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 transition from hunting and gathering to farming has been called on of the “most debated and least understood” topics in archaeology – this topic is also at the heart of Anthropology 362: The Archaeology of Foragers to Farmers. ANP 362 will tackle a selection of the theories, problems, and issues in the study of foraging and farming as adaptive strategies. In this course we will examine human groups who practice foraging, farming, or a mix of both from a global perspective.  We will also look at the transition of groups from foraging to farming, including the origins of agriculture; the concept of low-level food production as it pertains to wild and domestic species; how foragers interact with farmers; and the social and cultural changes that are linked to this transition.  We will rely on archaeological evidence throughout the course, but will also use ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological data in our exploration of this fascinating topic.

ANP 362 will be taught by Mr. Sean Dunham who is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology.  He has a long term interest in subsistence practices and the origins of agriculture.  Mr. Dunham’s dissertation focuses on the interaction of hunter-gatherers and low-level food producers with their environment as well as how their decisions influenced resource use and scheduling (including the use of domestic plants) during the Late Woodland period (AD 600 to AD 1600) in northern Michigan.  He has also previously taught courses in history and anthropology at the University of Minnesota, University of Michigan-Flint, and Lansing Community College in addition to MSU.  Feel free to contact him at dunhamse@msu.edu for further information.

ANP 362 has a required textbook:   The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why did Foragers become Farmers, by Graeme Barker, Oxford University Press, 2009.  Additional readings and course materials will be made available on ANGEL.

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

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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.

The Cairo Genizah: Stories of the Past, Lessons for Tomorrow Rabbi Mark Glickman

Congregation Kol Shalom on Bainbridge Island and Congregation Kol Ami in Woodinville, WA

Monday, November 1 at 7 pm Room 118, Psychology Bldg

Jews treat the written word with great respect, especially if the text invokes the name of God. Respect for sacred texts means that, once they are worn out or superseded, the texts are buried in a special rite. Burial happens on rare occasions, so in the meantime the books are kept in a separate space ‐‐ often attached to a synagogue ‐‐ known as a genizah.The Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo was built in the 9th Century CE. Since that time, manuscripts and books were placed in their genizah ‐‐ a dark, windowless attic. In 1897, Rabbi Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University stepped into that attic, finding the largest treasure of medieval and early manuscripts ever discovered. The genizah held about 300,000 documents, most of which date from the years 969 to 1250 CE. Glickman’s talk will explain how Schechter’s find, though still being “unpacked” today, has forever transformed our knowledge of the Jewish past, Muslim history, and much more.Rabbi Mark Glickman is the first non‐Egyptian to visit the Genizah since 1911, and one of very few to visit it in modern times. Sacred Treasure: The Cairo Genizah — is Glickman’s accessible, comprehensive account of this treasure trove of documents and their discovery. It is a great adventure story, as well as an examination of the genizah’s documents.Books will be available for purchase after the lecture.

Sponsors: MSU Jewish Studies, Office of Diversity & Inclusion, International Studies and Programs, The Graduate School, and College of Social Sciences, as well as Congregation Kehillat Israel, MSU Hillel, and the Greater Lansing Jewish Welfare Federation.

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.

This professional development course (ANP 892, section 5, Adan Quan) is about how to improve your ability to communicate about “culture” related topics to diverse publics (undergraduates, K-12, policymakers, business) and how digital media can facilitate this. It addresses two challenges many graduate students in anthropology and related disciplines will face in their careers: changes in teaching methods and expectations (including increased use of digital media) and increased demand for knowledge about “culture” and “cultural differences” presented in a clear, understandable manner. Through a series of hands-on projects, students will learn how to assess learner’s/audience’s needs, to create effective learning materials, and to use digital media to facilitate teaching/learning. Our “real world” challenge will be to create learning materials for a MSU online course that introduces “US culture” to foreign college students. Your challenge: to identify basic concepts/knowledge appropriate for this course, and to translate this into creative learning materials using digital media. Students should walk out of this course with actual teaching materials they can use in courses they anticipate teaching, with a better sense for effectively designing courses and online learning materials, plus a sense of how to better communicate basic insights about “culture” to diverse audiences. The key goal is to improve your abilities to teach as TA now, as well as make you more marketable to schools after you receive your degree, due to your knowledge about digital media and creative teaching approaches usable in both “real” and online courses. To theoretically inform this practice, we will survey literature covering relevant topics such as intercultural relations, digital anthropology, and the conceptualization of culture in and outside anthropology. Course is open to non-anthropology graduate students but some basic exposure to sociocultural anthropology (at least some undergraduate coursework or independent reading) is presumed. For more information, please contact me: quan at msu.edu