Just a quick reminder: the 2006 meetings of the Canadian Anthropology Society/Société Canadienne d’Anthropologie (CASCA) are coming up very soon! They will be held at Concordia Univesity from May 9-14 to be exact. The conference website can be found “here”:http://artsandscience.concordia.ca/socanth/casca2006/index.htm. I know of at least 2 SM readers who will be there . . . looking forward to meeting you! It’s not too late to register so if you are anywhere within easy travel of Montreal, I encourage you to come. Montreal’s beautiful in the spring, the terraces are open and CASCA is fun!

By the way, yours truly is organising a round table on anthropology in cégep as well as presenting a paper entitled: Wet Sundays in James Bay: Drinking as Transcendance of Cultural Identity. Here’s the abstract:

This paper, based on fieldwork conducted in James Bay in 1998, will explore the ways in which drinking alcohol may work to transcend cultural divides. I am particularly interested in presenting a discussion of layers of marginality within a given social environment and how the shared experience of drinking may allow an outsider to gain a transient status as insider in specific contexts. Ethnographic examples obtained through the experiential approach exemplified by Jean-Guy Goulet as well as a theoretical framework based on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus will frame the discussion.

I hope to come back with some juicy stuff to blog about in the next few weeks.