Department of Anthropology

  • Melanie Pitt named Outstanding Senior 

    Graduating Senior Melanie Pitt of Farmington Hills, Mich. has been chosen by the Department of Anthropology as this year’s Outstanding Senior. 

    Pitt said she was elated and shocked when she heard the news.  

    “It was very unexpected,” Pitt said. “I don’t tend to expect much from what I have done, but it was a nice surprise. I was really happy.”  

    Professor of Anthropology and director of the MSU Bioarcheology Laboratory Dr. Gabriel Wrobel nominated Pitt for the award because she showed initiative with organization, something that is crucial for work in the lab. 

    Wrobel said Pitt’s organization set her apart from other students.  

    “When I first met Melanie and I talked to her a little bit, I immediately saw that she just had an organized brain and she liked to put things in order. And I thought, I need somebody that can do that in this lab,” Wrobel said.  

    “She was clearly prepared and organized and that was great,” Wrobel added. “I love finding students like that.”  

    Pitt transferred to MSU from Schoolcraft College in Livonia in 2021. She previously studied at Albion College, where she worked as a research assistant in the Anthropology Department. Pitt said she always enjoyed studying anthropology and the thought of studying and working in MSU’s bioarcheological lab intrigued her.  

    “When I was transferring into a bigger university, I started to think, ‘Oh, maybe forensics would be interesting,” she said.  

    Pitt said she did more research and connected with Professor of Anthropology Dr. Stacey Camp, who helped her narrow down which subfield she wanted to study: bioarcheology. 
     

    Wrobel helped Pitt secure the Dean’s Assistantship grant through the College of Social Science. The grant, a $5600 stipend, gives students “the opportunity to have an enriched independent research experience in the social sciences with a faculty mentor.”   

    Pitt worked closely with Dr. Wrobel to create a digital repository for the bioarcheology lab using Kora.  

    Kora is an open-source, database-driven, online digital repository application for complex multimedia objects (text, images, audio, video) created by MATRIX. The application ingests, manages, and delivers digital objects with corresponding metadata that enhances the research and educational value of the objects. (from Kora’s website).  

    “She has completely restructured the lab and how we organize the materials that are in it, how we find things, how we keep digital records,” Wrobel said. “It has been a huge help.”  
     

    Pitt said organization did not always come naturally to her, but following her diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, things got easier, and she started to excel in her college courses.  

    “I’d always sort of thought I was just a bad student, my peers never seemed to struggle with homework and studying the way I did,” Pitt said. “Once I was diagnosed with ADHD and began treating it, the difference was unbelievable – it was like I had needed glasses my whole life and never understood why I could not read the board like everyone else. I was not a bad student, my brain just worked differently, and I had never had the means to excel.”  

    “Before coming to MSU, I didn’t know what I wanted to do after college,” Pitt said. “I’m still a little unsure, I am figuring it out as I go. I love archaeology, and this experience with the digital archive and organizing the lab has shown me I also really like collections management. It has given me a few things to think about as potentials for future careers.”  

    After graduation, Pitt is slated to join Dr. Wrobel in Belize where they and other members of the Ambergris Caye Archaeological Project, including Maya students from Belize, will excavate an ancient Maya site community. Pitt will lead the project’s field lab. 

    Pitt said she is excited about the opportunity to travel, and she is looking forward to continuing her work. She said it is bittersweet to look back on her college career and she is proud of how far she has come.  

    “It’s strange to look back six years ago and remember how much harder school used to be for me,” Pitt said. “At the same time, I would not have it any other way. I think the way that I was when I first started college and the struggles that I faced were essential for where I am now. That was a foundation that I needed to build upon. But it was all necessary steps to get to where I am now.”  

    watrall

    ,

  • Associate Professor Dr. Elizabeth Drexler publishes in Visual Anthropology Review

    Department of Anthropology Associate Professor and Director of Peace and Justice Studies Dr. Elizabeth Drexler published an article in Visual Anthropology Review. The article is titled, Seeing Gaslighting: Photo-Dialogues and Structural Injustice. Focusing on gaslighting, the article reveals a process that manipulates perception to obscure systemic inequality and injustice and produce complacency and/or inability to perceive complicity in an unjust system through photo-dialogs that engage the sensory and affective rather than evidentiary aspect of images of injustice. 

