The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that Associate Professors Stacey Camp and Ethan Watrall have been awarded a 3 year National Park Service Japanese American Confinement Sites (JACS) grant for $379,017 to develop The Internment Archaeology Digital Archive (IADA), an open digital archive that will host, preserve, and provide broad public access to digitized collections of archaeological materials, archival documents, oral histories, and ephemera that speak to the experiences of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II in the United States. This digital archive, which will be accessible to descent communities, scholars, students, and the general public, will focus on two sites of World War II incarceration: (1) Idaho’s Minidoka National Historic Site (the site of Minidoka War Relocation Center), a War Relocation Authority (WRA) facility that incarcerated over 9000 predominantly Japanese American citizens and (2) Idaho’s Kooskia Internment Camp, a Department of Justice (DOJ) prison that incarcerated over 260 Japanese American men deemed “alien enemies” by the United States government. 

Established in 2006, the National Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Sites (JACS) grant program is focused on the preservation and interpretation of U.S. confinement sites where Japanese Americans were detained during World War II.

A collaboration with Michigan State University’s internationally recognized MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences where Watrall also serves as Associate Director, The Internment Archaeology Digital Archive (IADA) will make a critical intervention in the preservation and interpretation of the digital record of World War II incarceration in several key ways. First, IADA will be the first digital archive to disseminate, interpret, and make legible archaeological and material culture from sites of WWII Japanese American incarceration. IADA will focus on several themes that crosscut the archaeological data and materials from two sites of incarceration, including recreation and leisure, dining and foodways, healthcare, and education. Unlike photographs that were censored or governmental documents that present an incomplete or biased picture of the internment and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, archaeology provides a unique window into the actual material realities of prisoners’ lives. 

Second, IADA will provide unique insight into the lives of first generation Japanese migrants, also known as Issei, who are largely neglected in historic and archival records. Because Issei were unable to naturalize due to the exclusionary immigration laws of the time and, as non-citizens and important members of the Japanese American community prior to the war, were seen as a threat by the United States government, they were considered prisoners of war (POWs). As such, they were treated under the conditions outlined in the Geneva Convention of 1924. IADA will provide a mechanism to compare and contrast the experiences of Japanese American non-citizen Issei at Kooskia, a Department of Justice (DOJ) prison that has been studied archivally and archaeologically by Camp since 2009, to the experiences of Japanese American citizens imprisoned at Idaho’s Minidoka War Relocation Center. 

The project will take advantage of the Department of Anthropology’s Digital Heritage Imaging and Innovation Lab in order to do 3D scans of diagnostic and particularly noteworthy archaeological material – all of which will be accessible on the IADA website when it launches at the end of the grant period.  

Beyond the digital archive of archaeological materials, archival materials, and oral histories, the project will include robust and freely available educational materials and lesson plans for use by educators. The IADA will also include a robust “People Search” feature that will allow users to search for information on individual prisoners incarcerated at the two project sites. Each prisoner will have a dedicated record page that will feature a timeline of the events in the prisoner’s life, photographs of or associated with the prisoner, associated relatives, artifacts and possessions associated with the prisoner (when available), oral histories from the prisoner (when available), and a map illustrating the prisoner’s place of birth, place(s) of residence prior to incarceration, location(s) of incarceration, and place(s) of residence after incarceration.

While IADA is primarily designed to address the immediate needs of Kooskia and Minidoka’s descent communities, Japanese Americans, and scholars of Asian American studies and incarceration, the project’s audience extends well beyond these groups. In its broadest, IADA will provide testimony and material evidence of the trauma wrought by incarceration and discrimination.

Ultimately, the project’s long-term goal is to provide a platform for the inclusion of archaeological collections from other sites of confinement and incarceration.  

Image of Men playing game at Kooskia, Kooskia Internment Camp Scrapbook courtesy of University of Idaho Library, Digital Initiatives

The Department of Anthropology congratulates Dr. Chantal Tetreault on winning a coveted Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program Award. Dr. Tetreault is an Associate Professor of Anthropology specializing in linguistic and cultural anthropology. Her recent work has primarily focused on issues of migration and social change in France. More generally, her research illuminates how cultural processes of identity construction are achieved through everyday language use.

The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program encourages academic and professional experts across disciplines in their international research and/or teaching endeavors. This program selects individuals through a competitive process to help them achieve their ambitious goals. Fulbright prides itself on being the “most widely recognized and prestigious international exchange program in the world.”

