The Department of Anthropology is honored to announce that Dr. Todd Fenton and Dr. Joseph Hefner have been selected as inaugural members of the Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) Subcommittee on Anthropology. This is part of the larger organization, National Institute of Justice and National Institute on Standards and Technology, made up of more than 500 forensic science practitioners and other experts who represent local, state and federal agencies, and are within academia and industry. Dr. Fenton and Dr. Hefner were announced in October 2014 as two initial members of OSAC’s subcommittee on Anthropology, and the first inaugural meeting of the committee took place in January 2015. The Subcommittee on Anthropology is a subsection of Crime Scene/ Death Investigation and part of the new OSAC. The broader goal of the initiative is to develop standards and best practice guidelines for the discipline.

The Subcommittee on Anthropology is an eighteen member committee that includes the top practitioners and researchers within Forensic Anthropology. Within the subcommittee, each member serves as a co-chair on a different best-practice guideline committee. Dr. Fenton is the Executive Secretary and co-chairs the Personal Identification and Trauma Analysis committees, and Dr. Hefner is serving as the co-chair for the Statistical Methods and Ancestry committees. The goal of the subcommittee is to establish best-practice guidelines for the discipline that will become standards for the field. This is an important step in that these standards can be referenced in court, helpful for legislation in the future, and will promote the use of common standards among forensic practitioners. Both Dr. Fenton and Dr. Hefner strongly believe in having these standards not only to improve the methods of discipline, but also to create stronger guidelines for personal and laboratory certification. These documents will set qualifications for who can be considered a forensic expert, promoting more rigorous certification of individuals and training labs, which will further add weight to court testimonials.

It is an honor for Dr. Fenton and Dr. Hefner to have been selected for these position, and is a positive reflection of the broader Department of Anthropology. Their service on these committees for the next four years or more, and will help to improve forensic anthropology as a discipline. The guidelines and standards developed by the Subcommittee on Anthropology will be living documents that will continue to be updated to reflect with new research and advancements. For now, the current goal is to create the first set of standards so that this process can begin.

You can learn more about the Subcommittee on Anthropology, as well as the broader Organization of Scientific Area Committees on their website at: http://www.nist.gov/forensics/osac/sub-anth.cfm

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

With increasing archaeological applications of natural and physical scientific technology, there is an increased need to train students in their principles, application, interpretation and reporting. By doing this, students are able to compete successfully in a changing employment landscape. Working in tandem with Prof Tyrone Rooney (Geological Sciences), William Lovis and Rooney were awarded a $48,000 Provost’s Office TLE grant for purchase of a handheld (portable) X-Ray Florescence (pXRF) instrument for student training and research in advanced technologies. The Bruker Environmental Tracer unit acquired for this purpose will be housed in Geological Sciences. Lovis, along with graduate students Frank and Nicole Raslich, have undertaken EHS and State of Michigan training certification for use of analytical X-ray apparatus.

The portable XRF is in common use in archaeology and museum studies as a vehicle for evaluating artifacts to determine their material sources, compositions, technologies, and transmission. This can help answer questions about tool production, migration, manufacturing processes and more. The technology is effectively applied to a broad range of raw material categories common in archaeological analysis, including ceramics, stone, metals, glass, pigments, food remains and others.   Moreover, the technology is in use in facilities at universities, museums, government agencies, and in private enterprise. Students appropriately trained in this technology will have an advantage in a competitive employment market especially in Heritage Management and environmentally related programs and projects funded by public dollars. These careers place a premium on the ability to employ various cutting edge technologies, portable XRF among them. Bruker Environmental will provide a comprehensive, on-site, training session at MSU for potential users. Students will be informed of scheduling particulars, and are urged to take advantage of this training opportunity when presented.

