American Experience Lecture Series

"Westernization among Amerindians: The Bari People of Venezuela"
By: Manuel Lizzaralde

This lecture is FREE and open to the public.  The 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, a professor at Connecticut College, 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 environment, 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 culture 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 indigenous populations have disappeared along with them.  Manuel currently teaches classes on ethnobotany and ecological anthropology, drawing upon his background in botany, geography and anthropology.