"Westernization among Amerindian: The Bari People of Venezuela"
By: Manuel Lizzaralde
This lecture is FREE and open to the public. This lecture 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 enviornment, including the types of areas they inhabit and their use of plants (ethnobotany). Because the indigenous knowledge of local plants is very rich, and all of these cultures are rapidly changing, 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 the indigenous populations have disappeared along with them. Manuel poses such complicated issues to his students, drawing from his background in botany, geography an anthropology. He currently teaches classes on ethnobotany and on ecological anthropology at Connecticut College.
