radical evil which is rooted in particular systems of
course a rent was focused on the system of
totalitarianism and its manifestation in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union
Arendt also wrote about human attachment as a form of fraternity or
recognition of a common humanity
From her standpoint Arendt observed that quote
Humanity
Manifests itself in such Brotherhood most frequently in dark times it appears
historically among persecuted peoples and
enslaved groups
Thus human attachment is not a natural affinity
But for her it is the great privilege of pariah people's the outsiders
She had no faith in enlightenment ideals
Which to her look like reckless optimism, and this is a quote in the light of present real realities
even so a
rent never fell into melancholy and saw a possibility in what she called a
process of mutual understanding
on a
gigantic scale a
Rent might not have joined the these strands of her philosophies in a single paragraph, which is what I did I
do
Because I recognized that put together they connect with those
anthropological projects that identify the material substructure of any political economic system that
exacerbates inequalities
Render some human humans redundant or superfluous and turns certain groups into pariahs
Anthropologists may not be of the Paria peoples, but by way of the holistic study of humankind
or by means of participant observation
Or by sensibility many are drawn to those who have been displaced and dispossessed
Despised and dehumanized a starting point for a multitude of projects that comprise a rich
store of anthropological knowledge
produced by
anthropologists from all over the world about humanity
anywhere and everywhere
It is from within that collective body of knowledge
We can offer
illumination to the world
It contains the specificities across geopolitical space and over time that
precludes the premature coming to broad
generalizations that Arendt warned against it contains the details that allow us to
identify
patterns
similarities
analogies and
Precedents so that we may be alert
To the direction in which the world may be heading without jumping to mistaken conclusions
It contains the raw material for a process of mutual understanding on a grand scale
That's the story
On the last pages of the book upside down a primer for the looking-glass world
the writer Eduardo galeano dares readers to exercise the right to dream
suppose we rave a bit he writes and offers a long list of possibilities for an alternative world a
Student introduced me to this book bringing it to class one day and asking if we could also rave a bit
We did writing down our ideas for this world and for a livable future
Placing them on scraps of paper and put in a jar and placing them in a jar
One by one we lifted the slips of paper reading aloud one another's vision each
was generous
creative and thoughtful a small but perhaps
necessary step in helping all of humankind move past the horrors and
towards
universal liberation as
anthropologist Roger Lancaster recently described what the world needs now I
Will recite excerpts from Bertolt Brecht's poem to posterity
Truly I live in dark times he who laughs has not yet received the terrible news
Nothing that I do
Entitles me to eat my fill by chance
I was spared they tell me eat and drink be glad you have it
but how can I eat and drink when my food is next from the hungry and my glass of water belongs to the thirsty and
Yet, I eat and drink I
came into the cities in a time of disorder as
Hunger reigned I came among men in a time of turmoil and I rose up with them and so passed the time
Given to me on earth
You who shall emerge from the flood in which we are sinking
Think when you speak of our weaknesses also of the dark time that brought them forth
For we went
Changing our country more often than our shoes in the class war
despairing when there was only
Injustice and no resistance for we knew only too well
Even the hatred of squalor makes the brow grow Stern even anger against injustice
makes the voice grow harsh
alas we who wished to
Lay the foundation of kindness could not ourselves be kind
This whole essay my address here tonight is a song of sorrow a lament
For human suffering and for my sense of impotence in the face of it though, I know the suffering is preventable
Prior to my coming to anthropology into my very first project
I had an incipient understanding of the darkness and the feeling that my personal good fortune was fortuitous
Nothing that. I do entitles me to eat my fill by chance. I was spared I
Was drawn to study Outsiders to stigmatize the poor and homeless and turned to anthropology for explanation
My guide outwards towards the worldly shape of events
Over the years and several projects my understanding has deepened it has enabled me to embrace our disciplines
holistic orientation
appreciate that knowledge moves forward by challenging convention and commit to engaged scholarship on multiple levels and
affirmation of the value of our discipline I
Have studied the urban poor their love sorrow and rage
I have situated their experiences in larger political economy
and I have crafted narratives designed to communicate to the larger public a
goal that has motivated my work on writing anthropology I
Hope my work informs a vision for a more just future that includes shifting resources
down the steep grade of inequality as Paul Farmer puts it from where there is too much to where there is too little a
Principle I applied in my most recent project in the Republic of Georgia
all this my life, and my work came full circle with intimate ethnography a
project that starts with the personal for clues to a broader history I
took a professional risk by centering my own father who was charming and funny and also wounded and difficult as
Subject of my father's Wars an anthropological work I did so to help unravel
the complexities of a history marked by violence and to show in the most intimate of detail
the painful consequences
for an ordinary
unfamous man and by implication any person in any place thus affected
Like a rent and Brecht my father was born into war and lived his life
across a violent century
changing countries more often than his shoes the
meanings of my father's memories
His moments of being that sometimes came like a shock
Unfolded after the experience which I then crafted into a narrative
By means of this project I came to realize how my father's story shaped my sensibility and to recognize
That his sorrows
became my sorrows his losses my motivation to understand him and
understand them
Thus his story is also my own
It brought me sorrow
But also awareness it taught me empathy and drew me towards the displaced and dispossessed
My interest in retelling my father's story and past events
Was not to use memory as a monument but to help inform an ability to assess the present
to recognize the patterns the differences and similarities
The precedents the analogies that's the purpose
eight years ago
anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom wrote the way we explain our today's
creates our tomorrow's as true for people struggling to resist systemic structural violence as for us the
Anthropologists struggling to understand what is going on why and how the violence might be undone?
