Special Lecture “Odors, ontologies, and the age of Covid: Ethnobotany for the 21st Century”

Please join us for a Special co-sponsored event by TCD and UF Ethnogarden

“Odors, Ontologies, and the Age of COVID: Ethnobotany for the 21^st Century”

By Dr. Glenn H. Shepard Jr., Goeldi Museum, Brazil

Thursday, March 9th, 4:00 – 5:15 PM

McCARTY HALL B, Room 2102

Odors represent an important but little studied aspect of indigenous understandings of health, illness, sexual attraction and ecological and cosmological interactions. I will present an overview of my ongoing research into olfactory categories and ideologies in the Amazon and show how they remain relevant in the age of Covid and climate change.

Glenn H. Shepard Jr. was raised in the Tidewater area of Virginia, attended Princeton University, and received his doctorate in Medical Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. He is an ethnobotanist, medical anthropologist, and filmmaker with more than thirty years of field experience in the Amazon. He has published over 130 research articles and participated in the production of several films, including the Emmy Award-winning documentary, Spirits of the Rainforest. His research, photography and writing has gained visibility in magazines like National Geographic, The New Yorker, Financial Times and The New York Review of Books. He is currently a staff researcher in the Human Sciences Division at the Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he helped curate a recent online exhibit about Kayapó filmmakers (https://archaeology.columbia.edu/kayapovideowarriors/). He blogs at “Notes from the Ethnoground” (ethnoground.blogspot.com).