Department of Anthropology

  • Dr. John Norder

    Dr. John Norder

    Since graduating from University of Michigan and joining MSU’s faculty, Dr. John Norder has found himself in many roles: archaeologist, ethnographer, teacher, advocate, and facilitator. Most recently, he’s been furthering MSU’s service mission in partnership with Indigenous peoples as the Interim Director of the Native American Institute (NAI). Due to his success, he’s been recommended by the Dean of Agriculture and Natural resources to assume the role as formal director for the next five years.

    NAI’s philosophy is to promote research and sustainable development that is native led and culturally relevant. Under Dr. Norder’s direction, NAI is working in three different capacities: Connecting tribal organizations with MSU resources and partners, consulting on joint projects with Indigenous groups and MSU researchers, and implementing projects directly in response to requests from tribes. Dr. Norder has also begun tracking research with Native Americans across MSU’s campus so that NAI can be a hub where applied research, extension projects, and scientific investigation relating to Indigenous communities converge.

    Dr. Norder’s experience with heritage resource management is an asset at NAI, and it was MSU’s Department of Anthropology that supported him expanding his focus in this direction. After joining the faculty at MSU he received funding to conduct ethnographic work on land use, fueled by his interest in pre-European Indigenous landscapes. Conversations with land users led him to a broader focus on heritage resources, since it was clear these were vital to current livelihoods and community identity. Heritage resources include cultural resources like archaeological sites, but also natural resources like fish, wildlife, wild rice, and forest products that tribes manage and depend on economically. In many Indigenous communities these resources have become important tools for asserting sovereignty. As director of NAI, Dr. Norder oversees a range of projects that address these and other issues.

    One reason Indigenous communities seek out NAI is the need for natural resource assessments and development. A recent example is a climate project conducted with the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi, MSU environmental justice expert Dr. Kyle Whyte, and University of Michigan’s Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessment center. NAI handled the qualitative study on the project and Dr. Norder worked with student interns who collected data on environmental use and knowledge among the Potawatomi. The team has been approached by the journal Human Ecology to submit a multiauthored piece on this project.

    Dr. Norder encourages students, working in Native American communities or elsewhere, to be solution-oriented in the work they are doing. He sees opportunities for anthropology students to do meaningful work in this area, and NAI is a unique organization that supports this engaged research with tribes. Dr. Norder, working with the new director of the American Indian Studies Program and others on campus, is developing plans to eventually establish a center at MSU that would house all Indigenous groups on campus and move them towards deeper association with each other with the goal of attracting more Native American students to MSU.

    Norder NewsLetter

    Image: Dr. John Norder at Long Slide Falls near the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin

    This article is in the Department of Anthropology’s Fall 2015 Newsletter, see the entire newsletter here.

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  • Featured Faculty Member: Dr. Andrea Louie

    Featured Faculty Member: Dr. Andrea Louie
    Dr. Andrea Louie
    Dr. Andrea Louie

    Dr. Louie launches a new research project on shifting international student identities in the context of post-industrial Michigan, building on her previous body of work examining Chineseness in the context of transnational migration, globalization, and government projects of inclusion and exclusion in both China and the U.S.

    As an undergraduate, Dr. Louie majored in History and Anthropology at Bowdoin College, taking her first anthropology course with an inspirational visiting professor named Harald Prins, who encouraged her to explore her burgeoning interest in Chinese American identity in his course on Native Americans. He also encouraged Dr. Louie to apply to graduate school at U.C. Berkeley, a university with strengths in anthropology, Asian Studies, and Asian American Studies. There, Dr. Louie studied under Laura Nader, receiving her Ph.D. in December 1996.

    Dr. Louie has been a faculty member at MSU since 1998, when she was hired for a position focusing on Asian diasporas and migration after completing a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Washington University, St. Louis. She has taught a variety of courses, including Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology, Social and Cultural Analysis, China: Culture and Society, National Diversity and Change, and a graduate course titled Transnational Processes and Identities. In 2004, her proposal for an undergraduate specialization in Asian Pacific American studies was approved, and she was the program director for this specialization until stepping down in 2010.

