"Westernization among Amerindian: The Bari People of Venezuela"
By: Manuel Lizzaralde
This lecture is FREE and open to the public. It will be held in room 103, first floor of the Marine Sciences Building. For directions/campus map, please visit: http://www.averypoint.uconn.edu/about/directions.html
Manuel grapples with questions of people and the environment on a daily basis in his teaching and research. A native of Venezuela, Manuel has focused much of his work on the relation of indigenous Latin Americans to the environment, including the types of areas they inhabit and their use of plants (enthobotany). Because the indigenous knowledge of local plants is very rich, all of these culture are rapidly changing and the information is being lost. As development increases, sweeping changes come to peoples and ecosystems that have remained intact for thousands of years. Half of the world's rainforests have been destroyed in recent times, and indigenous population shave disappeared along with them. Manuel poses such complicated issues to his students, drawing from his background in botany, geography and anthropology. Manuel teaches classes on ethnobotany and ecological anthropology at Connecticut College.
