The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Dr. Ethan Watrall has been named a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
Founded in 1707 and granted a royal charter in 1751, the Society of Antiquaries is based in London and charged with furthering the study and preservation of heritage and archaeology in Britain and around the world.
The Society’s 3000 elected members include some of the most prominent scholars and professionals in heritage and archaeology, national museum directors, curators, directors of heritage preservation trusts and non-profits, and members of the UK parliament.
Fellows are nominated internally and elected by existing members of the Society in recognition of their significant achievement in the fields of heritage and archaeology and are entitled to use the initials FSA after their names.
Dr. Watrall was nominated and elected in recognition of his work in publicly engaged digital heritage, digital preservation in heritage and archaeology, and digital museum collections.
Dr. Watrall is the first and only Fellow elected from Michigan State University.
The MSU Department of Anthropology welcomes Dr. Ampson Hagan as their new College of Social Science Dean’s Research Associate. Dr. Hagan earned his PhD in anthropology from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and joined MSU in fall semester 2022.
“I applied to the College of Social Science Dean’s Research Associate Program at MSU because it looked like it was one of a kind,” he said. “The dedication to supporting and nurturing scholars from diverse backgrounds caught my eye, and the program’s commitment to doing the work of putting scholars in positions to succeed, with institutional resources, intrigued me.”
Dr. Hagan’s research interests surround humanitarianism and rescue, broadly focusing on how Black African migrants crossing the Sahara Desert encounter and navigate the humanitarian and policing nexus that seeks to intercept them.
He grew up watching cartoons where superheroes saved others, and then he worked in large NGOs in which people engaged in heroic acts of humanitarianism and rescue. In 2015, during his PhD research at UNC, he often saw news reports of African migrants getting stranded and shipwrecked in the Mediterranean.
“I began to wonder about the paths they took to reach the sea, and I began to see more reports of migrants stuck in the Sahara. After reading about humanitarianism in the Sahara and other regions of Niger and Algeria, I decided to go and see what I could learn about the lives of migrants in those countries.”
Over the course of 12 months of ethnographic research with unauthorized migrants and inside a migrant camp in Niger, this research is the body of his dissertation, Deserving Humans in the Desert: How Black trans-Saharan Migrants Experience the Logics of Liberal Humanism via Humanitarian Care in Transit.
He has ambivalences towards the field of humanitarianism, as well as the practice of rescue.
“The inherent politics of both are complex and involve contradictions to their stated goals,” he said. “Articulating those politics and contradictions is something I think is incredibly important. That would allow stakeholders, organizations, and governments to speak more openly and think more critically about how concepts of humanity, and understandings of who is considered human, are at stake in humanitarian rescue operations and structures.”
He thinks that the rescue as a concept needs to be critically analyzed as a tool that reflects who is worthy of being saved and who is not and that these issues are important for anthropology and for society to consider.
“I hope that others continue to question the concepts of rescue and humanitarianism on their ‘human’ grounds. A humanitarianism that fails to influence or even attempt to improve the abject and dangerous conditions that humans face, is a failure to intervene in crisis. What does that say about humanitarianism? About rescue? I want this research and its fundamental questions to exist in conversations outside of my narrow slice of academic discourse.”
In spring, he will teach ANP 330 Race, Ethnicity and Nation, and this semester, he’s focusing on writing.
“As a very new member of the department, my most meaningful experiences have been all the support from my colleagues, and all the time I have had to write!” he said.
Dr. Hagan joins the department of Anthropology as a Dean’s Research Associate, a program established in 2018 aimed at promoting an inclusive scholarly environment in which outstanding scholars in the social sciences support the advancement of diversity, equity and inclusion in the academy.
“We’re delighted that Dr. Hagan has joined our faculty and we are excited about the important perspectives and dynamic research he brings to our department,” Dr. Todd Fenton said, chair of the department.
The Dean’s Research Associates have a minimal teaching load, will be mentored and supported, and will participate in a Dean’s Research Associate Development Institute with the goal of possibly transitioning them into tenure-system positions at MSU.
