My name is Aubra Klassen, I'm the event manager at Burlington City Arts, and if you haven't heard, there's a total solar eclipse happening next Monday, yay. So we have some merchandise in the back that's all created by the city. Our wonderful designer Ted at Burlington City Arts designed all of it, and it all is going back to refund or like to pay for the events that are happening and all of the public safety and staffing and everything that an eclipse requires, because it turns out there's a lot of people coming here who we need to make sure are happy and safe. But we also have some great events lined up over, starting last week through the weekend, including this series of talks, totality talks. There are three UVM professors, John Perry last week, Luis Vivanco tonight, and Paul Deslands tomorrow, who are all going to talk about different perspectives about eclipses. And so tonight we have Luis Vivanco, who's the professor and chair of the anthropology department at UVM. He's an environmental anthropologist, and he's going to talk to you about the socio-cultural dimensions of eclipses. And I hope you all enjoy and have a great time. Thank you, Abra. And since you were once an anthropology student, your lessons continue tonight. Thanks all for coming out. I'm glad to see my friends and fan club here tonight. And I hope that your effort to brave the weather is rewarded with an enlightening and I hope somewhat entertaining talk. The title, I think, was meant to be somewhat dry because I'm giving the same talk up at UVM with a bunch of astronomers. And I thought, well, they're not going to be happy with my facetious angle on certain kinds of elements of what they do. But I am a cultural anthropologist, and so what you'll get is a dose of how an anthropologist approaches eclipses. And I want to start by reading an edited excerpt that was recently circulating in the anthropology community of a report from a dispatch, if you will, from the field that was once sent to the community of ethnologists that described a solar eclipse, a total solar eclipse that occurred in the territory of the Nassarama. And that followed a path of totality from Nescawin in the west to Avondon in the east. This is the excerpt. The eclipse arrived as a glorious celestial interlude in what had been a period of violent sectarian and interband conflict. Bizarre pronouncements and grotesque abuses by the paramount chief against both his political enemies and his allies. And the menace of a distant enemy threatening to use its much feared weapons of collective annihilation. Drawing on esoteric knowledge and astro-colendrical traditions, oracles who conduct their work in protected sanctuaries of learning had predicted the coming eclipse with remarkable precision. Throughout the land, pilgrims known as shadow seekers set out in search of ecstatic experience in the eclipse's path. And hawkers sold fetishes and exotic looking ocular appurtenances to protect people's vision from the sun's rays. On the appointed day, anxious Nassarama gathered in anticipation of cosmic connection, spiritual revelation, and community renewal. Their expressions ranging from earnest solemnity to jubilatory revelry. So for several hundred years, travelers, explorers, government officials, and ethnologists have produced similar accounts contributing to a kind of broad common sense about how people around the world know and experience eclipses as anxiety producing but also glorious events as an abnormal and sometimes fraught disruption in the status quo as a domain of knowledge specialists and arcane traditions and as opportunities for people to engage in strange and inexplicable behaviors. Common sense tells us that an eclipse can be all these things. I have to admit though I get cautious around common sense. Every anthropologist will tell you that common sense is neither common nor sensical. It turns out that accounting for human meanings and experiences of an eclipse is a lot more complicated, subtle, interesting than our common sense allows. In fact, there's more about the eclipse than I expected that is grist for the anthropological mill. So in my field, which is an environmental anthropology, it's a subset of cultural anthropology, which focuses on the culturally diverse patterns of how people interact with the natural world and make sense of their relationships with nature. We can use eclipses to think about how people interpret their place in the natural order of things and how notions of that order might structure their interactions with the natural physical social environment. Or consider the fact that people approach eclipses as a spectacle of nature and engage with them by putting on elaborate cultural productions. An eclipse can be good to think with to understand why, when, and how a natural encounter might be marked as special and signals the enactment of certain kinds of behaviors, social cooperation, and formal activities. People expect different things about an eclipse and they do them differently around the world, revealing much about what people consider necessary and proper collective action or social norms or aspirations for personal experience. All of this recently led one astronomer to suggest, given the subject matter we study, it seems only appropriate that while most of us still define ourselves as astronomers and scientists, we should build our sturdiest bridges across the Gulf, separating us from the interested community of cultural anthropologists. I have to admit, that's a totally arresting thing to hear from an astronomer. It's the last thing I would expect. If anything, I would expect those sturdy bridges to be built with computer science or geology. But during the past 30 years or so, anthropologists have produced really interesting studies about how societies around the world know and experience celestial patterns and events, among them eclipses. And so his enthusiasm of bridge building is certainly supported by what's happening in our field. So what are those studies saying? What can eclipses tell us about people and our relationships with nature around the world? What can we learn if we think with eclipses? I want to explore these questions with you tonight in three brief sections. Number one, every culture has a sky. Secondly, managing the eclipse and understanding. And lastly, the once in a lifetime opportunity. Oh, by the way, before we move on, I do have to disclose something really important, which is, I've used an old anthropological trick on you. That excerpt I read, it's from a paper an anthropologist wrote about the solar eclipse that passed through the U.S. on August 21st, 2017, the so-called Great American Eclipse. American, Nassarama. Get it? It was heavily edited by me, of course, to cultivate a distancing, an exotification, because I pulled what we in anthropology call a Horus Minor on you. So in the 1950s, an American anthropologist by the name of Horus Minor wrote an essay that he called Body Ritual Among the Nassarama, which describes the mundane tasks involved in how Americans use bathrooms with similarly exoticizing and distancing language. So for example, washing your face becomes splashing ablutions of water to cleanse and purify. He did it in part to poke fun at the way scholars objectify and exoticize, but also to call attention to the fact that we as Americans believe and do things that, when framed through a certain lens, can seem as strange and unfamiliar as the things that other groups of people around the world do. So there's another way, for me at least, that eclipses can be useful to think about and think with. In looking at how we do eclipses, we can gain some perspective on us, estranging ourselves from ourselves for a little bit, to open a window into the sociocultural patterns that also guide us in how we interact with eclipses and other natural spectacles when they happen to come our way. So every culture has a sky. Around the world, for thousands of years, people have observed and recorded astronomical arrangements and movements, and made a lot of connections between those phenomena and terrestrial correlates. Those observations have played a very important role in human adaptation to different environments, signaling to people, for example, when certain foods might become available or disappear, when you might want to plant or harvest, when to start, sorry, how to navigate across great distances of the ocean or the land, how you might think about time and market's passage, to know when changes in the weather or tides would be coming