    This article is based on a project supported by the Provost Undergraduate Research Initiative Award (2019-20 and 2020-21) that generously funded Isabel Hersey’s research assistance. 

    White Girl Tears Have Power
     Source: Lillian Young.

    Read the full article at: https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12286

    Abstract: Extending photovoice methodology, I describe a process of seeing structural injustice through photo-dialogues.   In a collective context where state and society collude in normalizing and extending injustice through both law and systemic gaslighting, the problem of exposing injustice with images involves issues of common sense, language, institutions, and access to various forms of power. “Seeing gaslighting” reveals a process that manipulates perception to obscure systemic inequality and injustice and produce complacency and/or inability to perceive complicity in an unjust system. Photo-dialogues engage the sensory and affective rather than evidentiary aspect of images of injustice.

    watrall

  • Associate Professor of Anthropology Dr. Heather Howard co-publishes chapter in Michigan Salvage: Bonnie Jo Campbell and the American Midwest

    Associate Professor of Anthropology Dr. Heather Howard co-published a chapter in Michigan Salvage: Bonnie Jo Campbell and the American Midwest. “Indigeneity in Once Upon a River” and accompanying teaching activity, “What’s your Indigenous narrative?”

    In this chapter, Howard-Bobiwash examines transformations in the tropes of indigeneity in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River (2011), from novel to the feature film version of the book released in 2019. The role of fiction in the production of knowledge about Indigenous peoples is explored through questions of representational practice, and intersections of race, gender, identity, and landscape. The accompanying teaching activity prompts students to think critically about how portrayals and silenced absences of Indigeneity all around us are and produce social norms with real consequences for Indigenous persons and communities.  

    Michigan Salvage is the first scholarly collection on celebrated writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, the author of two novels and three short story collections, including National Book Award finalist American Salvage (2009). Her writing captures a diverse and bustling rural America, brimming with complex characters who struggle with addiction, poverty, and land degradation—issues that have become, undeniably, part of the southwestern Michigan landscape that she calls home. The essays in this volume demonstrate many rich ways to approach Campbell’s writing, from historical and cultural overviews to essays examining the class and gender implications of her stories and novels, to teaching essays highlighting how to use her work in the classroom and beyond. Along with each essay, Michigan Salvage also features lesson plans and writing prompts meant to spark discussion and encourage further investigation into these stories and novels.

    Howard-Bobiwash, Heather A. (2023). “Indigeneity in Once Upon a River” and accompanying teaching activity, “What’s your Indigenous narrative?” In Michigan Salvage: Bonnie Jo Campbell and the American Midwest, Lisa DuRose, Andy Oler, and Ross Tangedal (eds). Michigan State University Press, pp. 15-32, 192-194.

    Read the chapter here: https://msupress.org/9781611864526/michigan-salvage/

    watrall

    ,

  • Associate Professor of Anthropology Dr. Heather Howard co-publishes an article in the Epidemiologic Reviews

    Associate Professor of Anthropology Dr. Heather Howard co-publishes an article in Epidemiologic Reviews with Danielle Gartner (Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, MSU, primary author), Madeline Nash (Doctoral Student, Sociology, MSU) and Ceco Maples (Undergraduate Major in Anthropology, MSU). The review article is titled, Misracialization of Indigenous People in Population Health and Mortality Studies: A Scoping Review to Establish Promising Practices. This review identifies four primary limitations of approaches used in population health research that misracialize or misclassify indigenous people and offers promising practices to consider. 

