Department of Anthropology

  • MSU Anthropology Graduate Panel Podcast at SfAA and Kehli Henry wins Bea Medicine Scholarship

    Congratulations to Kehli Henry on winning one of the two very competitive Bea Medicine Awards from the Society for Applied Anthropology. “The scholarship celebrates the life and legacy of Beatrice Medicine, an internationally prominent anthropologist who passed away in December 2005. Dr. Medicine was a descendant on both sides of her family from the Lakota, and an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. This heritage found reflection in her life’s work — an impressive record of teaching, research, and service, which focused on understanding and tolerance within the broader human condition and particularly toward Native peoples” (http://www.sfaa.net/about/prizes/student-awards/bea-medicine/)

    Kehli will be presenting her paper “Engagement Between & Across: Working with an American Indian Community while Working through Academia” in a panel highlighting the work of the Anthropology Department’s doctoral students at the SfAA’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh in March. The panel, titled, “Researcher and Community Engagement: The Politics of Doing Research” is organized by Adam Haviland and Meenakshi Narayan and also includes papers by Ying-Jen Lin, Fredy Rodriguez-Mejia, and Marie Schaeffer.

    The panel was selected by popular vote to be one of the twenty podcast “by the SfAA Podcast Project during the 75th Annual Society for Applied Anthropology conference, and will be made available free to the public online” (SfAAPodcasts.net). This panel will explore aspects of research that mediate researcher-community interactions with a focus on reflexively examining the roles of positionality, power, and subjectivity in our encounters with communities. Through consideration of issues including researcher positionality, community perceptions of research, and what researchers can really offer communities,  this panel probes the politics of doing research. Drawing on experiences with communities in Taiwan, Honduras, India, and the United States, panel members will highlight parallels and divergences in the politics of doing research in their respective locations.

  • Meenakshi Narayan receives College of Social Science Research Scholars Fellowship

    The Department of Anthropology is very pleased to inform that Meenakshi Narayan, a third-year graduate student of the Department is a three-year College of Social Science Research Scholars Fellowship awardee (2013 – 2015). Through receiving this award, Meenakshi has successfully carried out two years of summer research in India, including her pre-dissertation research (2014) to facilitate her dissertation research. Meenakshi will use the award from this year to focus on language training at the South Asia Summer Language Institute (SASLI), Madison Wisconsin.

  • Dr. Todd Fenton and Dr. Joseph Hefner Selected as Inaugural Members of a National Forensics Science Subcommittee

    The first meeting of the OSAC Subcommittee on Anthropology took place in January 2015. Dr. Todd Fenton and Dr. Joseph Hefner were announced in October 2014 as two initial members of the National Institute of Justice and National Institute on Standards and Technology’s subcommittee on Anthropology. The Subcommittee on Anthropology is a subsection of Crime Scene/ Death Investigation and part of the new Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC). This initiative replaces the Scientific Working Group in Anthropology (SWGANTH) established by the FBI and the National Institute of Justice but retains a similar mission:  “The Subcommittee on Anthropology will focus on standards and guidelines related to application of anthropological methods and theory – particularly those relating to the recovery and analysis of human remains – to resolve legal matters” (http://www.nist.gov/forensics/osac/sub-anth.cfm). The OSAC was formed in February 2014 to support the development of standards and guidelines in American Forensic Science. Parts of this announcement were also featured on MSU Today in December.

  • Watrall & Goldstein Receive Grant to Organize Institute on Digital Archaeology Method & Practice

    Watrall & Goldstein Receive Grant to Organize Institute on Digital Archaeology Method & Practice

    The Department of Anthropology is very pleased to announce that, in collaboration with MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences, Professors Watrall and Goldstein have received a $249,708 Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to organize the Institute on Digital Archaeology Method & Practice

    Hosted jointly by MATRIX and the Department of Anthropology and directed by Watrall (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology; Associate Director of MATRIX) and Lynne Goldstein (Professor, Department of Anthropology), the institute will bring together 20 participants to the campus of Michigan State University for two 6 day sessions in 2015 and 2016.  The ultimate goal of the institute is to build capacity among private sector, public sector, student, and scholarly archaeologists – especially in areas that fall outside “traditional” digital archaeological practice.  The institute also hopes to build the foundation for a networked and intellectually unified community of practice for digital archaeology

    In order to accomplish the goals of the institute, attendance will be open to public sector archaeologists, private sector archaeologists, students, museum archaeologists, and scholarly archaeologists from both the anthropological and humanist archaeological communities. Sessions (both talks and workshops) will be delivered by a wide variety of internationally regarded experts from the world of classics and ancient history, archaeology (humanist and anthropological), the digital humanities, museums, and web mapping. The institute is organized along several themes: Field Methods, Data & Linked Data, Geospatial, Scholarly Publication & Communication, Public Outreach & Engagement, and Project Development & Management.

