Elizabeth F. Drexler
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)
Award: Association of Third World Studies (ATWS) Cecil B. Currey Book-Length Publications Award for 2007-2008.

Overview:

“A needed critique of the often-romanticized vision of ‘reconciliation through truth commissions’ for nations caught up in historical cycles of violence.”–Susan Rodgers, College of the Holy Cross

“Elizabeth Drexler’s sensitive treatment of Aceh’s recent history is an invaluable contribution to the debate.”–Goenawan Mohamad, author of Conversations with Difference

In 1998, Indonesia exploded with both euphoria and violence after the fall of its long time authoritarian ruler, Soeharto, and his New Order regime. Hope centered on establishing the rule of law, securing civilian control over the military, and ending corruption. Indonesia under Soeharto was a fundamentally insecure state. Shadowy organizations, masterminds, provocateurs, puppet masters, and other mysterious figures recalled the regime’s inaugural massive anticommunist violence in 1965 and threatened to recreate those traumas in the present. Threats metamorphosed into deadly violence in a seemingly endless spiral. In Aceh province, the cycle spun out of control, and an imagined enemy came to life as armed separatist rebels. Even as state violence and systematic human rights violations were publicly exposed after Soeharto’s fall, a lack of judicial accountability has perpetuated pervasive mistrust that undermines civil society.

Elizabeth F. Drexler analyzes how the Indonesian state has sustained itself amid anxieties and insecurities generated by historical and human rights accounts of earlier episodes of violence. In her examination of the Aceh conflict, Drexler demonstrates the falsity of the reigning assumption of international human rights organizations that the exposure of past violence promotes accountability and reconciliation rather than the repetition of abuses. She stresses that failed human rights interventions can be more dangerous than unexamined past conflicts, since the international stage amplifies grievances and provides access for combatants to resources from outside the region. Violent conflict itself, as well as historical narratives of past violence, become critical economic and political capital, deepening the problem. The book concludes with a consideration of the improved prospects for peace in Aceh following the devastating 2004 tsunami.

Details: 296 pages 6 x 9
Cloth: $59.95
ISBN: 978-0-8122-4057-3
Pubdate: The Ethnography of Political Violence Jan 2008

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Edited by: Alec Campbell, Larry Robbins and Michael Taylor
(Michigan State University Press)

Overview:

Tsodilo Hills is a richly illustrated account one of the world’s oldest and most beautiful historical sites: For 100,000 years, inhabitants of Botswana’s Tsodilo Hills region left behind a record of their gathering wild foods, hunting, fishing, mining, rock painting, cattle herding, and metalworking, as well as of their participation in a coast-to-coast trade network. During the past 30 years, archaeologists, paleontologists, historians, and anthropologists have worked at Tsodilo. Here is the Tsodilo story, the Hills’ revelations brought together in one volume, beautifully illuminated by more than 150 color plates and maps. For scientists, this work brings together decades of research at a site in the Kalahari that was virtually unknown until the late 1970s. Tsodilo Hills also offers a fascinating glimpse into the history of the Kalahari Desert to the general reader, as well as an unsurpassed guide to an extraordinary world to the desert’s many tourists.

Reviews:

“Tsodilo Hills is a wonderfully researched and richly textured description of one of Africa’s most sacred sites. It weaves together multiple lines of evidence — geological, ecological, anthropological, and historical — to construct a chain of interaction that extends for tens of millennia and ties together people and place. It combines perspectives of scientists, students, government administrators, and Tsodilo inhabitants to look from the present both back to the past and into the future.” — John Yellen, research associate, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

“The abundant photographs range from enthralling and intriguing parts of the Hills, timeless weapons and habitats of area tribes, individuals in traditional and in contemporary dress, rock paintings, and members of scientific teams. Many maps too, regarding different aspects of the Hills (e. g., tourist facilities, excavation sites)….”
— Henry Berry, bookseller and founder of Connecticut Book Auctions

Details: 189 pp., 8.5″ x 11 ”
Paper: $39.95
ISBN: 0-87013-858-8 | 978-0-87013-858-8
Pubdate: January 2010

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Edited by Robert Whallon, William Lovis, and Robert Hitchcock
(University of California Los Angeles-Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press)

Overview:

Information and its Role in Hunter-Gatherer Bands explores the question of how information, broadly conceived, is acquired, stored, circulated, and utilized in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, or bands. Given the nature of this question, the volume brings together a group of scholars from multiple disciplines, including archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and evolutionary ecology. Each of these specialties deals with the question of information in different ways and with different sets of data given different primacy. The fundamental goal of the volume is to bridge disciplines and subdisciplines, open discussion, and see if some common ground-either theoretical perspectives, general principles, or methodologies-can be developed upon which to build future research on the role of information in hunter-gatherer bands.

Robert Whallon is professor of anthropology and curator at the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology at University of Michigan, and the founding editor of Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. William A. Lovis (Ph.D. MSU Anthropology 1973), professor of anthropology and curator at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University, is coauthor of Modeling Archaeological Site Burial in Southern Michigan, and editor of An Upper Great Lakes Archaeological Odyssey. Robert K. Hitchcock, professor of geography at Michigan State University, is coauthor of The Ju/’hoan San of Nyae Nyae and Namibian Independence: Development, Democracy, and Indigenous Voices in Southern Africa, and coeditor of Genocide of Indigenous Peoples: A Critical Bibliographic Review.

