Sherry Ortner, professor of anthropology at Columbia University will speak at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Saturday, Dec. 8, on her recent work examining social categories in American high schools.
Sponsored by the CU-Boulder anthropology department, the 2001 Distinguished Cultural Anthropologist Lecture will be held at 6 p.m. in room 270 of the Hale Science Building. The free public event will conclude with an opportunity for questions and commentary.
Ortner's lecture, titled "Burned Like a Tattoo: High School Prestige Categories and 'American Culture,' " will focus on high school social categories such as "popular kids," "jocks," "nerds," "hoods," etc. These categories have been around in most U.S. public high schools in most parts of the country since at least the 1940s, she said.
Ortner will explore factors that continue to foster such stereotypes. She will show that there is an underlying "grammar" to these categories, one that resonates strongly with some of the most fundamental assumptions of "American" culture.
Ortner has done extensive fieldwork with the Sherpas of Nepal on their religion, politics and involvement in Himalayan mountaineering. Ortner's lecture on Saturday focuses on her most recent project on the meanings and workings of "class" in the United States - for which she used her own high school graduating class and her grown children as ethnographic subjects.
Ortner is the author of a number of books on anthropology. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was recently awarded the Retzius Medal of the Society of Anthropology and Geography of Sweden.
Co-sponsors of the lecture include the CU Developing Areas Research and Teaching program or DART and the CU Center for Humanities and the Arts.