Dr. Tetreault’s award will support her research project, “What is Arabic Good For? Future Directions and Current Challenges of Arabic Language Educational Reform in France.” Currently, only 0.2% of all middle and high school students who take a second language in France have access to Arabic, despite it being the second most widely spoken language. In her research, Dr. Tetreault will analyze the ways that Arabic is taught and not taught in France through investigating the types of discourses, institutional gatekeepers, and practitioners influencing the inclusion of Arabic in the French education system. Dr. Tetreault will explore the perspectives of politicians, educational administrators, scholars, teachers, and students to gain insight into the ways these differently positioned individuals interpret the value of Arabic relative to the evolving issues of culture, politics, and education in France.

The educational landscape of Arabic language instruction in France is complex, with ties to a colonial past and a post-colonial present. These relationships continue to play out in terms of France’s immense role in economic, political, and cultural affairs in the Maghreb and the Middle East. However, despite clear geo-political stakes in the Middle East and North Africa and the Arabic language, France has repeatedly failed to make Arabic a national educational priority unlike other European Union countries. Dr. Tetreault’s research will contextualize the French cultural impasse on Arabic language educational reform in terms of the rise of right-wing Islamophobic political discourses. The importance of these public conversations and failed educational reforms goes beyond the scope of language instruction to entail changing understandings of French identity in the context of immigration, globalization, and post-coloniality.

With this award, Dr. Tetreault will travel to France and conduct her research next spring over the course of six months, collaborating with colleagues at the National Institute of Eastern Languages and Civilizations (INALCO). Dr. Tetreault’s analysis of the national debates surrounding Arabic language educational reform in France will be disseminated through a series of articles and a book.

The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that Dr. Mara Leichtman has been awarded a prestigious fellowship of the Luce/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Program in Religion, Journalism & International Affairs. Dr. Leichtman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology affiliated with the Muslim Studies Program, African Studies Center, and Asian Studies Center. Her research interests focus on the interconnections among religion, migration, politics, and economic development through examining Muslim institutions and the communities they serve.

Luce/ACLS Fellowships support scholars in the humanities and social sciences pursuing research on any aspect of religion in international contexts with a desire to convey their specialist knowledge to the media. The Luce/ACLS Fellowships culminate in producing a significant piece of scholarly work and communicating these perspectives to public audiences through collaboration with journalists. Dr. Leichtman’s fellowship will support her research project, “Humanitarian Islam: Transnational Religion and Kuwaiti Development Projects in Africa.”

Arab Gulf states are surpassing Western development agencies in providing assistance to African countries. Dr. Leichtman’s research will analyze individual, civil society, and state giving in Kuwait through Islamic ethical frameworks as motivations for charity. Case studies of transregional connections with Senegal and Tanzania assess the cultural and religious impact of Gulf funding in Africa while complicating the “giver/receiver” binary. Through exploring Sunni and Shi‘i organizations in Africa, Dr. Leichtman’s project will unpack the politics of Kuwaiti giving by situating the aid apparatus within national, international, historical and contemporary contexts. Media coverage has depicted Africa as another sphere for the Saudi Arabia-Iran rivalry in disseminating Sunni-Shi‘i sectarianism. Based on this research, public writing for media and policy outlets will demonstrate that Iran is not the only Shi‘i player in Africa and that Africans are not simply pawns in Gulf power politics.

Dr. Leichtman is among only six other scholars from across the country to be awarded a fellowship this year. In addition to receiving $63,000 to implement their projects, each fellow will participate in a media training workshop and an annual symposium that brings the scholars into dialogue with renowned journalists to discuss key issues in religion and international affairs. This collaboration will serve to disseminate more nuanced, contextualized, and dynamic understandings of religion in global public life, politics, and policy.

The Luce/ACLS Program in Religion, Journalism & International Affairs is made possible by the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation.

The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that Dr. Heather Howard has been awarded a distinguished 2020–2021 Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship. Dr. Howard (left) is an Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her work focuses on collaborative, community-based, and participatory approaches to research which promote the value of Indigenous knowledge frameworks to scholarship.