“Offering more than just words, the program has put in place institutional resources that will promote the development of scholars of color, and I am excited for the opportunity to grow as a researcher and a future faculty member at MSU,” Dr. Hagan said.
In addition to his research, writing and teaching, Dr. Hagan enjoys learning new skills.
“I want to learn how to skate. I have plenty of pursuits and skills that I want to attain in the near future and learning to in-line and roller skate are important skills to learn,” he said. “Two more things: I’d like to volunteer on a farm, and I want to learn how to drive a car with a manual transmission.”
To learn more about Dr. Hagan, visit https://anthropology.msu.edu/author/haganam1/.
This Friday, Dr. Ampson Hagan is giving a talk entitled, “Sur témoignage et témoignage: witnessing, testimony, and documentary as humanitarian techniques of dissuasion” for the Anthropology Lecture Series.
The talk will be from 3.30 -4.30 pm in C103 McDonel Hall.
Black migrants in Niger have, at public forums, provided testimony of their difficult and horrible experiences traveling through the Sahara. These accounts involve performances of truth and authenticity, intrinsic qualities of both testimony and witnessing (témoignage et témoignage). These affective experiences revolve around preconceived notions of truth, and expectations of normative or appropriate performances of victimhood. Documentary also emerges as a tool of migration management in Niger. Organizations deploy documentaries of migrants in crisis to show the difficulties that many have experienced on the journey through Niger to North Africa. Together, testimony, witnessing, and documentary represent humanitarian efforts to dissuade would-be migrants from embarking on unauthorized migration in order to prevent humanitarian emergency. As techniques of dissuasion, these tools also support the geopolitical goal of blocking and controlling African migration.
Caption: The MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab facilitated a training session in Lansing for members of the Michigan State Police force. The training involved how to properly excavate and handle remains. The skeletons used for the training were made of plastic. Photo credit: Jacqueline Hawthorne, MSU College of Social Science photographer.
In September, the MSU Department of Anthropology offered their four-day, Human Remains Excavation Course for Michigan State Police officers and laboratory personnel.
“This training is important for us to expand our skillset and provide the best and highest quality response for the community,” Christina Rasmussen said. She works for the Michigan State Police in the Lansing Forensic Lab and was one of 17 participants in the training.
This training provides an overview of how forensic anthropology can contribute to investigating deaths, and the appropriate methods investigators should follow when they are searching for and recovering actual human remains (although the skeletons used for training are made of plastic).
“This training is important, as service to the community is a pillar of our practice,” Dr. Carolyn Isaac said. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Social Science, and the director of the MSU Forensic Anthropology Laboratory (MSUFAL). She collaborated with Anthropology Associate Professor Joe Hefner, PhD., on the training, in addition to receiving help from graduate students including Rhian Dunn, Micayla Spiros, Clara Devota, and Holly Long.
“We often partner with law enforcement to aid in the search and recovery of human remains and it is essential that we all understand the appropriate techniques to ensure all of the skeletal remains and evidence at the scene are collected. We also want to create relationships with our law enforcement colleagues so they know they can call us to assist in such recoveries.”
The training includes a combination of lectures and hands-on experience. Lectures feature topics such as how to assess sex, age, ancestry, and stature from skeletal remains; identifications using comparative radiography, skeletal trauma analysis; and forensic archaeology.
The department also provides a hands-on osteology (bone) laboratory so participants can try to identify the various features of the biological profile in the skeletal remains.
One afternoon is dedicated to forensic entomology (how the study of insects can contribute to the death investigation) and a field demonstration of decomposition and the collection of insects of interest. Ryan Kimbirauskas, PhD, a board-certified forensic entomologist and MSU faculty in the Center for Integrative Studies in General Science hosted this part of the training.
“On the third day (excavation day) teams search for, systematically excavate, recover, and document simulated clandestine burials (plastic skeletons that we buried back in May),” Dr. Isaac said. “From this exercise, they prepare presentations on their excavations and present them on the last day.”
