Nuer Wisdom: Preserving the Past – Empowering the Future

Sharon Hutchinson

1155 Observatory Drive Madison, WI 53706, 206 Ingraham Hall
@ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Africa at Noon

Speaker: Sharon Hutchinson

Time: 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm CST

Venue: 206 Ingraham Hall
(This in-person event will be livestreamed)  Join Livestream

Speaker’s Bio

Sharon E. Hutchinson is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African Studies at UW-Madison and the author of Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State and many other scholarly publications. Her professional commitment to research and document the culture history of the Nuer (Naath) people of South Sudan and Ethiopia has endured for more than 45 years. After retiring from UW-Madison, she served part-time for several years as an adjunct full Professor of Social Anthropology on the faculty of Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.   After leaving that position to embrace the freedom of full retirement, she has endeavored to preserve and promote the rich cultural and linguistic heritage of all South Sudanese, wherever they may reside, through a novel series of publication projects.  Focusing initially on the Nuer language, she established an independent publishing company in 2023, whose mission is to high-quality paperback books at prices affordable to South Sudanese populations worldwide as well as university and community libraries.  During its first year of operation, her company published four books, including a comprehensive Nuer grammar and a Nuer-English dictionary.

 

Presentation Summary:

In this talk, Sharon Hutchinson will explain her post-retirement efforts to empower and encourage a new generation of war-displaced Nuer (Naath) men, women and children, many of whom were born far from original South Sudanese homelands, to discover for themselves the wisdom and complexity of their dynamic cultural and linguistic heritage.  During 2024,  Dr. Hutchinson, or “Nyarial” as she is better known among Nuer, has created both a new website (https://www.nuerdilemmas.com) and a dedicated Youtube channel (https://www.youtube/@nuerdilemmas), where she is gradually posting a wide variety of new educational resources in the Nuer language (Thok Nath) as well as English that draws on her vast personal archive of research findings, field photographs, audio-recordings, maps and other documents.  Hutchinson’s outreach efforts have already generated new waves of excitement, curiosity, optimism and collective pride within Nuer communities around the world.