The Anthropology Colloquia with Vikram Tamboli, UCA. Seeds of Power: Poisoning, Ritual Dance, and Afro-Indigenous Knowledge in the Americas

The Anthropology Colloquia will host Vikram Tamboli,  University of California, Los Angeles on October 27.

Tamboli will give a talk called “Seeds of Power: Healing and Harming, Ritual Dance, and Poisoning in the Americas,” which has focused on (Guyanese) seed rattles worn around the ankles.

"Seeds of Power restrings the frayed history and geography of an obscure technology—Thevetia ankle rattles and girdles made of toxic seeds—that Afro-Indigenous peoples used in a variety of ceremonial dances from Amazonia to Mesoamerica. Starting in the sixteenth century, partial knowledge and material evidence of these seeds and rattles circulated through accounts of travelers and explorers, early modern herbals, and cabinets of curiosity and, by the nineteenth century, reached museum and herbarium collections across the globe. The story of these Thevetia seed rattles emerged through my research on the Afro-Indigenous politics of assault in the Guianas for my book manuscript “Black Powers and Bush Work: A History of Trafficking Ideas in Amazonia and the Caribbean, 1722—2022."

Vikram Tamboli has been conducting a research at the Penn Museum, as well as the Smithsonian, APS, etc. focusing on early modern American medical and botanical knowledge as it intersects with Indigenous ritual practice, and with the seeds as emblematic of Afro-Indigenous knowledge-scapes. He has also been interested in the rattles that were collected, the traffickers and collectors, and object itineraries.

Event Co-sponsored by CLALS