Caption: The MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab facilitated a training session in Lansing for members of the Michigan State Police force. The training involved how to properly excavate and handle remains. The skeletons used for the training were made of plastic. Photo credit: Jacqueline Hawthorne, MSU College of Social Science photographer.
On excavation day, participants are divided into a number of teams to perform line searches and probing to detect where the simulated clandestine burials are located. Once the burial locations have been determined, they begin the systematic excavation, ensuring thorough mapping and photography of the process are completed.
“The goal is to expose the skeleton to understand the position of the remains and any associated evidence when they were placed into the ground,” Dr. Isaac explained. “During this process they learn how to detect clandestine graves or soil disturbances, utilize soil probes to determine the outline of the burial, set up a grid over the burial for mapping, carefully remove soil from above the remains to ensure they are not disturbed, screen soil to find any small portions of bones or evidence, pedestal the bones (i.e. removing enough soil to expose the bones but not too much where they will fall out of place), and how to take coordinates of the skeletal remains to produce a map for documentation purposes.”
For Rasmussen, one key takeaway was the need to approach each scene differently but collaboratively.
“I learned the importance of being creative and innovative since each scene is different,” she said. “Working together as a team is the only way to effectively process a scene.”
The Human Remains Excavation course has a rich and long history that spans several decades. The training course was established by Dr. Norm Sauer, founder of the MSU Forensic Anthropology Laboratory, back in the 1990s, and it continued when Dr. Todd Fenton took over the directorship of the lab in 2012.
“The MSUFAL relationship with the MSP has been around for a long time and represents years of working together on complex forensic recoveries, death investigations ranging from suspicious deaths to multiple homicides, and everything in between,” Dr. Hefner said. “We are fortunate to have such a strong bond with the state law enforcement, and these courses provide us an opportunity to give back to the community outside of our normal academic duties.” To learn more about the MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab, visit anthropology.msu.edu.
Department of Anthropology Ph.D. student Aubree Marshall and co-authors Jessica S. Wollmann (Radford University, University of Toronto), McKenzie Schrank (Radford University, University of Colorado), and Laura Tobias Gruss (Radford University) published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology. The title of the article is “Tibial torsion and pressures in the feet during walking: Implications for patterns of metatarsal robusticity.” This article presents the result of six years of research conducted through the Biomechanics Lab at Radford University. This research explored the relationship between tibial torsion and foot angle during standing and walking, and how the findings compared to the metatarsal robusticity found at the site of Dmanisi.
Objectives: The Dmanisi Homo fossils include a tibia with a low degree of torsion and metatarsals with a pattern of robusticity differing from modern humans. It has been proposed that low tibial torsion would cause a low foot progression angle (FPA) in walking, and consequently increased force applied to the medial rays. This could explain the more robust MT III and IV from Dmanisi. Here we experimentally tested these hypothesized biomechanical relationships in living human subjects.
Materials and Methods: We measured transmalleolar axis (TMA, a proxy for tibial torsion), FPA, and plantar pressure distributions during walking in young men (n=40). TMA was measured externally using a newly developed method. A pressure mat recorded FPA and pressure under the metatarsal heads (MT I vs. MT II–IV vs. MT V).
Results: TMA is positively correlated with FPA, but only in the right foot. Plantar pressure under MT II–IV does increase with lower TMA, as predicted, but FPA does not affect pressure. Body mass index also influenced plantar pressure distribution.
Discussion: Lower tibial torsion in humans is associated with slightly increased pressures along the middle rays of the foot during walking, but not because of changes in FPA. Therefore, it is possible that the low degree of torsion in the Dmanisi Homo tibia is related to the unusual pattern of robusticity in the associated metatarsals, but the mechanism behind this relationship is unclear. Future work will explore TMA, FPA, and plantar pressures during running.