    Read the full article at: https://doi.org/10.1093/epirev/mxad001

    ABSTRACT: Indigenous people are often misracialized or misclassified as other racial or ethnic identities in population health research. This misclassification leads to underestimation of Indigenous-specific mortality and health metrics, and subsequently, inadequate resource allocation. In recognition of this problem, investigators around the world have devised analytic methods to address racial misclassification of Indigenous people. We carried out a scoping review based on searches in PubMed, Web of Science, and the Native Health Database for empirical studies published after 2000 that include Indigenous-specific estimates of health or mortality and that take analytic steps to rectify racial misclassification of Indigenous people. We then considered the weaknesses and strengths of implemented analytic approaches, with a focus on methods used in the United States (U.S.) context. To do this, we extracted information from 97 articles and compared the analytic approaches used. The most common approach to address Indigenous misclassification is to use data linkage, though other methods include geographic restriction to areas where misclassification is less common, exclusion of some subgroups, imputation, aggregation, and electronic health record abstraction. We identified four primary limitations of these approaches: (1) combining data sources that use inconsistent process and/or sources of race and ethnicity information, (2) conflating race, ethnicity, and nationality, (3) applying insufficient algorithms to bridge, impute, or link race and ethnicity information, and (4) assuming the hyperlocality of Indigenous people. While there is no perfect solution to the issue of Indigenous misclassification in population-based studies, a review of this literature provided promising practices to consider.

    watrall

  • MD-Ph.D. Student Jessica Ding Wins an Honorable Mention in Shao Chang Lee Scholarship Fund Best Paper Competition

    The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that MD-Ph.D. student Jessica Ding has won an honorable mention in the Shao Chang Lee Scholarship Fund Best Paper Competition through the Michigan State University Asian Studies Center. The Shao Chang Lee Scholarship Fund was established by friends and colleagues of the late Professor Lee to provide scholarship awards for undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at MSU who have made outstanding accomplishments in Asian studies and are pursuing or planning to pursue a program that includes Asian studies.

    Jessica’s paper is titled “Household Registration System Reform: A Sociohistorical Comparison of Shanghai and Ho Chi Minh City”, and was written for Dr. Xuefei Ren’s course, Sociology 931: Topics in Structural Inequity. 

    Here’s a brief description of her paper:

    Migrants entering densely populated urban areas often face barriers to finding work, securing housing, and accessing social services. There are significant structural restrictions at play—in some countries, these restrictions are embedded in inequitable household registration systems. This paper evaluates the divergence in household registration system reforms using two case studies: the hộ khẩu system in Vietnam and the hukou system in China. Despite similarities in original intent, national reforms in the two countries were constructed and implemented differently. This was primarily due to four factors: municipal-central authority power differentials, the balance of citizens’ rights with economic growth, different scopes, and relative concerns with resource allocation. Particularly after the onset of COVID-19, which worsened socioeconomic inequities and disrupted rural-urban migration patterns, it is critical to understand how household registration systems (and their subsequent reforms) continue to shape social mobility and urban growth amid rapid economic progress.

    watrall

    ,

  • Dr. Masako Fujita coauthors published article

    Associate Professor of Anthropology Dr. Masako Fujita recently coauthored Does the immune system of milk increase activity for infants experiencing infectious disease episodes in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania? which appears in the American Journal of Human Biology.

    Read the article here: Does the immune system of milk increase activity for infants experiencing infectious disease episodes in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania? – Wander – American Journal of Human Biology – Wiley Online Library

    Read more about Dr. Fujita here: Featured Faculty, Dr. Masako Fujita: A passion for anthropology and making a difference in women’s health and wellness – Department of Anthropology (msu.edu)

    watrall

    ,

  • 17th Annual Endowed Bernard Gallin Lecture in Asian Anthropology

    Join The Department of Anthropology on April 24 from 12 – 2 p.m. for The 17th Annual Endowed Bernard Gallin Lecture in Asian Anthropology: Biometrics and Their Discontents in India: Surveillance Capitalism, Techno-utopianism, and Public Health on the Gendered Margin. The lecture will be held in room 303 of the International Center.