and many other things. But as one notable scholar of these matters observed, drawing constellations or star patterns following the movements of the planets across a zodiac or being dazzled by an eclipse, experiencing the sky is not the same for all people. Put another way, every culture has a sky, but how people in a given time and place make sense of it, determine the goals of acquiring knowledge from it, or imagine connections between what is happening in the skies and what is happening in their daily lives, reflects the broader panorama of global cultural diversity. So while reading a sky can yield practical insights for environmental adaptation, skies are also profoundly symbolic, providing people with a model of reality, a conception of a general order of existence, the universe, the cosmos, where do they fit into that? Also, it provides people with models for reality, helping people sort out truth from not truth, right from wrong, and the moral assumptions of a group always come out when we start sky watching. This is the territory, by the way, of cultural astronomy. It's a realm of scholarship that encompasses two subfields, ethno astronomy, which is the celestial knowledge beliefs and practices of contemporary peoples, and archaeo astronomy, how these matters express themselves archaeologically, that is to say, in the physical objects and the traces of human action left by past social groups. One of the central findings of cultural astronomy is that our own assumptions in the West can color how we understand the sky watching practices and insights of other societies. We inherit certain taken for granted ways of thinking and approaching the astronomical, for example as a space-time phenomenon out there, full of naturally occurring objects and energies subject to the laws of physics, which specialized knowledge makers unlock using the universal language of mathematics and value neutral technologies. Ours is a dehumanized and amoral view of space and celestial objects, free of human constraints and values. It is changing somewhat. In contemporary Western thought, we increasingly do see our future as bound up with the celestial realm. Thanks to recent technological developments and global politics, we are beginning to think of it as a realm full of potential for human discovery, resource exploitation, commodification, and not to mention ideological and political competition and control. These ideas are, among other things, the product of certain intellectual histories. So for example, the Greeks gave us that separation between world and universe and cosmos and culture and society. And other patterns, like the ways in which we institutionalize and fund and standardize knowledge about the cosmos in certain specific ways that make it the territory of the natural and physical sciences and not, for example, the territory of humanities and social sciences. But the category astronomy and the concepts that we use to make sense of it, things like atmosphere, space, time, territory, its separation from humans, does not necessarily exist in other social contexts or it differs considerably from how we think about these matters. For example, the Inuit who live in northern Canada are very sophisticated sky watchers. They've identified and named many, many stars and constellations. They read celestial cues constantly to tell time, to understand seasonal changes that are happening, to travel across dangerous ice and water, to predict the onset of inclement weather. That knowledge is integrated into the longstanding and trusted understandings of how their environment works. But they don't make a distinction between the astronomical stars and constellations and the atmospheric, such as the aurora borealis, sun halos or rainbows. Nor do they generally make formal and abstract pronouncements about any of these things. Because they believe that knowledge and skills of living in that environment are based on highly individualized experiences and observations. It turns out the Inuit are extremely skeptical of generalizable claims. Of course, there are plenty of stories, collective models for explaining what is happening in the skies. But they also accept fuzziness, indeterminacy about the ontological nature of celestial phenomena. In other words, they don't take for granted that they understand exactly what's going on. Even as their exposure has grown to Western cultural and educational values that emphasize precision, abstraction, these continue to be basic values that align with what it means to be Inuit. Such patterns aren't at all uncommon among other indigenous and non-Western peoples who develop and express their insights about celestial phenomena, neither through formal concepts nor as a separate domain of knowledge, but as integrated into their stories, their mythologies, their rituals and ceremonies, their lived experiences and taken for granted values. They're also embedded, of course, into the material objects that people create and use, things like timekeepers, calendars, tools of navigation or in the layouts of their settlements and their cities, their house floor plans, their burials and monumental architecture where they're deliberately designing and building these spaces to align with the cardinal points or stellar arrangements or movements of the sun and moon, making physical blueprints of the cosmos here on earth. Not surprisingly, it's the field of archaeoastronomy that bursts with examples of this. Just one example, because I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this place, is Chichen Itza, which is in the Yucatan in southern Mexico. And Chichen Itza is full of as many classic Maya sites are of ways in which they built the environment, they built their constructed their buildings to connect the cosmos with the everyday life and the ceremonial life. So for example, the main temple, it's called El Castillo by the Spaniards, but it's the temple of Kukul Khan, who is a central God figure for the Yucatec Maya. The feathered serpent god on the day of the fall and the spring equinox travels down from the skies along to the pyramid in order to remind people of the materiality of Kukul Khan in this world, that he will come down from the heavens to engage directly with the people, to remind them of their responsibilities, their relationships. Or the ballgame, you may have heard of the famous Mesoamerican ballgame, which is using a rubber ball in a court that has impossibly difficult hoops to score through on each side and the two teams could basically only use their hips to move the ball around. They viewed the ballgame as a cosmic story. Playing the ballgame was playing a version of how the cosmos are organized. The heavens operate like a ball court and a ball court operates like the heavens. In the game, there's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of chaos, there's a lot of violence, and at the same time, however, there are rules, there are expectations, there are certain protocols that one needs to follow.  And interestingly, a lot of the mythology around eclipse in Yucatec Maya, ancient Yucatec Maya society focused on those heads being representative of what happens when an eclipse occurs, which is a separation of the sun from the earth. So what's important here is how architecture and stories and urban layouts can bring, ordering principles from the skies and derived from the heavens into how they imagine and organize key elements of social life. Using celestial bodies to produce themselves as social beings. But what interests me is the fact that this also flows in the other direction. It's not just the mapping of the celestial onto the social. People project the social onto the celestial.  So around the world you see that many groups humanize and personify their skies.  Stories of love, sex, gender, power, death, dark family secrets, suspicious spouses, unruly children, sibling rivalries, acts of seduction and treachery, irresponsible parenting. Stars are ancestors, constellations are culture heroes or celestial communities. Movements of the sun often reflect tensions around marriage, sex and childrearing. For example, in most Australian Aboriginal cultures the sun is female and the moon is male. Sun woman pursues moon man across the sky from day to day in zig-zagging patterns. The Yolngu who live in Arnhem land call moon man Galindi. Yolngu traditions describe water filling Galindi as he rises, becoming full at high tide. When the water drains out there is a corresponding ebb in the tides. When he's full, when the moon is full, he's viewed as fat and lazy. Anger drives him to kill his sons as punishment for not sharing their food with him. In retribution, his wives attack him, carving his body with their axes, day by day causing him to wane away until he eventually dies for three days, which is the new moon, before he resurrects as a crescent, the waxing moon, growing again until he is full and the cycle begins anew. These aren't just mere symbolic connections, these are deeply moral relationships. They model appropriate social comportment.  