Details: 256 pages, 6 x 9
Paper: $95.00 Cloth, $65 Paper
ISBN: 978-1-931745-63-5 (cloth) | 978-1-931745-64-2 (paper)
Pubdate: 2/25/2011

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MSU has received an award from CASE: Council for Advancement and Support of Education for its promotion of the Saints’ Rest excavations. We have been told that MSU University Relations will receive its Circle of Excellence Silver Medal Award in the Special Public and Community Relations category for 2006 for the Saints’ Rest Archaeological Project.

ANP 491, 301 Special Topics: Bioanthropological Perspectives on Health, Disease and Socio-ecological Changes in Developing Countries (2 credits)

March 16 – April 27, 2012
Fridays 9:10-1:00

INSTRUCTOR: Hilton Silva, MD, MPH, Ph.D, Professor of the Universidade Federal do Para, Belem, Brazil

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Globalization and socio-ecological changes worldwide create ideal conditions for the emergency of a large number of new and old diseases. This seminar focuses on how bioanthropological approaches, combined with a public health perspectives provide new insights for analyzing health outcomes across a range of social and environmental circumstances. Aspects of the origins and spread of infectious and chronic diseases, and their relationships with socio-cultural, economic, environmental and life style changes throughout the world will be examined, with particular focus on traditional populations of Latin America and Africa. Material from historical and recent sources on South America, Africa, Asia, North America and Europe will be discussed. The program explores the interfaces between anthropology and public health and discusses recent trends of key infectious and chronic diseases and their relation to cultural and economic conditions. Readings and discussions on the health and health planning implications of environmental, economic and social changes at the global and local levels will conclude the seminar. Students will become familiar with the complex relationships of health issues with socio-ecological changes in different regions, and will develop skills to design bioanthropological approaches to examine health related questions.

The ANP Communications Committee is pleased to announce the results of our 2010 photo contest below. We will post winning entries on Facebook soon.  Judges were one graduate student, Linda Jackson, and two faculty on the communications committee, Ethan Watrall, and myself. There were many high quality entries, so selecting winners and honorable mentions took some effort. One purpose of the contest was to generate images that can help the department communicate to various audiences the types of work we do. For example, Annette Werner plans to select some of these to print out and display in the department, and the communications committee is working on highlighting these online (e.g. you’ll soon see them highlighted on the contest Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/groups/msu_anthropology/ and eventually on our web site). Thanks again to all who submitted a wide range of wonderful images, and congratulations to the photographers below.

For the Communications Committee,

Adan Quan

———————-

WINNERS

1st prize: Rick Burnett. Sandy Dunes. Western Namibia, Dune 7, Namibia.  July 2010.

2nd prize: Kimberly Rovin. Man at Church Entrance. Lalibela, Ethiopia. December 2008.

3rd prize:  Cate Bird. The Ferryman’s Son. Mis Island, Sudan. January 2007.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Jared Beatrice. Lord of the Skies. Nemea, Greece. June 2010.

Emilia Boffi. Henna Hands. Delhi, India. July 2008.

Laura B. DeLind. Meskhetian Turk Men Playing Russian Checkers. Okemos, Michigan, USA. Spring 2010.

William Lovis. Abandoned Windmills. Pyrgos, Tinos, Greece. July 2009.

Born: March 15, 1944
Died: May 11, 2010

Patricia Ruth Whittier, 66, of East Lansing, Michigan, died on Monday, May 11, 2010. Pat was born March 15, 1944 to Milton Arnold Jenks and Ruth Preston Jenks in Providence Rhode Island and was valedictorian and graduate of Plant High School in Tampa, Florida where her parents retired. She received her Bachelors degree at Florida State University. She married Herbert L. Whittier, of Ashtabula, Ohio on September 2, 1965 in Tampa Florida and the two of them moved to East Lansing where she earned her Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology at Michigan State University with her field work in Southeast Asia funded as a Fulbright Scholar. She studied the Indonesian language at the Cornell University as an NDFL scholar and also at the University of Michigan.

Pat was a social anthropologist and did fieldwork with Herb in Indonesian and Malaysian Borneo with tribal populations. They and their children lived for two and a half years in Surabaya, Indonesia (1979-1981), where she taught at the International School. They also spent a year (1983) in Nepal at Tribhuvan University’s Institute of Agricultural and Animal Science in Rampur. In Michigan, as a professor she taught at Michigan State University in the Department of Anthropology, was managing editor for the Medical Anthropology Quarterly: International Journal for the Analysis of Health, and also served as assistant director of the Center for Women in International Development. In addition, for 16 years she was the editor of the MSU Institute of International Health Newsletter. In a later career move, she left MSU and joined the staff of Lansing Community College where she taught accounting for 15 years. As a teacher and scholar she nurtured and contributed much to the careers of her colleagues, students and friends; her unassuming intellect was invaluable to all who worked with her and appreciated by all who knew her. She was an accomplished poet and a master of the English language as well as a specialist in scientific methodology. Her editorial touch was felt by many of the publications and dissertations produced at Michigan State University.

She was not only a world traveler and a scholar, she toured parts of the US and Michigan on BMW motorcycles, with a preference for vintage bikes, with her husband and sons. Finally, she was a devoted wife, mother, and friend, whose touch will influence her family and others for many years to come.

Surviving Pat are her husband Herbert L.Whittier and her two children, Robert W. Whittier of Chicago, Illinois and James P. Whittier of East Lansing, Michigan.

There was no formal funeral ceremony or memorial service; instead a wake was held at the Whittier home in East Lansing., and was attended by many of Pat’s close friends. The family would like contributions be made to The Arc of Michigan, 1325 S. Washington Ave., Lansing, 48910 in lieu of flowers. The family is being served by the Gorsline Runciman Funeral Homes, East Lansing. Online condolences may be sent at: www.gorslineruncimaneastlansing.com.