We now stand amidst the state of a political world order with its crop of right-wing leaders from Trump to heir Dewan
Netanyahu dude or bond and more
How are we to understand our today at the broadest level?
We must face the fact that the sorry state of the world is rooted in the logics of the global capitalist political economy
marked by increasing privatization
marketization and deregulation that maintains
conditions of scarcity and
Insecurity while protecting private concentrated wealth the driving force the crux of the problem
Powerful ideological scripts justify draconian policies and ever-growing
inequalities
the deployments of racist expressions and actions the
strengthening of ethnic nationalisms and the intensification of religious bigotry help manage
discontent
obscure
structural inequality
and contain in relatively controlled settings
Those who are redundant and have been made superfluous
the very definition of a rents
radical evil
What is to be done
from my vantage point at this moment at the close of my term is your triple a president I
Believe there is much. We are already doing and much we can continue to do acting within the interstices to effect
small-scale change I
Also believe it is important to distinguish our roles and capabilities as individuals and as individual
anthropologists from those of the Association
which has clearly defined functions and capacities that can be leveraged if done, so
strategically
Most important we need to see one another as collaborators in
solidarity with common goals
even if we disagree on certain points or tactics in
These dark times it is essential that we stand together
We are well past the debates at least in US anthropology about whether the discipline
individual anthropologists and the largest Association of anthropologists in the world
Should remain aloof from or actively engage in the great issues of our times we are
engaged and actively so
but
We still struggle with a perception that we are not influential enough to shape the course of future social conditions and events
Perhaps it is pure aggrandizement to imagine anthropology has any power to shape the future in any way
but
Believing in our own marginality seems a safe retreat that masks our privileges and to easily
relieves us of
responsibility
the history of the discipline is replete with examples of
anthropological data and methods being central not marginal to social policy and
And as Evan Kirksey recently remarked in a personal conversation
many anthropologists
do contribute to making concrete if
molecular changes to policy against a backdrop of seeming impossibility
Our greatest contribution lies in our collective
ability
to lift the protective cotton wool
To peek at some real things out of which might the will to resist be perfected
We explore
uncover
translate interpret and explain
Thereby making the world visible we write histories in the process of being made
We are at our best when we look
see and
perceive with honesty and in good conscience
avoiding the trivial while working towards the great purpose of mutual understanding
on a gigantic scale
Thank you very much
Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm blown away
Roop ugh
Thank you, thank you so much Alex
So now
before we get to party I
Have the greatest honor and privilege no no she doesn't we aren't going there yet a
Chance Elise has touched their lives for the past many years and touched our hearts tonight and provoked us as
Anthropologist we know that gifts aren't things there are things we set out to other people to establish relationships to maintain them
They go out, and they do things in the world so we have a couple of small gifts for you
And they are very small because they're only a token and an expression of the love we all have for you. Thank you
Thank you, you don't get more traditional
Thank you very much, thank you. Thank you
Should I open it
okay, I mean I'm not used to you know my family can tell you I'm very longer when it comes but
Thank you. Well. I can't read it without my glasses, so you're gonna have to help me a little bit, okay
Presented to Elise Waterston in recognition of her step steadfast commitment to the mission of the American Anthropological
Association and for a distinguished contribution to its programs and services as president
2015 2017 and as president-elect
2013 2015
presented in Washington DC at the 116th annual meeting the second day of December 2017
Triple A Secretary Susan Watts key and executive director Edie Lee Bo
Okay now can I have it you know oh?
That's an institutional gift this is oh thank you so much. I open it
Alright, I will but he's gonna have to help me okay, so let me get my glasses cuz I can't deal with this
Okay, what woo the Ritz Carlton? Oh?
my goodness oh
I get to go to a hotel. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Thank you so very much
That's absolutely lovely with a beautiful card
And
Alex just whispered in my ear thank you you did great, and I know that Alex is going to do great
And it is now my great pleasure to pass the baton to you
The gavel I know it's the gavel
Or the drop ability or devil says okay, and so this ceremony is
Come has come to conclusion. Let's go. Have a good time now