The stories emphasize interdependency, mutual obligation. The sky is not just a backdrop of human life. Humans aren't simply visitors there. They were already integrated into it in very important ways. Again returning to the Aboriginal context, you can see these moral interrelationships on display when an eclipse occurs. In that scenario, the sun woman has captured moon man, seeking to copulate with him to consummate their relationship.  So when an eclipse occurs, a medicine man or an elder uses magical means to fight off the potential chaos and evil that this would cause, sending it directly to sun woman. Typically it includes throwing sacred objects in her direction whilst chanting a particular song or set of words. Even in our own dehumanized skies, we draw on cultural meaning and background to seek connection, explanation, familiarity. As one recent ethnographic study of scientific astronomers, who work in the field of comparative planetology showed, placemaking and imagining worlds is central to the daily work of what it means to practice that science. Planetary science knows the universe not as a void, but as densely inhabited with planets and other objects, geological places with the physicality of Earth. But these are truly alien. They don't know really what these things are. So they make the alien familiar by drawing on categories like place. A concept that feels more local makes the alien exploreable, knowable, maybe even someday inhabitable. This doesn't mean they're not also documenting objective celestial phenomena, but like people everywhere, when confronted with the incomprehensible, they draw on familiar cultural ideas and language to lend some comprehension to that which what they don't understand. You might remember that earlier I mentioned there's a gulf that separates astronomers from cultural anthropologists. It still exists. And that's partly why. They don't believe that culture has any role in how they think about their subject. But making the strange familiar, actually, that's what we anthropologists say culture does for us over and over and over again. Part two, managing an eclipse and understanding. So how does this all apply to eclipses, especially solar eclipses? It turns out that they always carry a lot more significance than lunar eclipses to people around the world. That relationship between the moon and the sun, that dyad is, for obvious reasons, a central axis in how people think about the skies. But the movement of the moon over the sun can cast a shadow on taken for granted certainties. Eclipse understanding, in other words. Disruptions in familiar patterns always raise important questions about what it all means and what the appropriate response should be. And the responses are extremely diverse around the world to an eclipse. Certain themes stand out. Behaving with solemn reverence, the goal being to remind people of the sacred order of the universe. Or it's opposite. Noisemaking and other actions meant to disturb the heavens to write things that are clearly wrong. Or taboos on cooking, eating and swallowing to remind people of their responsibilities during times of existential uncertainty. And also acts of reciprocity with the nonhuman world to remind and rebalance the important relations that keep us alive. The Dine, also known as the Navajo, conception and practices around solar eclipses are a really interesting illustration of how tightly a particular cultural astronomy or set of ideas about how the cosmos work will frame a certain kind of response when one happens. According to Nancy Mary Boy of the Indigenous Education Institute, the Dine world view emphasizes a holistic and ordered universe where everything is interrelated and all the pieces of the universe are enfolded within the whole. At the same time, every piece contains the entire universe, creating a network of relationships and processes in constant flux. The sun, the moon and the earth are always moving, seeking constantly to rebalance themselves. The origins of the Dine people are in the stars and the sun, whom they consider to be their father. Earth is their mother. Like all living things, they all will die. When the eclipse occurs, the sun is dying. The father is dying because grandfather moon has covered it. But when the moon retreats, father son is there. It is his rebirth. It is his renewal. For humans, it is a renewal as well. It's a time of cleansing, purification. The appropriate protocol is to not look at sun while he is dying.  You're not allowed to eat or drink. And if you do anything besides what you're supposed to do, you will be unwell potentially for years because it's a time to de-center human-to-human relationships and remind yourself of the broader cosmic order of which you are part and which is part of you. It's framed as a holy event because those relationships with the cosmos are the sacred order of their universe. Now, other groups view an eclipse as a great calamity or a portent of evil because the sun has been victimized by the moon. For example, among some contemporary Maya groups, the sun and moon are involved in an ancient sibling rivalry, an ongoing fight for dominance over each other. And it's rooted in lies and deception that they constantly engage with. During an eclipse, people, Maya people, are expected to make a lot of noise to get the sun's attention, to awaken it to all the lies that the moon has been telling it about people. The appropriate action is to yell, to bang things, to pinch the nose of dogs so that they will bark. Like the Dene, contemporary Maya use eclipses to think about their place in the universe. In this case, they take the idea of chaos in the skies and connect it to the ever-present threat of social disorder on earth. The Chamula, who live in southern Mexico, for example, view the eclipse as a time of aggression, of the moon biting the sun. It's a barbaric and chaotic act to them. They recognize that their own ancestors once were similarly barbaric and bit each other. Over time, the Chamula have become civilized and they don't bite anymore. They don't believe that eclipses are anything to fear. But they are opportunities for reflection. It reminds them of the ever-present potential of evil, of chaos, and a disruption in their own civilized social order. Or consider that for the Inuit, an eclipse is a reminder of their dependence on the non-human beings that provide for their survival. During an eclipse, Inuit know, based on thousands of years of observation, that animals and fish retreat and disappear. That disappearance is a cause for concern. It's a normal disruption in the, or it's an abnormal disruption in the normal order of things. And it signals to the Inuit that they need to give some attention to those creatures. Before anyone can resume normal hunting and fishing, it's important for people to go out and collect animals and fish, bring them to their community, give them away, share them. And it reminds everybody that their subsistence and their survival are based on the mutual reliance that exists, the deep relationships between humans and nonhumans. So I know what some of you are thinking, these are superstitions.  