The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Dr. Ethan Watrall and Professor Emerita Dr. Lynne Goldstein have published two edited volumes with the University Press Florida on Digital Heritage and Archaeology – Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice: Presentation, Teaching, and Engagement (https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813069319) and Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice: Data, Ethics, and Professionalism (https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813069302)
The two volumes bring together a diverse group of archaeologists and heritage professionals from private, public, and academic settings to discuss practical applications of digital and computational approaches to the field. Contributors thoughtfully explore the diverse and exciting ways in which digital methods are being deployed in archaeological interpretation and analysis, museum collections and archives, and community engagement, as well as the unique challenges that these approaches bring. In particular, the volumes highlight the importance of community, generosity, and openness in the use of digital tools and technologies.
The volumes represent one portion of a larger project that was originally funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant – The Institute for Digital Archaeology Method and Practice (digitalarchaeology.msu.edu). The institute, which was directed by Watrall and Goldstein, sought to build community and capacity among private sector, public sector, student, and scholarly archaeologists and heritage professionals around ethical, thoughtful, and practical applications of digital methods and computational approaches in archaeology and heritage. Many of the authors represented in the volumes were original institute attendees.
Department of Anthropology Associate Professor Dr. Masako Fujita, Ph.D. Candidate Nerli Paredes Ruvalcaba and co-authors recently published in the American Journal of Human Biology. The article, titled, “Human milk lactoferrin variation in relation to maternal inflammation and iron deficiency in northern Kenya” explored how nutritional and disease stress among breastfeeding mothers might influence the immune content in mothers’ own milk, focusing on an iron-binding protein called lactoferrin. Lactoferrin is abundant in fluids such as saliva, tears, and milk. In milk, it serves to protect infants against infection. Lactoferrin has come under the spotlight recently because of its preventive and therapeutic potential against COVID-19 when taken as a supplement (made from cow’s milk). The study found that human milk lactoferrin content did not differ between mothers with and without iron deficiency, suggesting that mothers under nutritional stress are able to maintain their delivery of lactoferrin to infants. Moreover, the study found that mothers undergoing inflammation (likely due to infections) delivered more lactoferrin when raising younger infants than mothers without inflammation raising similarly young infants, suggesting that mothers under infectious disease stress might upregulate milk lactoferrin delivery and therefore bolster immune protection for young infants who are at heightened vulnerability to infection.
Background: Milk lactoferrin is a multi-functional, iron-binding glycoprotein with immunomodulatory effects, protecting infants against infectious diseases.
Aims: This study explored how maternal inflammation/infection and iron-deficiency anemia (IDA) might influence human milk lactoferrin. Lactoferrin might be elevated with maternal inflammation resulting from infectious disease processes. Conversely, lactoferrin might decrease with IDA, corresponding to scarce maternal iron for transfer in milk. In these two hypothesized scenarios, the degree of lactoferrin elevation or decrease might vary with infant vulnerability to infectious diseases or malnutrition. Alternatively, lactoferrin might be unassociated with inflammation/infection or IDA if mothers could buffer it against these conditions.
Materials & Methods: We used cross-sectional data from Ariaal mothers of northern Kenya (n = 200) to evaluate associations between milk lactoferrin and maternal inflammation/infection, IDA, infant age/sex, and the mother-infant variable interactions in multivariate regression models.
Results: Maternal inflammation was associated with higher lactoferrin for younger infants (<~5 months of age) but with lower lactoferrin for older infants. Maternal IDA was unassociated with lactoferrin alone or in interaction with infant variables.
Discussion & Conclusion: Results suggest that mothers of vulnerable young infants deliver more lactoferrin when they have inflammation/infection but mothers with older infants do not, and that maternal delivery of lactoferrin is unaffected by their IDA. Longitudinal research should verify these findings.
