2012: Comparing Scholarly and 'New Age' Approaches to the Mayan Prophecies

The Scientific and Medical Network Frontier Lecture given by Barbara and Dennis Tedlock

At Colet House on Tuesday 9th October, 7pm to 9pm 

Dennis and Barbara will unravel the truth about current New Age claims predicting a world-change in 2012 based on the Mayan Calendar.

Dennis Tedlock is an anthropologist and linguist whose teaching and research center on the indigenous languages, verbal arts, writing systems, philosophy, and religion of the Americas. He has done field research among the Zuni of New Mexico and the Maya of Guatemala and Belize. His books include Teachings from the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy (with Barbara Tedlock), Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller, and The Dialogic Emergence of Culture (with Bruce Mannheim). For Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life, he received the PEN Translation Prize

Barbara Tedlock is a UB Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. She has done ethnography in Brazil, Nigeria, Guatemala, and with Zuni Indians in New Mexico. Along with husband, she served as co-editor of American Anthropologist, the journal of the American Anthropological Association. Her interests center on the American Southwest and Mesoamerica and include subjects such as shamanism, Zuni art and aesthetics, the cultural organization of time and space, ethnomedicine and cognitive, psychological and symbolic anthropology. Additionally, Tedlock was initiated as a Shaman by the Maya Quiche of Guatemala.

She has published several books: Time and the Highland Mayan (1982), Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations (1987), The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Zuni Indian Encounters (1992) ,Teachings from the American Earth (co-edited with Dennis Tedlock) (1992) and The Woman in the Shaman's Body (2005).

In 1997, Tedlock, along with her husband, won the American Anthropological Association President's Award for distinctive leadership at the American Anthropologist.