In the contemporary world, impacted by globalization, the spread of Western institutions and ideas, how can such things persist? Well, that's what keeps me in business, because these things do persist. They combine, they hybridize. It's never so simple. As a recent ethnographic project that took place in India demonstrates. In Hindu mythology, an eclipse occurs when the demon Rahu swallows the sun. The sun is a major life force in the universe. So it is a tremendously threatening moment. Now, Rahu did this as an act of revenge against Lord Vishnu, protector of the universe, who had created a special elixir of immortality. But he wanted to keep it away from the demons. He didn't want them to have immortality. But Rahu, clever, had gotten ahold of that elixir of immortality. And he took a drink. At which point, Lord Vishnu cut off his head. Rahu survived as a bodyless demon. And he repeats this act of vengeance of swallowing the sun periodically. Within the context of Hindu astrology, this mode of thinking that holds that celestial events, stars and planets have a powerful influence over your fortunes and daily life. An eclipse is grand or inauspicious and requires great caution. Lest your fortunes be completely destroyed. Temples are closed. You are not allowed to eat or drink or swallow during an eclipse. Food is cleared out of the house or hidden. Sleeping, sex, urination, defecation, all of these things are prohibited. When it's over, you're expected to take a bath, take a dip in the Ganges or sprinkle yourself with Ganga water in order to cleanse yourself and to change into clean clothes because Rahu has been around. Now, these practices are followed by tens, 20s, 30s, thousands of millions of people. And so some Indian ethnographers recently set out to study how and why these things persist. Especially in urban India, where modern media and educational systems are pervasive. What they found through their interviews, their fieldwork, their observations was that rarely did people frame these things as superstitions, but as simply a part of who they were as Hindu, for example, or as an element of family traditions and respect for other family members. So one young, highly educated man, an engineer, commented that he knew he could not get objectively made ill if he swallowed during the eclipse. But out of deference to his mother, he would not swallow during the eclipse. Or a young woman, also highly educated, visited her mother's house during an eclipse and when asked what we, she thought of the whole thing about not swallowing. She asked this question right back to the ethnographers. Why should I indulge in violating the custom and risk the well-being of my family members? I don't find any of this at all surprising. Certain familial and social relationships are simply too important to imperil. The world is uncertain.  And distinct rationalities, magical thinking, scientific thought, they coexist, they intermingle. You probably knocked on wood recently, said bless you after somebody sneezed. On my way out the door to come down here, a student said break a leg. Why do we say those things? Doesn't confuse us, but they are a key part of how we rationalize our own behavior and activities and sense of the world that we live in. Part three, the once in a lifetime opportunity. So here we are, the Nassarama have another opportunity to engage with an eclipse. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity as the hype emphasizes. Unless you were there in 2017, of course. Because thanks to precise astronomical calendars in the 2017 eclipse, we're ready for this. Preparations have been ongoing for some time. But it's pretty clear to me that we're drawing on our own cultural narratives about how the universe works. And we're relying heavily on our own cultural authorities to help us do the eclipse in ways that are familiar and appropriate to us. And it begins with how we frame it. While groups like those I've just described frame an eclipse through collective expectations of their social obligation to behave in certain kinds of ways, we think of it as an individual opportunity to have a unique experience. The sun and moon dyad, of course, is important for us as well. That opportunity for dualistic thinking is certainly how a lot of people around the world think of eclipses. It's just that we approach it somewhat differently. While others might view that relationship, that dualism as one that raises questions of good and evil, life and death, male and female, order and chaos, we have other concerns. We have other tensions. Individualism versus collectivity, is this about us as individuals? Is this meant to be just an individual experience or is it an opportunity for collective connection? The creation of collective memories, shared experiences. Is it going to be free of cost or should we commodify it? In a capitalist society, we always ask these kinds of questions. Does the public have every right to experience this or are we going to buy and sell it? We're going to privatize it and commodify it. Expectation versus hope. Our society is accustomed to very tight control and predictability and technological mastery. We expect things to occur. That's not true around the world, of course. A lot of people don't expect things. They hope for things. It makes us a little uncomfortable to think that we're reliant on the patterns of the weather or some other factor that could disrupt this expectation we have of what's happening next week. Unity versus diversity. What does it mean to have a shared experience in a culturally diverse, socioeconomically stratified country? Equity versus exclusion. We are a country that is equitable in aspiration, but hierarchical and exclusionary in practice. So who gets to have a full experience of an eclipse? What does that mean? Of course in the mix of all this are the astronomical scientists helping us make sense of it all. They don't see it as cultural astronomy what they're doing, but as a transparent and objective physical thing that they're studying. And they've been busy. They're setting up special telescopes to view and record the jets and plumes of gases on the sun's surface during the eclipse. They're creating and testing sensors that are going to measure the sun's magnetism and how it drives solar winds or that can detect the ripple effects of drops in sunlight on satellite communications and GPS. Efforts are being made to draw in youth schools and the broader public to excite people through hands on activities and not coincidentally to legitimate the expenditures our society makes and the authority that we give to science, especially during a time when a good percentage of the American public is skeptical of scientific claims and predictions. This is not new or unfamiliar if you know anything about American history. In the U.S. eclipses have been productive sites of scientific knowledge creation and at the same time an ongoing process of institutionalizing and legitimating scientific practice. In 1878, for example, a total solar eclipse passed over U.S. territory at a time when American research science was young and considered weak and inferior to European sciences. Motivated by a mixture of curiosity, institutional competition between universities and government agencies, and nationalism, American astronomers competed and collaborated with each other to record what they could of that eclipse, to capture images, and to test new technologies that they invented to measure eclipse phenomena, including Thomas Edison who famously invented the what's known as the tassimeter because he thought it could measure the heat produced by the sun's corona during the full eclipse. Even as the knowledge that was created back then was modest and Edison's invention completely failed, their efforts inspired and educated an American public, helping the young country to position science and technology as a core to the pursuit of knowledge and national greatness. So what about the anthropologists? We're relatively new to this whole scene but we're noticing what the astronomers are up to and it turns out that the science can be pretty much a sideshow of specialists doing their own esoteric things because the scene is quite dynamic and complex, populated with others, producing a kind of polyphony characteristic of a mass society in which different people and institutions are navigating the eclipse through their everyday priorities, their issues of the moment, their aspirations in a lot of different kinds of ways. So there are prognosticators and forecasters in the mix here, weather people, economists, departments of public safety, they're all sharing probabilities and percentages of good weather, how many people will come to Burlington, the regional economic impacts of this eclipse. Meanwhile, everyday citizens are starting to make forecasts and prognostications of their own, wondering what their future holds, if the eclipse will bring about mass chaos and whether they should stock up on food, water and gasoline. There's also governing officials caught between technical plans to control the mass movement of people, to manage significant, horrible, logistical and infrastructural challenges, while creating enough freedom and flexibility of that movement to ensure that we maximize tax returns. Helping the budget. There's also lots of journalists and filmmakers and social media