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

The Department of Anthropology is proud to present the newest edition of the biannual newsletter. Our Spring 2015 issue features these articles:

Spring 2015 Message from the Acting Chair: Dr. Laurie Medina

Dr. Fenton and Dr. Hefner Selected for National Standards Committee

TLE Award Allows Purchase of XRF Instrument

Featured Faculty Member: Dr. Andrea Louie

Featured Retired Faculty: Dr. Ken David

Featured Adjunct: Dr. Jamil Hanifi

Alumna Dr. Julie Pelletier: Working with Indigenous Communities

Alumna Dr. Marita Eibl: Explores Government Opportunities

Indigenous Graduate Student Collective: e-maamawizijig giizhiikamoowaad akinoowamaadiwinan

Environmental Archaeology Research Partnership

Graduate Student Awards, Grants and Fellowships

Joshua Schnell Awarded Beinecke Scholarship

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

In November 2012, Anthropology PhD students including Adam Haviland, Marie Schaefer, Kehli Henry, Nikki Silva, and Mike Cavanaugh, and law students from the Indigenous Law Program, including Sarah Donnelly, Nellie David and John Simermeyer, started a new graduate student organization at MSU for American Indian/indigenous students and other students interested in indigenous issues and scholarship. They created the Indigenous Graduate Student Collective (IGSC) to provide a space to collaborate, debate, and address common issues for graduate students working on indigenous issues across the University.

The founding members were also inspired by a meeting with the University of Toronto Native Students Association, organized by Dr. Heather Howard in October 2011. Marie Schaefer explains, “We were inspired by their organization and the work they do to bring a similar group to life on MSU’s campus.” While MSU already had an indigenous undergraduate student group, the North American Indigenous Student Organization, graduate students felt it was important to have a group to support their distinct experience as graduate students. As Sarah Donnelly explains “It’s easy to just focus on school work and forget why we came to school in the first place: to help our tribe. The Native American Law Student Association (NALSA) and other native student organizations are a great way to collaborate and find support over native issues as well.”

Since its founding the collective has worked on building connections with indigenous graduate students across campus. According to former member Victoria Sweet, “What I think is so valuable about this particular group is the potential it has for building strong inter-departmental connections. Sometimes those connections are hard to make because we are all so busy with our own coursework and research that we don’t make the time to reach out. Bringing the strengths of the various graduate programs together will only improve the quality of the conversation about American Indian issues on campus and provide greater opportunities for all students involved.” The mission of the IGSC is to promote indigenous scholarship and camaraderie among graduate students while building campus and community connections. One of the many objectives of the IGSC is to offer learning opportunities and to forge partnerships and community ties. In order to meet the needs of its members, IGSC has held a number of events including a symposium and an all day writing workshop, and faculty fry bread forums where members are able to ask questions of AISP faculty from across campus about graduate school and research while eating homemade fry bread.

If you are interested in learning more about the IGSC you can visit their website at: www.msuigsc.weebly.com or email them at: msu.igsc@gmail.com.

In 1974 and 1975 Professor William Lovis performed the original archaeological survey for what would become Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore – one of Michigan’s premier tourist destinations. Lovis had an opportunity to return to Sleeping Bear during summer 2014 as part of an interdisciplinary, inter-departmental, inter-institutional partnership with the National Park Service to investigate the effects of global climate change on endangered archaeological sites – their taphonomy and preservation.

Working closely with NPS liaison Laura Quackenbush, under both Archaeological Resource Protection Act and National Environmental Policy Act permits, a team of researchers including G. William Monaghan, and Andrew Stewart performed extensive landscape reconstruction and sediment and charcoal sampling in the vicinity of precontact occupation areas dating ca. AD 700-1200. These samples are being OSL and AMS dated at Illinois State Geological Survey, with funds provided by a public/private partnership with the local business Cherry Republic, courtesy of Mr. Robert Sutherland. Wood samples from rooted trees, and dated ca. AD 1448 have been identified by Prof. Frank Telewski from MSU Plant Biology as northern white pine. Dune processes are being reconstructed by Prof. Alan Arbogast, MSU Geography.

The goal is to reconstruct the dynamic landscape evolution of the area, and predict long term effects of climate change on the future of cultural resources. Lovis and colleagues hope to continue this exciting research throughout the coming year, and use the information to enhance interpretive information available to park visitors.

