Please note that this information is sorely out of date and will be updated at soonest possible time.

Honor Seminars Coming Up:

The Geography of Bliss
Eric Weine

Time and Location: TBA

Eric Weiner has traveled to the places that surveys show are the happiest on earth to see what makes these people happy. His book, The Geography of Bliss, is the memoir of those travels and it describes an extraordinary take on happiness and the cultural factors that nurture happiness. His presentation will journey from America to Iceland to India, asking why Asheville, North Carolina is so happy? Are people in Switzerland happier because is the most democratic country in the world? Does Bhutan's official tracking of it Gross National Happiness help to make them happier? His answers are drawn from his own personal discoveries about himself, the insights of classical thinkers on happiness, and analysis of the world's most contented cultures. He provides surprising insights into why and how place matters in our search for happiness.
  
Eric Wiener is a veteran foreign correspondent who has worked on several award-winning teams for National Public Radio and been a business reporter for The New York Times. He has been posted to New Delhi, Jerusalem and Tokyo and, more recently, was a correspondent for NPR's mid-day magazine show, Day to Day. He currently writes content for NPR's website. Weiner is the author of The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World, a memoir of his travels to countries that are known for their happy people. Weiner is the winner of the Angel Award, a co-recipient of an Oversees Press Club special citation, and a co-recipient of the Peabody award. His commentaries have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Slate and The New Republic.



Archaeological Evidence for the Origins of Affluence
Dr. Michael Galaty

Time and Location: TBA

The archaeological origins of affluence can be traced to the Neolithic ("New Stone") Age, the period (beginning circa 6000 BC) during which human beings the world over domesticated plants and animals. The transition to agriculture and settled village life may have been adaptations to changes in the environment, but changes in prehistoric social life may be implicated as well. It was also during the Neolithic that our ancestors first created systems of social stratification. These new social hierarchies depended on differential control of surplus goods, land, specialized economies, and trade. If today affluence seems paradoxical, the original paradox is that humans gave up hunting and gathering at all. Settled farmers worked harder and were less healthy than their hunter-gatherer forebears and neighbors. In this seminar, we will investigate and discuss the first paradox of affluence: why did humans leave millions of years of egalitarian social relations behind?


Dr. Michael Galaty received a B.A. with honors in Anthropology from Grinnell College and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology-Anthropology and has been at Millsaps College since 1999. His areas of interest include the archaeology of complex societies and state formation, as well as the analytical analysis of ceramics. He has conducted archaeological research in Mississippi and Virginia, as well as in the European nations of Greece, Hungary, and Albania. Since 2004, he has directed the Shala Valley Project, which studies the archaeology and history of the territory of the Shala tribe in the northern Albanian high mountains, including their practices of warfare and feud. The Shala Valley Project is supported by major grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Galaty has published several books, on Mycenaean pottery, Mycenaean palaces, and the practice of archaeology under dictatorship. He was the 2003 winner of the Millsaps College Outstanding Young Faculty Award.