influencers and other creatives out there already capturing the sights and sounds, trying to render the event into something more than a collection of individual experiences. Maybe even a collective memory that tells us something about who we are. And of course there's many, many businesses, industry, service sectors, especially those associated with tourism, and of course a lot of hustlers out to make a buck, competing and collaborating to ensure that the cultural production side of things, the experience that people will have, the quality of the services they'll enjoy, the material objects that we might call souvenirs, that they will buy in huge quantities, all go smoothly and profitably. And of course we already see them, the everyday items, the coffee mugs, the book bags, even the beer that are branded with eclipse imagery, connecting the mundane, the everyday with a new spectacle to appreciate. Interestingly, across all of these spaces and institutions, I hear echoes of themes that I talked a bit about earlier. People are talking about the upcoming eclipse as a moment for sacred reflection, thinking about our place in the cosmos. Others have dark fears of disruption and chaos. And still others see it as an opportunity to make connection, to have a special experience with others. So now that I'm really deep into this talk, coming towards the close, and you're on the hook to hang in there, it's probably a good moment for me to admit that I have not spent much time around eclipses, never studied them, certainly have never done field work around an eclipse. But I did cut my teeth as a as an ethnographer in Costa Rica where I was studying community level nature, conservation, and ecotourism in a prominent place called Monteverde. And although that's the scale of what was playing out there is much smaller, there's something rather familiar about dynamics that I was interested in there that is applicable to how we might think about our own natural spectacle. At the heart of Monteverde's identity as a place to admire, to seek, to go to, is this bird, the resplendent Quetzal. Huge numbers of people show up to this very rural part of Costa Rica to see one. And that bird is positioned as a central spectacle of going to the cloud forest. Of course there were authoritative scientific facts that circulate around the birds, references to their migratory and breeding habits for example, but science was pretty proximal to it all. It was kind of on the edges. The Quetzal is very densely symbolic. I heard many different people talk about the fact that it was sacred to the Mayas, that it's a symbol of conservationist success at protecting habitat, something to pin hopes and dreams of economic development for a somewhat impoverished and marginalized part of the world, and a source of chaos and inconvenience because of all those tourists who are coming to see a Quetzal. Now for most of those people who've traveled all that way to seek a Quetzal, it was just one experience among others that they were there to consume. One thing to see in an activity largely focused on well-seeing and collecting evidence that one had seen it. And then there was a whole large variety of people behind the scenes making it possible for them to see that, making it possible for a cultural production of sorts that makes the Quetzal something like what I call a routine surprise. A delightful bird suddenly found, but it's there because it was fed quietly and predictably by a landowner to ensure that it would be there when the guide shows up with a bus full of tourists who want to see a Quetzal. For a small subset of travelers though, the Quetzal carried something more. It carried a promise of experiential transformation. I started to think of these people not as birders as they might call themselves, but as pilgrims. Those for whom the purpose of the journey was not just to register a site, but a conscious effort to have a deeply meaningful connection and experience with this creature. Now we tend not to attribute religiosity to anything like this, but expectations of unique significance circulate around the desire to see a Quetzal. That it's going to be an awe-inspiring experience, that it's going to create ecstatic joy at seeing something so beautiful. It's an opportunity perhaps for a change in perspective or maybe a moment of collective connection with other people who are witnessing the same thing. This is kind of an unusual take on pilgrimage, which we tend to associate with a journey of penance or fulfillment of doctrine or expression of faith, but pilgrims are always looking for an experience of something larger than themselves. Without quite knowing it or appearing to care too much, the Quetzal is incredibly productive. It's productive of meaning, of experience, of individual and collective livelihoods, a whole regional economy, and it's pretty productive for someone like me who wants to think about what all that means. Now you could literally substitute the word Quetzal with the phrase total solar eclipse. I think what makes what we're living through now familiar to me is that the eclipse is productive in similar kinds of ways. In our case, the scene is populated with an influx or an upcoming influx of casual visitors looking to consume, as well as pilgrims. They call themselves umbra files, seeking ecstatic and transformative experience. And then of course we have many diverse local people, variously excited by the prospects of economic productivity for Burlington, and yet cautious, some of them even fearful, of how it all might disrupt and complicate our lives, maybe for days, but especially on the day of because everyone has to make plans and so people worry about how are they going to jostle their way through the massive crowd to carve out the unobstructed view that they want or to find their drumming circle or their yoga session because they want to have a unique individualized experience of this natural spectacle. So when we think about an eclipse, of course there's something occurring objectively out there. Absolutely. We associate it with an impersonal nature or universe. Other cultures would see it differently, but there's just so much going on within eclipse that can tell us about the people watching it that is worthy of our attention and curiosity. And that for the anthropologist, and I hope maybe for you, makes the impending eclipse good to think about and to think with because it provides us all with an opportunity to appreciate how we, like so many others around the world, use celestial bodies and events to produce ourselves as social beings. Thank you. I gather there's time for questions. Yeah, Dan. It seems like an eclipse is generalizing as a major interruption and I'm wondering if do all societies have to have these interruptions to stay interested? I mean, you could say, you know, certain political figures in the United States, for example, are great at creating interruptions. Have you found one that really just doesn't need that or is not attracted to that? That's actually a great question that illustrates why more research is necessary. You know, my sense is that most people around the world love to have patterned lives. They love to have expectations. But in many cases, you're going to find people who, you know, they're accommodating to the unexpected. They're, they welcome it. But there's so few ethnographic studies of how people make sense of eclipses that I don't think I can answer that with a whole lot of confidence. It's more, you know, I can count on both hands how many studies I've run across. But for other subjects, there are thousands of studies. But for eclipses, I think because eclipses, we can predict them, of course, but because they're, they're not a deep structure of how people live, they've kind of escaped the attention of a lot of anthropologists unless it happens while an anthropologist is there. Or in the case of that Indian research project that happened not long ago, there's a big theoretical debate or question or compelling national question about why do we as Indians still follow these strange practices when we think of ourselves as very modern. But yeah, I think you're pointing to something that there's just not a whole lot of research on. So as an anthropologist who's about to experience an eclipse, what will you be observing other than the sun? Yeah, that's a good question. I think you have a double consciousness as an anthropologist. One of our central methodologies, if you will, is participant observation. And so it's certainly