    Zoom option:

    https://msu.zoom.us/j/98407758700

    Passcode: ANP@MSU

    ‌Talk description:

    Biometric ID emerged, over the decades of the 1990s and 2000s, as a key figure for national security in India, as security was variably reimagined in relation to shifting economic and political futures.  One key site where biometric governance came to matter as both utopian promise and dystopian threat was in a new managerialism for health and welfare. Beginning with the reimagination of drug-resistant tuberculosis by computer scientists, this talk turns to a series of ethnographically rendered sites of contestation over the biometric future, focusing on debates on AIDS and TB care and the prevention of violence among Indian transgender (kinnar, hijra, thirunangai) networks in relation to the forms of life and of death that biometric security promises.

    watrall

    ,

  • Undergraduate symposium submission deadline March 3

    The Department of Anthropology’s annual undergraduate research symposium and showcase takes place on March 28th from 6:30 P.M. to 8:30 P.M. in room 103 in Erickson Hall. Parents are welcome, too!

    watrall

    , ,

  • Society of Antiquaries elects first MSU professor Dr. Ethan Watrall as fellow 

    By Katie Nicpon

    The Society of Antiquaries elected Dr. Ethan Watrall, associate professor in the Michigan State University Department of Anthropology, as a fellow. The Society of Antiquaries was founded in 1707, and represents the oldest learned and prominent scholarly society focusing on heritage and archaeology. The society’s 3,000 elected members include some of the most prominent scholars and professionals in heritage and archaeology such as national museum directors, curators, directors of heritage preservation trusts and non-profits, and members of the UK parliament. Dr. Watrall is the first MSU professor to have ever been granted this distinction, only the fourth elected from the Big 10, and the ninth from the United States. 

    “Being named a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries is enormously important to me as it is a recognition of the importance of my work to the fields of heritage and archaeology,” Dr. Ethan Watrall said. “It also reflects very well on the Department of Anthropology by shining a spotlight on the outstanding research, teaching, and outreach we’re doing in heritage, preservation and community engagement.”  

    Dr. Watrall was elected due to the notoriety of   his research, teaching and outreach in the use of digital methods and computational approaches to document, preserve, contextualize, and provide access to tangible heritage and archaeology. 

    “I strive to leverage digital methods to preserve and provide access to archaeological and heritage materials, collections, knowledge, and data in order to facilitate research, advance knowledge, fuel interpretation, and democratize understanding and appreciation of the past.”

    In most cases, his research leans towards providing a mechanism for the public to engage with and understand our collective heritage.

    “But it’s not just about public access to digitized heritage,” he explained. “My work also focuses on collaborating with communities to digitize their own heritage and tell their own stories about their past with that digitized heritage. A lot of my work also intersects with museums and other collections holding heritage institutions, building workflows and platforms to digitize, provide access to, and contextualize natural and cultural collections that are often completely inaccessible to the public, communities, students, and scholars.” 

    While Dr. Watrall has directed or co-directed many externally funded digital heritage and archaeology projects, a recent example of his work in this area is the Internment Archaeology Digital Archive (IADA), which he co-directs with his Department of Anthropology colleague Dr. Stacey Camp. Currently funded by the National Park Service and developed in collaboration with MSU’s Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, IADA is an open digital archive that will host, preserve, and provide broad public access to digitized collections of archaeological materials, archival documents, oral histories and memorabilia that speak to the experiences of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II in the United States.

    “A significant amount of the digitization work on this project is happening in my lab at MSU (Digital Heritage Innovation Lab), including using various techniques to create 3D scans of artifacts and objects from two sites of internment and incarceration – the Minidoka National Historic Site (the site of Minidoka War Relocation Center) and the Kooskia Internment Camp 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 provides testimony and material evidence of the trauma wrought by incarceration and discrimination.”