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

Dr. M. Jamil Hanifi was born and raised in an urban Pashtun tribal social environment in preindustrial Afghanistan. He maintains native-level competence in Farsi and Pashtu- the two major languages of Afghanistan. He holds a BSc in police administration and MA in political science from Michigan State University. With innocent ambivalence and a novice academic interest in the contrast between his tribal background and hyper-modern American culture he continued his graduate studies in the combined anthropology and sociology program at MSU in 1963. Two events during 1963 and 1964 played a major role in causing him to follow his comparative interest in the context of anthropology: Professor Bernard Gallin’s “history of anthropological theory” course and public lectures at MSU by W. Lloyd Warner and Eric Wolf. The separation of the anthropology and sociology departments into two separate units during 1965 caused Dr. Hanifi (and a number of other students) to migrate to other universities. Dr. Hanifi ended up at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale from where he received his doctorate in cultural anthropology during 1969.

Following graduation, Dr. Hanifi taught anthropology at California State University-Los Angeles from 1968 to 1969 and at Northern Illinois University from 1969 to 1982. Family reasons caused Dr. Hanifi and his family to return to Michigan during 1990, where he received adjunct faculty status in the MSU Department of Anthropology. He taught ANP 491 Anthropology of the Middle East during Fall semester 2012.

Dr. Hanifi has conducted ethnographic research in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Pakistan and Tajikistan-SSR with funding from the American Philosophical Society, Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship, United States National Academy of Sciences, USSR Academy of Sciences, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A current ethnological research project dealing with Afghanistan is funded by the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies. His ethnographic interest in Afghanistan and North America is ongoing and cradles a current research and writing project that will result in a two volume anthropological autobiography: “Growing up in Afghanistan: an ethnographic retrospective” and “Learning American as an ‘Other’”.

During the 1970s and 1980s Hanifi wrote several journal articles, chapters and reviews dealing with anthropology, history and the ethnology of the Middle East and Central Asia. During the past two decades he has published articles, brief essays, reviews and chapters in the Critique of Anthropology, Iranian Studies, Anthropology News, Anthropos, Journal of Anthropological Research, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, the 2000 AAA publication “Rethinking Refuge and Displacement” and the 2010 Middle East Institute volume about Afghanistan. Hanifi is the author of several entries dealing with Afghanistan in Encyclopaedia Iranica. Some of his academic and political writings are posted on Zero Anthropology blog. Farsi translations of some of his essays are published in Omaid Weekly and posted on Khorasan Zameen and Zahedan Press. His article titled “Concocting the ‘Other’ in Afghanistan” is in press.

Hanifi’s current research and writing projects include: Interrogating Euro-American “Fieldwork” in Afghanistan; Crypto-Colonial Hegemony in Afghanistan; What is an “Afghan”?; the myth of Pashtun domination and rule in Afghanistan; an ethnographic and historical analysis of the 1932-1955 Salnamas; Changing patterns of personal names and identity politics in Afghanistan; power relations and honorific titles for men and women in Afghan households. He is also working on two joint writing projects with his son, Dr. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, a professor of history at James Madison University. These projects deal with the ethnology and colonial history of Afghanistan.

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

Dr. Julie Pelletier’s planned to specialize in medical anthropology when she arrived at MSU. However, her academic career took a different direction when she was awarded doctoral research funding by the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians to conduct a project on indigenous identity. She completed the PhD program in 2002, after being hired into a tenure track position in Anthropology at the University of Minnesota – Morris (UMM). UMM had actually been an Indian residential school in the late 1800s. To counter this history, Dr. Pelletier faculty in English and a senior professor in History to create a major and a minor in American Indian Studies. The creation and administration of an American Indian Studies program provided Dr. Pelletier with valuable experience in curriculum evaluation, resource allocation, program planning, and other challenges related to an interdisciplinary program.