something that we count, we accept that experience matters and creates, helps us create knowledge. So I'm, I will be as attentive to my own experience as I will be to others around me. And I think what, what excites me about this is the chatter and the conversations both before and after. You know, I've done, there's a, if you ever, if you, if you all have extra time and curiosity, you should read umbra files, read about umbra files. Umbra files, there's a, it's sort of an interesting semi-formal, slightly organized group of people from around the world who identify themselves as chasers of eclipses and they'll travel great distances to do it. And they always have origin stories about how and why they became eclipse chasers that tend to emphasize that something truly sacred happened to them, that they were caught unawares and unexpected at the power of the experience. And so they want to have it again. And um, so they have, it, what's fun is the, the ways in which they create expectations and, and even their own little rituals around how they should experience an eclipse. So for example, in 1973 there was an eclipse in southern Africa. And there was a group of umbra files there at the time who had a flag that they had created for the event. And the weather was perfect and everyone got to appreciate the full totality. And so they thought that that flag was what allowed, what gave them that great weather. And so since then a group, a sort of changing group of umbra files have taken hold of that flag and have never had bad weather. And so there's a lot of investment into the significance of that. They also, among umbra files, when you've had a successful eclipse, you should go off and drink an egg cream. Because apparently a New York group did that and ever since they've had great success with their viewing of eclipses. So, so I'm very attentive to the ways people make sense of these things and, and, and always curious to, to be open to whatever happens myself, right? I'm, I don't, I can't separate myself. I'm the instrument of research and unlike a, you know, a survey, a survey is the instrument of research. Here, take this, fill it out. I'm going to study it. Rather anthropologists embrace this idea that our experience plays a role. So I will be keeping a double eye, or a double consciousness, one eye on others and one eye on myself. Thank you. I have just a quick question. Given your double consciousness, where, where are you going to watch the eclipse? I haven't figured that out yet. I, I, part of me, you know, I have to, I have to navigate with, with family members because I mean, like that, I just, you know, we, we think of this, we want, I want to see it with a group, right? And some of us here will. So we'll have to make some collective decisions because this is going to be a collective experience too, right? But there's a big part of me that just wants to follow the flow of people. See where the flow goes. Just, you know, observing and, and joining in on, on the, the pilgrimage of sorts to, to the right spot. So I haven't figured that out yet. It'll be emergent, I suspect. Yeah, yeah, right, wherever you can get through. Am I coming through? Yes, you are. Thank you so much, Professor Vivonko for that enlightening talk. I would like to ask you to riff a little bit on the idea, on the contrast between the umbra files who are chasing the eclipse, who are going to it, and the non-umbra files who are existing in a place and receiving what comes to them from the heavens. And I wonder if there's a class lens you want to bring to that? Oh yeah. There's a gender lens you want to bring to that? Just can you riff on that a little? Yeah, no, I'm glad you, I'm glad you, you raised that because, you know, there, there are issues, well, there's just dynamics of social status that are shot through all of this, right? So, you know, there's an article in The Times yesterday, I think, on Jay Pasachoff, who was a professor of astronomy and a very noted umbra file. I think he had been to 63 eclipses before he died. And I think we put, he gets on the front page of The New York Times because he's this sort of eccentric professor type who followed these things. But the considerable expense that he must have made, or I, well, I'll say his university made so that he could go to all those things is huge. He had the privileges of, you know, grants and things like that, that he was able to combine with his own personal passion of being in the path of totality because he describes it as this transcendent experience that he was always wanting to renew. But for the other umbra files, it's so interesting to read their, well, so they have a big presence online and there's like one website that lists a club of 300 or so umbra files. And there they list how many they've gone to where they were, what day they were, what the conditions were like that day, how did they get there anything unique about the experience? And it's a highly competitive world. People trying to outdo each other with the distance they'll travel, the hardship they'll suffer in order to prove their commitment as an umbra file. And I read one recounting where a woman described the $10,000 cruise that she took so that she could have the unique experience of seeing the eclipse in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in luxury. Right, so yeah, there's a lot of dynamics of class and status that go into that as well. And in terms of, you know, how does it play out here? I've not paid much attention, but I'm sure there's lots of opportunities for people to spend a lot of money here in Burlington to have a special experience of the eclipse. And so the class dynamics will be playing out here as well. Certain locations will be for the privileged and other locations won't. And obviously to its credit, Burlington is taking seriously the idea that this should be a public event. But I expect that on the edges there will be people who are having very, very expensive special experiences of the eclipse. Yeah, thank you. You mentioned the idea of the duality. It's fundamentally the sun and the moon. And was that a stronger idea in past societies? Like you were either, you know, you were on the crusade or you weren't. Oh yeah, yeah. Is that faded today or is that? No. I think there are, what one of the things that interests me is that there are a lot of societies that reject the dualism altogether and have for a long time and associate it with the West or with, you know, Greek influences on our thinking. So for example in Indian mythology there are so many different possibilities of how the cosmos will play out that they kind of reject dualisms and that, and so for example, let's say a concrete social illustration of that is in gender and so in India you have a third gender, right? There's, it's not just male or female. There's also both male and female or neither male nor female. They're called hydras and then they have another one, sadans.  Hydras are either intersex-born or they are males who choose to become women, basically, living their lives as effectively neither male nor female. But then you have these sadans who are women who live their lives as male, but again, aren't male nor female. So, so they're, and it kind of reflects their cosmology. There's just a lot of different possibilities of mixing. Whereas we're pretty, well, until recently, the mainstream of our country has much more, has been comfortable with just men or women, right? Male, female. Of course, that's being challenged and changing and threatened. You know, it's a topic of great debate, right? But, yeah, I'm always fascinated by cultures that have a particular cosmology that doesn't seek to dualize too heavily. But it is interesting to me how common that dualism is as it relates to sun and moon, because it's just obvious, right? The sun and the moon are right there and interacting with each other constantly. And so it's interesting to me how that does play out in very dualistic ways around the world. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for this talk. And I want to take you back to the Ketzel example that we're looking at here, pondering and ask you to riff on that a little more and particularly the differences. So you, you saw similarities of this like amazing natural thing that people are flocking to. But they're different. And you said you can feed a Ketzel to make it come. Totally. The clips, you can't feed it so far. We can't control it. And the predictability, too, like the immense predictability. There's, there's just interesting differences, ones in the sky, ones biological. Can you just talk about how they're different and why that might matter? Yeah. Thank you, Rochelle. That's a great question. I was going to go with what you were starting to say about control and predictability. And you know, there's the economy in rural Costa Rica around ecotourism is based on a pretty simple fact, which is that cloud forests are, it's not like the it's not like the natural history poster where there's just a lot of little creatures just waiting to be seen. Right. People spend a lot of money to go to this place and they get very impatient when they don't see anything because it's such a densely profusive sort of vegetal world. And, and so on the one hand, tourism providers, they're feed that, they direct that, they, they, they make it so that you will see certain kinds of things in the ways they build trails, they build them in zigzags. So you're always facing out, you're not looking forward and seeing people. So because you're there to see nature, right? So they build into the environment a certain expectation of what you're going to be looking at. But of course, animals, birds have agency, they, they don't respect the desires of humans most of the time. And so that's something else that they try and make predictable. And there are plenty of instances when in spite of the fact that a ketzal is fed that they show up and it's not there, right? And that causes a lot of consternation and disappointment.  They talk to each other about where's the best place, what's happening now, who saw what where. Okay, if we can't get a ketzal, maybe there's a mannequin bird that someone saw over there, right? So they're adapting on the fly um, you know, I think in the case of, I don't know, I, so I mentioned that's a routine spectacle. So when I think of an eclipse, I think of it as a non-routine routine spectacle. Like we're not, like I wasn't there for the 2017 eclipse. I don't know, I've never had this experience and we have to, we, you know, there's a certain cultural memory that goes along with every eclipse and we don't have it on hand. I don't feel like I have it on hand about where I'm supposed to go, how I'm supposed to act. I don't have a guide who's going to say, okay, well, let me give you some advice about, to make sure that this is a satisfying experience for you because it is, it's going to be unpredictable. But because it's so not, I mean, non-routine routine is obviously contradictory. We, you know, we can certainly predict with great accuracy to the minute, but that sense that, you know, there's so many expectations that go into seeing it that, that air of disappointment is just around the corners, just on the edge, just like it is for an eco-tourist who shows up in Costa Rica, but at the same time, you know, well, never mind. I was just going to say, I think at the same time, people are, they've already invested a lot in either of these things. They've invested a lot of emotional energy. They've invested resources. They want results. And so that experience of not getting results is a real, real downfall for a lot of people. Yeah. So I had an interesting insight. Apparently the weather specialists around here are very cautious about what they say right now, because they know that if they say the wrong thing, a lot of us are going to be extremely disappointed and a lot of money is at stake. And so there's debates and discussions happening in our newsrooms right now about how far do they go down the road of predictive accuracy with the weather? It's sunny right now as far as we know. Mysteriously after a big snowstorm and clouds on Saturday and hope versus expectation. Yeah, Andrew. Nice. Thanks. I was, I think by some measures that Vermont and New Hampshire are considered the least religious states or like the most number of people who I don't identify with any religious tradition. Right. And I mean, you know, you talked a lot about ritual and a number of these examples, even the ombre files. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how we think or how you think about religiosity in the context of New England, yeah, Vermont, and just the frenzy about the totality. I love that question because I was a religion major in college. So I've been thinking about this for years. I have a good friend on the faculty at UVM and the religion department who always says religion is always in the room. It's always here. It's just under the surface. Sometimes it comes out very explicitly, but it's usually under the surface. So the way I interpret that is that if you think of what religion does, it provides a set of meanings that order the universe, the existence, the cosmos, and your place in it. It gives you a set of expectations about how you're supposed to act or ethics or morality. We have those even though we might not profess to be religious, right? You know, the line between the secular and the religious is extremely blurry and dynamic. And so when I look at, you know, well, the pilgrims, like, you know, there was a period in my career where I was writing a lot about nature films and I was really struck at the way religious themes are constantly coming out in what ostensibly seems a very secular, scientifically organized nature film where, you know, nature is this idenic place with no humans and it's just the animals living in their own. Now that's a carefully crafted image. You know, one of my favorite quotations by a nature camera operator, nature film camera operators when I'm out on the Serengeti filming a cheetah chasing down a gazelle, I'm very careful to exclude the dozen or so safari trucks that are seeing the exact same thing in the field of vision of my camera. And I make sure that the pylons and the electrical lines are not ever seen in my shots, right? So it's a carefully crafted image of nature. But it's one of, you know, this sort of iden before humans despoil it. There's always a voice of God narrating it better if it has an English accent. You know, there's a natural order to things.  With one exception, they say that it's intelligent design that created all this. They're basically the same. It's really interesting. So, yeah, I think we tell ourselves what, in another context, would be called very religious stories all the time. Because we're seekers of meaning and we're seekers of we take our experience seriously and that experience is more than just material, right? I think the other thing, you know, religiosity does, that's really important is it provides causal explanation for things. When things are unfortunate, when you have an unfortunate result, you know, this is the problem of Job, right? How do you explain suffering? Well, you know, we have our own versions in secular scientific American life to make sense of that. It's luck or it's, you know, we might individualize it, we might blame ourselves. But we also turn to, you know, what in another context people would say is superstition, right? You know, we do things that seek to control our environment when things are uncertain. We come up with explanations for why we didn't perform so well, for example, on the soccer pitch. Oh, it's because I didn't wear the socks that I used to wear every single game since I was 12 years old, right? Like, so just that sort of, you know, don't wash your underwear, wear your, you know, pants backwards if you want a snowstorm, you know, those kinds of things, we kind of laugh at them, but we still do them, right? There's always that sense of that if we can, we need to control uncertainty in some way. And so we have lots of elaborate ways to convince ourselves that it's not religious, but it looks and smells like religious, religiosity to me a lot. And I've been thinking about pilgrimage in that light too.  