    Additionally, the focus of Dr. Watrall’s teaching helps to prepare future generations of Anthropologists to engage in digital methods and computational approaches to preserve heritage. He regularly teaches ANP 412: Methods and Practice in Digital Heritage and ANP 465: Field Methods in Digital Heritage – the only class of its kind in the U.S. 

    “Beyond my curricular efforts, I also direct the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative, which provides graduate students interested in cultural heritage with the space to learn how to apply digital methods and computational approaches to their work,” he said.  

    Dr. Watrall also seeks to share digital practices with the field of Anthropology across a wide scale. He recently published two edited volumes (co-edited with Dr. Lynne Goldstein, professor emerita of Anthropology) with University Press of Florida. The volumes, Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice: Data, Ethics, and Professionalism and Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice: Presentation, Teaching, and Engagement, are the outcomes of the National Endowment for the Humanities Funded Institute for Digital Archaeology Method & Practice which he co-directed with Dr. Goldstein some years ago. 

    All new fellows are formally admitted to the society during a ceremony at Burlington House, the society’s headquarters in London, where they sign the register of admissions and are welcomed into the society. Dr. Watrall hopes to attend the ceremony the next time he’s in London. 

    “It is my hope that the being named a fellow will help greatly increase the number of graduate students wanting to come to MSU to work with me and my colleagues in the department, provide more opportunities to secure external funding to support our work, provide more opportunities for innovative collaboration with other scholars and units around campus, and encourage the college and university to invest more resources in our work and allow us to grow and extend our reach and impact.” 

    To learn more about the MSU Department of Anthropology, visit anthropology.msu.edu.

    watrall

  • Alumna Assistant Professor Dr. Susan Kooiman (SIU- Edwardsville), Professor Emerita Dr. Lynne Goldstein, Professor Emeritus Dr. William Lovis and MSU Geography Professor Dr. Alan Arbogast publish in Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology

    Alumna Assistant Professor Dr. Susan Kooiman (SIU- Edwardsville), Professor Emerita Dr. Lynne Goldstein, Professor Emeritus Dr. William Lovis and MSU Geography Professor Dr. Alan Arbogast publish in Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology. This collaborative paper, titled, “The Precontact Archaeology of the Michigan State University Campus and the Campus Archaeology Program (CAP)”, presents the origins and role of the MSU CAP, and in doing so frames the diverse knowledge bases and intellectual partnerships through which the indigenous pre-EuroAmerican occupation of what is now the MSU campus is currently known. Drawing on oral accounts, MSU Museum collections, CAP excavations, and linkages with the landscape evolution of the campus, this comprehensive effort documents Indigenous use of the banks of the Red Cedar River at MSU for over 3000 years. It not only provides a substantial foundation for future campus research, but also presents important insights into the deep Native American heritage of lands now occupied by MSU. 

    Read the full article at: https://www.midwestarchaeology.org/files/MCJA%2047_2%20Kooiman.pdf

    Abstract: Here we summarize the current state of knowledge about the precontact archaeology of the Michigan State University (MSU) campus as revealed through work conducted by the MSU Campus Archaeology Program (CAP), the MSU Museum, and the Department of Anthropology. A multipronged approach places this collective work in programmatic, institutional, historical, geographic, and archaeological context. The history of CAP and its impact on campus operations and understandings of campus history demonstrate the strength of such programs. Unpacking the MSU Museum collections reveals additional insight into the deep Indigenous history of university lands. Results of the first systematic excavations of a precontact Archaic site on the MSU campus, the Beaumont West site (20IN205), are reported alongside accounts of systematic archaeological survey conducted over a span of 70 years, recent geomorphological work, and the cumulative collections of precontact material culture from the MSU campus housed at the MSU Museum. Collectively, this paints an engaging multifaceted story of an ever-changing natural and social landscape that highlights the value of understanding the role college campuses can play in providing information about the distant as well as the recent past.

    watrall