Department of Anthropology Associate Professor Dr. Masako Fujita and co-author Eleanor Brindle recently published in the Cambridge University Press’ Experimental Results. The article, titled, “Comparing the creamatocrit of human milk before and after long-term freezing” evaluates the effect of long-term cryogenic storage on the creamatocrit, a technique for estimating the milk lipid content. This study found that the creamatocrit of human milk undergone 10 years of storage at ultra-low temperatures can provide values in high correlation with creamatocrit values obtained prior to storage. However, the results suggest a systematic bias that may vary with the amount of lipids that were in the milk in the first place. This bias may result in a subtle but systematic underestimation in the lower creamatocrit range and overestimation in the higher creamatocrit range. The authors call for future research to evaluate the correctability of this bias – if correctable, milk specimens in deep freezers of universities and milk banks can facilitate opportunities for research on human milk variation across time and space.
Abstract: Objectives: The creamatocrit is a simple technique for estimating the lipid content of milk, widely adopted for clinical and research purposes. We evaluated the effect of long-term cryogenic storage on the creamatocrit for human milk.
Methods: Frozen and thawed milk specimens (n = 18) were subjected to the creamatocrit technique. The specimens were reanalyzed after long-term cryogenic storage (10 years at <70°C). The correlation between pre- and post-storage values was tested, and their differences were analyzed using the Bland–Altman plot.
Results: The pre- and post-storage values were highly correlated (r = 0.960, p < .0001). The Bland–Altman plot revealed a positive association between their differences and means (Pitman’s test r = 0.743, p < .001), suggesting the presence of nonconstant bias across the creamatocrit range. Long-term storage of human milk may introduce subtle bias to the creamatocrit in replicating pre-storage values. Further research should evaluate whether this bias is statistically correctable.
Department of Anthropology Associate Professor Dr. Mara Leichtman published an article in The Conversation, which is a nonprofit independent news organization.
Dr. Leichtman’s article, titled, “How Shiite Islam reached Tanzania, and Ashoura processions became an annual tradition,” is based on her fieldwork conducted in Tanzania this past summer. This article provides a brief history of Shiite Islam in East Africa followed by a detailed description of how Ashoura processions became an annual tradition in Tanzania. According to Dr. Leichtman, “In Tanzania, the government protects freedom of religion. And that is evident in the unique processions of the Indian and African religious communities sharing the peaceful message of Imam Hussein.”
Dr. Leichtman acknowledges the funding she received from the Luce/ACLS Program in Religion, Journalism & International Affairs and the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World at Shenandoah University to pursue this research.
Passionate about the intersection of people, animals, environment and activism, Kelsey Merreck Wagner is a Ph.D. candidate in the MSU Anthropology program and is also an artist. Since the pandemic, she has been weaving community trash into tapestries and preparing for her dissertation research trip to Thailand in October.
MSU Anthropology PhD candidate and local artist Kelsey Merreck Wagner stands with her tapestry she wove using plastic. For more of her art, visit her website. Photo credit: Kelsey Merreck Wagner.
“I was really drawn to the idea that weavings are inherently based in place because people generally use local fibers, whether it’s from sheep or local plant fibers, and the dyes from their materials come from their local ecosystems,” she said. “I really kind of wanted to do a satirical nod to that by thinking: Okay, what is my place-based weaving as a white woman in America? Plastic. Plastic. Plastic is my local resource that I have so much of. Trash is part of our environment and so plastic really can’t be separated from that. Because once it’s made, once it’s consumed and thrown away, it’s always going to be there. I started weaving with these as an experiment and realized I really loved the textures and patterns.”
Once she began collecting trash from others, she realized how trash displays intersectional identities in a person or a community such as gender, age, race and class, almost like a portrait.
“I also see my art as a call out to these different brands and corporations as kind of an eye opener of how much plastic adds up over time,” she said.
Her work will be showcased in the upcoming MSU Museum Science Gallery 1.5 ° Celsius exhibition which begins on September 6, 2022, and will last through February 2023. The exhibition will include contributions of more than one dozen national and international artists, scientists, and researchers to help the public explore the global climate crisis.
