The 22nd annual Robbins Memorial Symposium, hosted by Phillips Exeter Academy, presents a panel discussion and student assembly themed, “Cultural Extinction: What is at stake for humanity?” with anthropologists Wade Davis and Abe Waldstein, and linguist Gregory Anderson (’85) on Monday, April 14, 2008 at 7:00 p.m., in the Phelps Academy Center Forum, located on Tan Lane. Instructor Thomas Giblin will moderate the panel discussion.

This year’s event includes an evening film showing of The Linguists, featuring Anderson’s work and the global crisis of language extinction, on Sunday, April 13, 6:30 p.m., in the Phelps Academy Center Forum. A question-and-answer session will immediately follow. History instructor Donald Foster will present Anderson and facilitate questions. Both the panel discussion and film showing are free and open to the public. Panelists include:

Wade Davis – A noted anthropologist, ethnobotanist and photographer, Davis earned his Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Harvard, and spent time in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer. While there, he lived among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations and made some 6,000 botanical collections. He later worked in Haiti, investigating folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, and Borneo, where he lived among the nomadic Penan in the forest of Sarawak.

Among Davis’ many books are The Serpent and the Rainbow, about the process of zombification in Haiti (1986); an international best-seller and motion picture; Passage of Darkness (1988); One River (1996); and Shadows in the Sun (1998); and Light at the Edge of the World (2002).

Gregory D. S. Anderson ’85 – Director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, a non-profit organization dedicated to the documentation, revitalization and maintenance of endangered languages, Anderson specializes in the languages of Siberia. He has degrees in Linguistics from Harvard and the University of Chicago, and has conducted extensive fieldwork into the languages of the Altai Sayan group. Anderson has completed fieldwork in Nigeria on Eleme, in India on the Munda languages, in Bolivia on Kallawaya, and in Oregon on Siletz Dee-Ni. He has published widely in the fields of historical linguistics, descriptive grammar, morphology, verb typology, and the linguistics of Munda, Salishan and Ogonoid languages. 

Abe Waldstein – Focusing on a career of developing methodologies to organize and build capacity of effective community-based resource management organizations, Dr. Waldstein began his international work as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Togo. Later, his field experience concentrated in French-speaking areas of West Africa, South Asia, Philippines and the Former Soviet Union. With a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia, and a law degree from Concord Law School in California, Waldstein researched socioeconomic impact analysis for USAID; the World Bank; and other foreign countries in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Chad, China, Guinea Bissau, Mauritania, Nepal, Pakistan, Senegal, Sri Lanka and Tunisia. 

The Robbins Memorial Symposium was established in honor of the late David C. Robbins, an alumnus of Phillips Exeter Academy, class of 1978. Robbins went on to Brown University, where he did extensive research on the problems of developing countries. He was also a research assistant in the Institute for East West Securities. Robbins researched—academically and through travel—the roots of poverty, famine and revolution.

For more information, please call Donald Foster at (603) 777-3452, or dfoster@exeter.edu. For more information on other events, contact the Phillips Exeter Academy public events line at (603) 777-4309, or visit the Academy’s News & Events page. For directions to Phillips Exeter Academy, call (603) 777-4330.