After earning tenure and promotion to associate professor at UMM, Julie took a position, as the director of Aboriginal Governance Program, at the University of Winnipeg. She was the first person hired into the program without a law, political science, or Canadian Aboriginal studies background. With the support of her faculty, Dr. Pelletier launched a successful effort to promote the program to full department status; its name was changed to the Department of Indigenous Studies, and Dr. Pelletier’s title was changed from Director to Chair. During Dr. Pelletier’s five years as Chair, the department has hired two permanent faculty members, raising the total to five, and has developed and added almost twenty courses to the curriculum.

During Dr. Pelletier’s first year at UW, she was also appointed as the founding director of a new applied master’s program, a role she held for eighteen months. The Master’s in Development Practice (MDP) degree is offered by an international consortium of universities, with seed funding provided by the MacArthur Foundation. UW is one of two Canadian universities offering the MDP degree and the only one in the world with an indigenous focus. As Director of the MDP, Dr. Pelletier Developed extensive international contacts. In 2004, she attended the first United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights in Geneva. She has established several Memorandums of Understanding for UW with colleges and universities domestically and abroad that have a commitment to indigenizing the academy. She is proud to note that undergraduate students in her department know more about indigenous peoples in Canada and the world than most people, academics and policy-makers included.

Dr. Pelletier’s interest in American Indian casinos, which began in during her doctoral fieldwork, has continued, and she is currently co-editing a book on representations related to casinos and gaming in Canada and the U.S. with Dr. Becca Gercken, a faculty member in English at UMM. The contributors come from both Canada and the U.S. and range from the social sciences to the humanities. Michigan State University Press is the publisher, and the press’s “sister” relationship with a Canadian academic press means that the book will be easily available in both countries. Julie has also conducted fieldwork in New Zealand/Aotearoa, with a focus on indigenizing and decolonizing research methods and ethics. While her heavy administrative duties have constrained her research agenda, Julie is active in professional organizations, regularly presents at conferences, and is committed to mentoring junior scholars. Her five year term as Department Chair ends soon and she will enjoy a year of reintegration leave, intended to allow former chairs to rest and recharge. During this leave, Dr. Pelletier will be a visiting professor at several American universities and she is considering a trip to Finland, Sweden, and Norway to build contacts with the indigenous Sami people and she has been invited to New Zealand/Aotearoa and the Philippines.

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

Dr. Ken David decided on Anthropology during his senior year at Wesleyan University of Connecticut. His major was the College of Letters (CoL). The CoL taught you to be a critic of literature, of historical accounts, and of philosophical works; this experience incited Dr. David to work quite directly with peoples’ thoughts and activities. He chose the University of Chicago’s Anthropology program for his graduate studies, and his major faculty influences there were Victor Turner, McKim Marriott, David Schneider, and Clifford Geertz.

Having studied South Indian Music at Wesleyan, Dr. David was attracted to South Asian studies. For doctoral fieldwork in the Jaffna Peninsula of northern Sri Lanka, he lived and learned from Tamil fishermen, artisans, and landowners. His dissertation questioned the prevailing monolithic view of rural South Asia as an aristocratic feudal order with an account of a complementary Mercantile order. Publications followed with articles in Man, book chapters, and a volume he edited for the ICAES in 1974, “The New Wind: Changing Identities in South Asia”. This last work intensified his interest in social movements.

Arriving at MSU in 1972, Dr. David was appointed jointly by the Anthropology Department and as Associate Director of the Asian Studies Center under Bill Ross. There, he developed the Certificate Program in Asian Studies, one of the first area studies programs. His teaching time was split between Anthropology and Justin-Morrill College, which is now established as the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities. The latter duty stirred his interest in teaching and mentoring Honors students and in developing an innovative teaching style that has been implemented at all levels from undergraduate to graduate courses as well as in seminars to outside organizations.