The Whiting Public Engagement Program is a national grant that advances scholarly work applying the humanities in ways that benefit communities. The program’s fellowships recognize faculty whose work interacts with the public and brings together discussion on topics of significance. Dr. Howard is one of only six Fellows awarded across the country this year. The fellowship, in the form of $50,000, will support Dr. Howard’s project entitled “Waganakising Quillwork: A Portal to Share Indigenous Knowledge”. With this fellowship, Dr. Howard will engage in a collaborative project with Waganakising Odawak (Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians) to build a digital portal for Waganakising heritage.

The Waganakising Odawak are leaders in encouraging positive relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people while preserving their culture and advancing their self-sufficiency. This portal, and the process of its creation, will initially focus on porcupine quillwork traditions and align with Waganakising initiatives supporting historical and traditional arts knowledge while cultivating intercultural respect and understanding. As a Tribal-governed platform, the portal will be curated by Indigenous historians, makers, and other knowledge-holders of the Waganakising Odawak in Michigan.

Waganakising porcupine quillwork is a beautiful decorative art but is also a significant and profound cultural practice representing Waganakising history, Tribal sovereignty, and environmental conservation. This art embodies the respectful relationships between the human and non-human world which are interwoven in Waganakising oral traditions and storytelling.

These dimensions of the art are brought to the foreground by porcupine quillwork master and teacher Elder Yvonne Walker Keshick (left), who is known not only for her artistry, but also her way of relating that work to responsible gathering and protecting resources, Tribal rights, and the history of regional trade and political negotiations. Quillwork and Waganakising artists like Yvonne Walker Keshick therefore play a central role in perpetuating cultural knowledge and educating non-Indigenous neighbors about respect for Tribal ways of life.

To create this interactive tool, Waganakising historians and knowledge-holders will lead community events with Tribal members to identify heritage objects for including in the portal and to discuss the portal’s design. The project will begin by drawing on materials that are already digitized by the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC) with further technical support from the MSU Digital Heritage Imaging and Innovation Lab. The Waganakising portal will be a gateway to cultural heritage items and discussions by digitally drawing together materials held across the country and internationally into a centralized, Indigenous community managed platform.

Images:

Upper right – A quill box featuring otters made by Yvonne Walker Keshick using all natural quills. Image courtesy of MSU Museum collections, ID 2017:24.108. Photo by Pearl Yee Wong.

Lower left – Yvonne Walker Keshick with her granddaughter teaching quillwork on birch bark at the Great Lakes Folk Festival, East Lansing, August 8, 2015. Photo by Pearl Yee Wong.

Lower right – An unfinished quill box used for teaching and demonstration, made by Yvonne Walker Keshick using all natural quills. Image courtesy of MSU Museum collections, ID 2017:24.1. Photo by Pearl Yee Wong.

Dr. Mara Leichtman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology affiliated with the Muslim Studies Program, African Studies Center and Asian Studies Center. Dr. Leichtman specializes in sociocultural anthropology and the study of religion, migration, transnationalism, humanitarianism, and economic development. She is currently co-facilitating an interdisciplinary Trans-Regional Studies Scholarly Writing Group at MSU for faculty and graduate students as part of the Academic Advancement Network’s 2019–2020 learning communities, which “provide safe and supportive spaces for complicated conversations.” Dr. Leichtman also serves as a board member of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, a section of the American Anthropological Association.

One of Dr. Leichtman’s research projects, which culminated in her book “Shi‘i Cosmopolitanisms in Africa: Lebanese Migration and Religious Conversion in Senegal,” investigated the location of Shiʿi Islam in national and international religious networks, the tension between Lebanese and Iranian religious authorities in West Africa, and the making of a vernacular Shiʿi Islam in Senegal. This work has prompted several new avenues for scholarship and collaboration, one of which is Dr. Leichtman’s recent publication.

This past September, Dr. Leichtman and co-editor Dr. Rola El-Husseini (Lund University) published a special journal issue entitled “The Shi‘a of Lebanon: New Approaches to Modern History, Contemporary Politics, and Religion” in the established Islamic Studies journal Die Welt des Islams. The idea for this collaboration grew out of the realization that there had not been a recent collection bringing experts of Lebanese Shiʿism into dialogue with one another. This interdisciplinary issue assembles the latest research within history, religious studies, and the social sciences and is inclusive of emerging scholars. Most scholarship begins with the social and political awakening of Lebanese Shiʿa in the 1960s that led to the establishment of the political movement Hizbullah in the early 1980s. This volume spans the early 20th century to the present and aims to broaden knowledge about Lebanon by focusing on less known historical periods, revisionist historical accounts, and understudied topics. Such understudied topics include Shiʿi schools, involvement in the Lebanese Communist Party, ecumenicalism and gender reforms in Shiʿi Islamic political thought, and transnational ties between Hizbullah, Iran and Syria.