    While the institute will include sessions on a wide variety of topics, its organizational focus is on a digital project which attendees will be challenged to envision, design, develop, and launch over the course of the institute, with the bulk of the work happening between the two week long meetings.

    Header image CLE_1221 by Dr._Colleen_Morgan used under a CC BY 2.0 license

  • Watrall receives NEH Grant for next phase of the Archaeological Resources Cataloging System (ARCS) Project

    Watrall receives NEH Grant for next phase of the Archaeological Resources Cataloging System (ARCS) Project

    The Department of Anthropology is very pleased to announce that, in collaboration with the College of Arts and Letter and the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, and MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor Ethan Watrall has received a $350,000 NEH Digital Implementation grant to continue the work on the Archaeological Resources Cataloging System (ARCS) project. The project will be co-directed by Jon Frey (Assistant Professor, Department of Art, Art History, and Design)   

    Originally funded by an NEH Digital Startup Grant and developed as a proof of concept by a small research group in the College of Arts and Letters (http://arcs.cal.msu.edu), ARCS is an open-source application designed to reintroduce many of the advantages of traditional archival research into its new electronic form. By means of an intuitive web-based interface, users can upload, visually scan, keyword, sort, and link together digitized copies of photographs, drawings, and (frequently handwritten) documents that together are the most faithful representation of the archaeological record. What is more, ARCS relies on a crowd-sourced approach to augment the information it contains. This not only provides a ready alternative to archaeological projects that lack a staff of dedicated archivists, but also encourages collaboration among scholars as well as public interest in a project’s ongoing research.

    While the start-up phase of the project was very successful, the NEH Digital Implementation Grant will allow the project team to address several key software, design, and sustainability issues, including improved software architecture, interoperability, and community adoption and use.

    As part of this new phase of the ARCS project, the project director’s have identified three archaeological projects that have already begun to digitize their primary documents and are interested in using the ARCS software in order to meet their research needs. Implementation at each of these projects will involve a further development of ARCS, which will in turn yield an even more flexible platform that can be customized to match each individual project’s unique system of archaeological documentation. Most importantly, because our implementation of the software involves multiple projects, we will be uniquely suited to develop a middle-ground solution that bridges the gap between the need to preserve the unique character of each project’s evidence and the larger goal of utilizing the evidence from several locations in research at a regional scale.

  • Syazana Amirulmokminin Documentary to Appear in Michigan Film Festival

    We are very happy to announce that a short documentary film by Syazana Amirulmokminin, an undergraduate student in the Department of Anthropology, has been accepted into the Made in Michigan Film Festival.  Entitled The New Generation, the film dives lives of two young Asian-American women and the unique challenges they face living between two cultures. Amirulmokminin produced the film as part of ANP429: Ethnographic Field Methods, taught by Professor Mara Leichtman. The Made in Michigan Film festival takes place in Frankenmuth on Oct. 3rd and 4th.

  • Returning to Aztalan

    Aztalan Excavation Team, via Dr. Lynne Goldstein
    Aztalan Excavation Team, Photo by L. Goldstein and used with permission

    Dr. Lynne Goldstein has worked in and around Aztalan since 1976. Aztalan is a large Middle Mississippian site (ca. AD 1000-1200) located between the modern cities of Milwaukee and Madison, and is the most famous archaeological site in Wisconsin.  During this past summer, Dr. Goldstein led an excavation of the site to address questions about its structure. The field school included students from Michigan State University, students from University of Northern Iowa led by Professor Donald Gaff, and students from UW-Madison led by Dr. Sissel Schroeder. The teaching assistants for the project included current MSU Anthropology graduate student Kate Frederick and alumna Hannah Nelson. The crew included 20 individuals total.

    Aztalan map with areas to be excavated noted, via Dr. Lynne Goldstein
    Aztalan map with areas to be excavated noted, map by L. Goldstein and used with permission

    The field school took place through May and June 2013, and sought to answer questions by doing selective excavation units in two areas: a gravel knoll in the southeast corner of the palisaded area and an extension of the palisaded area referred to as the ‘sculptuary’. It was previously thought that the gravel knoll was a mound structure, however discovery of the sculptuary brought this interpretation into question. Excavation of the two areas revealed that they were heavily used in prehistoric times and would have been highly visible due to a mix of gravel and shell capping each raised feature.

    They also found a deliberate opening in the palisade wall, which had not been previously documented. Near this entrance was a pit lined with gravel containing both Late Woodland and Mississippian ceramics and a gravel path leading to the palisade opening. Based on the evidence collected from this summer’s field school, Dr. Goldstein proposes that the people of Aztalan were deliberately sculpting and modifying the landscape to meet their needs and represent their views of the world.