    Dr. Louie’s work has always dealt with questions that have been at the margins of the transnational migration literature, exploring the complexity of Chinese identities as they shift over time in response to multiple and sometimes conflicting discourses of Chineseness as a racial, cultural, and nationalist identity. Both of her previous research projects examined the re-working of “Chinese” identities in the context of globalization, transnational exchanges, and government projects of inclusion and exclusion in both China and the U.S. Dr. Louie’s first book, Chineseness Across Borders: Renegotiating Chinese Identities in China and the United States, was published in 2004 by Duke University Press and won the Association for Asian American Studies Social Sciences book award for books published that year. Her second book, How Chinese Are You?: Adopted Chinese Youth and their Families Negotiate Identity and Culture, is available from New York University Press as of August 2015. (http://nyupress.org/books/9781479894635/)

    While much positive attention has been given to the new family forms created through transnational adoption, there have also been numerous critiques of the ways that white adoptive parents approach the cultural and racial difference of their adopted children. This is particularly in reference to the attention many place on Chineseness as a form of cultural difference, often at the expense of an awareness of how their racial minority status also impacts them. Based on over 75 interviews as well as in-depth participant observation in St. Louis, the San Francisco Bay Area, and China, Dr. Louie’s research examined how white and Asian American adoptive parents’ racial and class positioning shape the “ethnic options” (Waters 1990) they exercised, and how both children’s and parents’ identities were reshaped and re-negotiated over time, especially as children come of age. Like the American-born Chinese Americans she explored earlier, their relationships to China and Chineseness are highly mediated, made even more complicated by their parents’ concerted efforts to help them craft identities that both acknowledge their Chinese origins but also integrate them into their own families’ cultural, religious, and racial backgrounds.

    Dr. Louie’s latest research project on Chinese international students represents a natural continuation of her previous work on transnational migration, Chineseness, and identity, and builds upon her expertise on mainland China, transnational migration, and identity. She plans to conduct an ethnographic study of Chinese student experiences in the U.S. that is situated in the realities of both post-socialist China (including the One Child Policy that drives the increase in students studying abroad) and in the context of a post-industrial Michigan.

    This article is in the Department of Anthropology’s Spring 2015 Newsletter, see the entire newsletter here.

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  • Masako Fujita

    Dr. Masako Fujita has been a faculty member in MSU anthropology since Fall 2008.

    She received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington where she focused on biocultural anthropology. Her research focuses on nutrition and health of living people.

    In particular, Fujita studies micronutrient health, maternal & child nutrition, and the idea of parental investment in elucidating resource transfer from one generation to the next. The factors examined include not only time and energy, but also biological resources such as nutrients and immune cells.

    In her laboratory, the Biomarker Laboratory for Anthropological Research at MSU, Fujita will pursue her research on noninvasive and field-friendly methods. Fujita and her colleagues have developed a method that is employed to quantify biochemical markers of morbidity and mortality risk in studies of population health.

    This research has recently been published in the Journal of Immunological Methods. In the near future, her colleagues, Eleanor Brindle (U of Washington) and Philip Ndemwa (Kenya Medical Research Institute), will visit Fujita’s lab where they plan to expand upon this research.

    Using quantitative markers coupled with qualitative and cultural information from questionnaires, interviews, and focus-groups, she will further her efforts toward a biocultural understanding of why so many children suffer from micronutrient deficiencies and increasingly from the metabolic syndrome around the world.

    “Being an anthropologist allows me the opportunity to include cultural dimensions. I’m able to work with living people and ask them questions.”

    Fujita maintains that she is interested in people’s explanations, while contributing to our understanding from theoretical predictions. Fujita involves undergraduate and graduate students in her research. Current laboratory projects include:

    • Gender-based infant feeding and in northern Kenya (with Erin DelBene)
    • Food beliefs and choices during pregnancy in northern Kenya (with Mariana Rendon)
    • Understanding offspring mortality in northern Kenya (with Janine Baranski)
    • Body adiposity and serum C-reactive protein (with Pamela and Felipe Cameroamortegui).

    Fujita’s recent and forthcoming articles include:

    • “HIV/AIDS Risk and Worry in Northern Kenya” in Health, Risk and Society
    • “Vitamin A dynamics in breastmilk and liver stores: a life history perspective” in the American Journal of Human Biology
    • “Low serum vitamin A mothers breastfeed daughters more often than sons in drought-ridden northern Kenya: A test of the Trivers-Willard hypothesis” in Evolution and Human Behavior

     

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