That's a really important thing. It's been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years as an act, as a, as a show of penance and devotion and so on. And people who do it today don't profess to be Catholic. They don't profess to, you know, have any kind of religious purpose to it, but they are having a very similar experience. They're connecting with something bigger than themselves. They're connecting with a deep history. They're connecting with deep inside themselves, with their spirit, even if they don't name it in that way. So, yeah, religion's always in the room. Thanks. Thank you very much for this talk. I feel like I'm kind of in the path of totality. I work down in a science center. I live right near here. I feel like a little bit trapped, like that I might want to leave, but maybe it's too crazy out there. It actually feels safer and calmer to just stay and ride my bike. Yeah. But for me, with all the science that's very interesting, I am much more drawn to the symbolism and the art. You haven't mentioned astrology, but the Vance here in Burlington are very symbolic and remind me a lot of first night or now highlight. Thank you. It seems like people are looking for renewal for opportunities to transform. That's the sense I get. Yeah, I think you're right. I think, yeah, thank you for that, because you're right. I only mentioned astrology in the context of India. Of course, we have plenty of us astrological significance in our own lives. And here in Burlington, you know, there's I can see a lot of people making this, investing a tremendous amount of significance into something like this, because it's a, because there's so many other things going on in our world that feel undesirable, that feel dark, that feel, you know, out of control. And this is something that brings us together. That's actually something that you see in the umbra file world. It's a moment of connection with others. It made me as an individual feel insignificant because I was with others. It connected me with humanity. Like that's a really common response. And then, and I think it's a common aspiration too, right? That we can at least momentarily have this connection with each other that we take each other as humans, not as Democrats or Republicans or right wing or left wing or whatever it is that we're worried about at the moment, right? So that very, that small excerpt that I heavily edited to pull a minor on you comes from an actual article, as I mentioned, by an anthropologist who was following the eclipse in 2017. And one of the things that he wrote about is that there was a large expectation all across the path of totality in many, many communities. That this, because this is the, this is when Trump is president, right? That this was an opportunity to step away from the show that is the president, right? And to have something that he can't control, that he can't mediate, that it's not going to be about him, but this is about us and that somehow it would draw us together as a country, right? That's why they called it the Great American Eclipse, right? So anyway, I think that's, I think it's so interesting to me too that, you know, that idea of renewal is one, that's a common theme that runs across cultures.  And so, you know, I'm kind of thinking back to Dan's observation about, you know, when people are looking for, like are they, is this like a desirable disruption in the state of affairs, right? And in some cases, yes, it is. The world needs to be renewed. Society needs to come to terms and start over, you know. It's really interesting in that way that how common that is cross-culturally. I wonder if you could go back to the original image in your talk, which had a, looked like a lot of people with cardboard boxes on their head. And I would love to just understand what that photo is about. And I want to just reflect on my previous experience watching an eclipse with my parents pinhole, projecting it onto the floor, and now this sort of ubiquity of the glasses. And thinking specifically about us is a really visual culture. I wonder if you could tie some of those threads together. Yeah, that's really great question, Andy. I appreciate that. So this comes from 1963 and Life Magazine did a series, or I should say an article that has a series of photographs of a fifth grade classroom in Illinois that was preparing itself for the eclipse by creating these clearly life-sized versions of a box-hole camera as a safe way to experience the eclipse, right? So it was framed as a kind of science, hands-on science experiment. And I love how the teacher is just staring right at the sun there. While the eyes of the children are protected. But yeah, I think what drew me in particular to this question, or I mean to this particular image is it feels distant and exotic, right? Because we take for granted that what we do now is the way to do it, right? And this is another way that culture kind of works. It makes you think that everything that you do right now is the right way to do it. So the normal way to do it, there's no other way to do it, right? But in our own society, we've had lots of different ways of engaging with eclipses. And so, yeah, this turned into a little bit of a comment on to kind of exoticize, you know, to pull back and say, whoa, whoa, that's weird. And this is another classic anthropologists trick on everybody is like, take whatever sort of, you know, it's supposed to be obvious and turn it around and say, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Like it's not so obvious after all. And we have to contextualize it. We have to provide some kind of explanation built from the context of the time. So, yeah, it is interesting. I think, you know, the glasses thing, I guess I'm really occupied a lot in the last couple of weeks with the whole glasses phenomenon because they're new to me. And it's an opportunity for branding. So yesterday I picked up a dozen sets of glasses for my department and they're emblazoned with the UVM logo on it, something like the catamount eclipse, I think it says or something like that.  And, you know, so those glasses, that's one thing I'll be paying attention to is like the glasses, right? They're a statement of one's individuality.  Where did you get the glasses? How are they designed to communicate, right? They're not just things for looking through, they're things for others to look at, right? So I've been thinking a lot about these glasses lately as, you know, I suspect on the surface if you ask why, the answer you get is always the easy one, which is that too many people have burned their corneas from looking at the sun, but there's another way to do it. It's right there, right? There are filters that you can put on a camera or a telescope or whatever, right? But it is, there is something completely natural feeling, yet totally arbitrary and artificial about the glasses thing. Yeah, I mean it's, and what's interesting too is that they have to be certified, right?  So they have to be certified by a particular organization. We want to have that expectation of safety, right? We have expectations, right? So just kind of following up on what you were just saying with safety. I know I'm supposed to read these things about not burning my retinao, and like it's amazing to me how many ways and things I've overheard in the past week that I might die or be injured because of this eclipse. Is that something that anthropologists follow just assuming safety is kind of... Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, that's a good one, Dan. Sort of anthropology 101 is that risk is in the eye of the beholder. You know, risk is a variable concept. What we might think of as risk is not to someone else. And that extends to all kinds of ideas about health and illness, what causes it. In fact, the most vibrant subfield of our discipline is medical anthropology that looks at all the different ways that people believe certain things will make them sick that another group would say you're totally irrational. And so yeah, it is interesting to me the sort of safety discourse. And that's, I don't know, we as a society in the past 25, 30 years have really ramped up the whole safety discourse. I'm talking to a room that was... We were the kids who could go play, go out the back door and disappear all day and then come back at dinner time and think of how we parent now, that sense of there's not safety, it's risky. Got to drive my kid to school instead of let him walk by themselves. It is interesting how the safety discourse dominates. So, and it was funny. I mean, you know, when Trump was looking at the eclipse without glasses, he was looking with glasses, by the way. There's pictures of him looking with glasses, but at one point he didn't have the glasses on. And so of course, that was an opportunity for people to make fun of him. Doesn't he know that, you know, it's just not safe to do that?  He's not a tough guy. Whoa, how ironic. He burned his retina, you know, that kind of thing. So, yeah, it is that safety discourse. It's a very powerful thing in our society right now. Are there any other questions? Or shall we give our speaker a round of applause? Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Yes, thank you all. I appreciate your many, many questions. That was fun.