    This past year, three undergraduate MSU Anthropology students have continued to work on the project, supported by Provost Undergraduate Research Initiative grants. Kyla Cools is working on analyzing intrasite variation of ceramics from the site. “Since the areas we excavated were not just habitation areas, but used during special circumstances, I am hoping to determine whether or not the ceramics found (and their frequency in the archaeological record) at these sites differ from those found in habitation areas,” says Kyla. Ian Harrison is using Carbon 14 dating of materials from the site to create a more accurate timeline of occupation. Megan Hall is preparing the collections for transportation to a permanent curation facility. Each of these students received funding through the grant to attend the field school and conduct the follow-up research during the school year.

    Details on the field school and the blog detailing the excavation can be found online: anthropology.msu. edu/aztalan-fieldschool/ 

    [Included in the Spring 2014 Dept. of Anthropology Newsletter, see complete newsletter here]

  • New Publications

    MA Holman Volume CoverThe Tie That Binds; Essays in Honor of Margaret B. Holman

    Margaret B. “Peg” Holman was for many years an Adjunct in the MSU Department of Anthropology, a Research Associate at the MSU Museum and former editor of The Michigan Archaeologist. The special tribute volume (Michigan Archaeologist Vol. 54) was co-edited by Dr. Janet G. Brashler and Dr. William A. Lovis. The volume contains contributions from over 20 of Peg Holman’s colleagues, friends, and former MSU students, attesting to her abundant impact on Michigan archaeology and the MSU Department of Anthropology.

     

    Screen Shot 2014-04-28 at 1.40.32 PMThe Bioarchaeology of Space and Place: Ideology, Power, and Meaning in Maya Mortuary Contexts

    The Bioarchaeology of Space and Place: Ideology, Power, and Meaning in Maya Mortuary Contexts is a volume edited by Dr. Gabriel Wrobel. It features articles that investigate the variations in social identity found among the Ancient Maya. It focuses on individuals and small groups identified through their mortuary behavior and burial treatment.

     

    [Included in the Spring 2014 Dept. of Anthropology Newsletter, see complete newsletter here]

    Images of the book covers provided by the authors and used with permission.

     

  • New Course: Exploring Equality and Diversity in the United States

    This summer, the Department of Anthropology will be offering a new online Integrative Studies in Social Science course created by Dr. Adan Quan. The course explores social diversity and equality in the United States from the perspective of an international student. The goal is to introduce international and domestic students to the issues and debates surrounding social difference in the United States, and have them engage with the content using personal experience. Students will gain the skills necessary to examine and frame their own positions, values and experiences within the wider context of social, political and economic structures in this country. The course aims to integrate numerous social science disciplines including Anthropology, Sociology, Economics, History and Geography.

    The course is hosted through Desire 2 Learn, and a number of tools will be leveraged to engage students. Pinterest, a digital pin board that visually displays bookmarks with annotations, will be used for digital presentation of issues, such as illustrating a stereotype within the United States. Google Hangouts will be used for hosting international discussion throughout the course. Other digital tools under consideration are Twitter maintaining discussions, creating online narrated stories using tools like Slideshare, and mapping diversity using Google Maps.

    The course will also involve a number of Anthropology undergraduates who will act as peer mentors. They will facilitate discussions among students and aid them in understanding course material. International students will benefit from having a peer who can help ‘translate’ the material by providing their perspective on US culture and society.

    Dr. Quan notes that “MSU is experiencing a large increase in international students. Many of these students have expressed a desire for more support in adjusting to life in the United States, such as succeeding in a US university setting and forming social relationships, and this course aims to help them with this.” It is also important that domestic students learn to understand the perspectives of international students. This exciting new course will bridge the gap between these domestic and international students.

    [Included in the Spring 2014 Dept. of Anthropology Newsletter, see complete newsletter here]

  • Bridging Cultures: Muslim Journeys

    Screen Shot 2014-04-28 at 1.31.45 PM
    Photo from D. Margolis, used with permission

    Bridging Cultures: Muslim Journeys has been a two year effort at MSU and in our community, funded by two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2013, Muslim Journeys Book-shelf brought a collection of 25 books and 3 DVDs on Muslim experiences and cultures to the MSU Libraries, the East Lansing Public Library, and Capital Area District Libraries. The three libraries hosted three films presented by MSU faculty; the MSU Anthropology Department lent its support for the screening of a French feature film at the East Lansing Public Library in November 2013.

    In early 2014, the MSU Libraries hosted a 5 session book discussion series on Islam and Islamic culture (Let’s Talk About It: Muslim Journeys). Each session began with a lecture by associate professor Mohammad Khalil (MSU Religious Studies/Muslim Studies), and was followed by small group discussions led by MSU graduate students in a variety of disciplines, including Anthropology’s Meryem Zaman. The book discussion series was well attended by undergradu- ates, graduate students, faculty, staff, and community members of many backgrounds. Deborah Margolis, MSU Librarian for Anthropology, Jewish Studies, Muslim Studies and Middle East, thanks the Anthro- pology faculty and graduate students for its involvement, and looks forward to future collaborative efforts involving campus and community.

    [Included in the Spring 2014 Dept. of Anthropology Newsletter, see complete newsletter here]