“They also asked me to do a weaving workshop at the STEM building,” Wagner said. “I’m going to be bringing a huge, basic, wooden tapestry loom that I’ll build for this one project. I’ll be bringing in plastic and then workshop participants are also encouraged to bring in any kind of trash that they want to weave with. We’re going to all work together to do a collaborative community weaving and see what we can make. We will be able to think of it as a portrait of the community or of the participants thinking about all the different trash that we use.”
Wagner will lead a weaving workshop on September 18 at the MSU Museum open to everyone in the community. Register at museum.msu.edu. Photo credit: MSU Museum.
Wagner’s undergrad training is in studio art and art history, and she found an interdisciplinary masters’ anthropology program where she was able to develop her art in relation to sustainability and the environment.
“I was passionate about and wanted to get more involved with environmentalism, but I never saw myself as a natural scientist,” she said. “But during my master’s, I started going to work at this elephant organization in Thailand, and it made me realize for the first time that conservation is really about people, and it’s about communities.”
Once she graduated from her master’s program, she worked for a year in Cambodia for an environmental organization as their exhibitions coordinator for their natural history museum. She was applying to MSU at the time and getting in touch with Dr. Beth Drexler, who is now her current graduate advisor.
“She was excited about the idea of blending visual anthropology and interdisciplinary research, and environmental activism, which is so exciting, because it was important to me to find an advisor and a program that values interdisciplinary work and activism,” she said. “That’s really why I ended up at MSU in this program, because I felt like there’s so many people that were studying different things and blending different bodies of knowledge, especially in a four field program. And that felt like the right fit for me. It all fell into place that I would be able to use my background in arts, my love of elephants and the environment. And then just also being really interested in how people relate to environments.”
Wagner is in her fourth year of her MSU Anthropology PhD program. In October, she will travel to Thailand to start her dissertation research. Her work focuses on human-environment and human-animal relationships, and how people have long-standing traditions of interacting with the environment, interacting with animals in the ecosystems in ways that are part of their culture. In Thailand, she is specifically interested in researching human-elephant relationships.
“I have been obsessed with elephants since I was a little girl, so it’s been a life-long passion of mine,” Wagner smiled. “In Thailand, elephants are so common in material culture and pop culture. They’re the national cultural symbol, and everywhere you go, there are sculptures of elephants outside buildings, in restaurants, t-shirts, and tourism goods – you see elephants everywhere. I’m also an artist, so I like seeing how elephants are portrayed and what a particular culture or community within that culture thinks about these animals and how they treat them.”
There’s a conservation component of her research where she’ll be continuing to work with the elephant organization Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai that she’s been working with since her master’s.
“It’s a giant elephant sanctuary where they have over 100 rescued elephants that have been rescued from circuses, street begging, logging – many unethical, unfair labor situations. The sanctuary is run by a local Thai woman who only hires local Thai and nearby ethnic groups to work at this organization caring for the elephants. Then, tourists come in and pay to clean up after the elephants and feed them. It’s a huge organization that does a lot for local communities, including funding and building some local schools.”
Wagner working with Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where she will complete her dissertation research. Photo credit: Kelsey Merreck Wagner
Through the organization, Wagner hopes to do a community engagement art project with the youth. While she envisions giant murals or a large art installation, she’s also leaving it open-ended because she wants the youth to express their ideas for the project.
“I’m trying to really just make those connections between activism and expression, both personal expression and community expression by bringing in the idea of talking about the environment through art. Anthropologists are really interested in applied and activist anthropology, and pondering how our research can contribute to issues as broad as climate change and human rights. And so for me, that’s why it’s really important to be working on these different art projects and activism projects with community members, and especially youth, because I see it as my way to be able to like give back in this very specific art and activism skill set that I’ve been developing for more than 10 years now.”
View Wagner’s work and join in the discussion about climate change at the MSU Museum Science Gallery 1.5 ° Celsius exhibition: https://museum.msu.edu/?exhibition=1-5-celsius. The weaving workshop is on the MSU campus from 1:00-2:00 on Sunday, September 18. You can register here.
To learn more about the MSU Department of Anthropology, visit anthropology.msu.edu.