Dr. Leichtman and Dr. El-Husseini’s introduction makes a case for the concept of “Arab Shiʿism,” and, more specifically, “Lebanese Shiʿism.” As social scientists, they posit that historical, political, and sociocultural distinctions between Iran and the Arab world have become more pronounced since the 1979 Iranian revolution. Yet Iran tends to be a primary area of emphasis of the growing sub-field of “Shiʿi Studies.” Furthermore, whereas Islamic studies scholars often focus on theological texts, which prioritize the writings of male religious scholars, social scientists are interested in the overlapping of religious, secular, ethnic, gendered and nationalist modes of identification and belonging. Thus the special issue is also a call for a more inclusive Shiʿi Studies that encompasses a wider range of disciplinary fields, historical periods, and contemporary lived experiences of Shiʿa outside of Iran—and in particular the unique situations of minority religious communities.

Another development from Dr. Leichtman’s first book is a new research project entitled “Humanitarian Islam in Kuwait: Transnational Religion and Global Economic Development in Africa.” She is particularly interested in the interconnection of Islamic organizations in the Middle East and Africa, where South-South relations are understudied. Dr. Leichtman began this project as a visiting Fulbright Scholar at American University of Kuwait during 2016–2017. Her fieldwork of case studies studying Sunni and Shiʿi charities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Tanzania and Senegal was funded by the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, West Africa Research Association, and MSU’s Humanities and Arts Research Program.

The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce Dr. Todd Fenton (Professor of Anthropology) as our new Department Chair. On behalf of the department, we would like to thank previous Chairperson Dr. Jodie O’Gorman for her years of invaluable service. Dr. Fenton looks forward to continuing this legacy and building on this strong department.

Dr. Fenton has served as a faculty member with the Department of Anthropology since 1998 and is a renowned forensic anthropologist. Over his career, Dr. Fenton has developed an internationally recognized PhD program focusing on forensic anthropology and established the MSU Forensic Anthropology Laboratory (MSUFAL) as a premier consulting, research, and training laboratory. One aspect of his career of which Dr. Fenton is most proud is the great success of his graduate students, who have received high honors and earned top academic and non-academic positions in the field of forensic anthropology. As Director of the MSUFAL for eight years, Dr. Fenton engaged in and managed over 500 forensic anthropology cases with local medical examiner offices and law enforcement agencies, helping the community and providing instrumental experience for his students.

Dr. Fenton’s research involves projects that seek to better understand the biomechanics of cranial and long bone fracture. The knowledge gained from this experimental research has critical implications for accurate analyses in forensic death investigations. To support this research, Dr. Fenton and a team of interdisciplinary colleagues received three large National Institute of Justice grants. In addition to forensic work, Dr. Fenton has ongoing collaborative bioarchaeological projects in Italy, including the study of skeletons excavated from an early Middle Ages cemetery in the ancient city of Roselle.

For the past four years, Dr. Fenton has carried out departmental duties as Associate Chair. During one of those academic years, he was also awarded an MSU Academic Advancement Network Leadership Fellowship, in which he had the opportunity to shadow Dean Rachel Croson of the College of Social Science. In these roles, Dr. Fenton saw the profound and significant impacts an administrator can have for improvement. He sees being chair of this department as an opportunity to help the faculty, staff, and students in achieving their goals and to fulfill the great appreciation he has for the department, college, and university.

Moving forward together, Dr. Fenton is committed to fostering an inclusive, safe, and welcoming departmental environment where all faculty, staff, and students are valued, respected, and celebrated. Dr. Fenton aims to improve the sense of community within the department and to ensure effective communication that strives for maximum transparency balanced with appropriate levels of confidentiality. He also intends to cultivate a more diverse and all-embracing environment in the department while working to increase the number of under-represented faculty members and PhD students. Dr. Fenton is resolved to be a strong advocate of the department to the administration and is determined to obtain the resources necessary for the department’s continued success.

Dr. Fenton greatly enjoyed his years of mentoring PhD students in forensic anthropology and is now excited to work with current and incoming students across the department to help them develop their academic and leadership skills and become the next generation of anthropologists.