The first stage of his anthropology career emphasized theoretical revisions based on ethnographic, symbolic anthropology, and social movements studies in South Asia. His research focus shifted radically in the late 1970s as the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, an overachieving minority in a new nation were oppressed by the majority population; as in other countries, the resulting separatist social movement evolved into a civil war from 1983-2009. Dr. David exported his knowledge of social movements to the study of social mobilizations within or between organizations. He was an early proponent of Organizational Anthropology, which involves the study of how cultural, power and communications issues impact boundary-spanning relationships such as corporate acquisitions, “teamwork” among medical specialists, design projects linking engineers from different countries, communications between nano-research scientists and the wider public, and relations between the Dutch tertiary education system and employers. This collaborative research touched twelve countries in three continents. While the first career stage was entirely theoretical, this second stage has been a counter-point between theory and practice. His 2008 publication, “Analytic Introduction to What can Nanotechnology Learn from Biotechnology?”, exemplifies this merging of theory and practice.

Following retirement, Dr. David plans to return to his first intellectual love, the study of Jaffna as it evolved through three colonial rulers to post-colonial times. His goal is to recount a progressive construction of contrasting Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic identities, and to conduct cultural analyses of indigenous notions of settlement, language, and land to clarify notions of sovereignty and leadership. He will combine ethnographic accounts with previously unpublished historical research and an extensive audio-visual account. In a project is called “Jaffna Remembered”, he shall also remember the undulating stream of over 6,000 students he has taught and the changing parade of anthropology faculty known over the last 42 years. Both have taught him a great deal.

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

Lisa Bright received a Cultural Heritage Informatics and a Campus Archaeology Program Fellowship

Sylvia Deskaj was awarded a NSF subsidized grant to analyze a portion of her dissertation material using the Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum of Natural History, graduate student travel grant from Archaeological Institute of America, Alliances for Graduate Education and Professoriate grant, and MSU Graduate Dissertation Research Enhancement Grant.

Hannah Feig received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from Center for Advanced Study of International Development (CASID).

Julie Fleischman received the Golden Key International Honour Society Research Grant for pre-dissertation research and the Ellis R. Kerley Forensic Sciences Foundation Scholarship

Kathryn Frederick is the recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Society for American Archaeology Student Paper competition for her paper “Holes: The Beginners Guide to Food Caching”.

Brian Geyer was awarded a FLAS Fellowship from CASID and a Cultural Heritage Initiative fellowship.

Edward Glayzer received a FLAS Fellowship from the CASID to go to Korea and study Korean at the Sogang University in Seoul.

Anna Christina Martinez received the Tinker Graduate Student Field Research Grant from the Tinker Foundation for her research on NGOs and Healthcare Delivery in Maya Guatemala.

Julie Seven-Mattes received the MSU Animal Studies Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for her dissertation “Catastrophe to Awareness: A Multispecies Ethnography of Animal Rescue in Post-disaster Japan”.

Katy Meyers Emery was awarded the Council of Graduate Students (COGS) Disciplinary Leadership Award, Campus Archaeology Program Fellowship, and Future Academic Scholars in Teaching Fellowship.

Amy Michael was awarded the Broad Art Museum Writing Residency fellowship and a Campus Archaeology Program Fellowship.

Meenakshi Narayan received the College of Social Science Research Scholar’s Fellowship

Emily Niespodziewanski received the Kenneth E. and Marie J. Corey Research Enrichment Fund to support research in Italy on medieval skeletal remains, and a COGS Conference Grant.

Marie Schaefer was selected as a graduate fellow with the Northeast Climate Science Center.

Andy Upton was awarded a NSF grant to conduct compositional analysis at the Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum of Natural History, and was selected as the R. Bruce McMillan Museum Intern with the Illinois State Museum.

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

Dr. Marita Eibl first became enamoured by the discipline when she did a sixth grade report on East African Anthropology. As an undergraduate at University of Notre Dame, she was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to learn about all four fields of Anthropology. During this time, she was able to conduct research in East Africa, which shaped her interests and led her to MSU, where she planned to focus on medical anthropology in Africa. Her dissertation research examined the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in Tanzania. Dr. Eibl explored how the different participants in the program viewed their roles within the broader PEPFAR operation and how local women chose to access HIV/AIDS medications through the program.

After graduating from MSU, Dr. Eibl was selected to be a fellow in the Presidential Management Fellowship (www.PMF.gov) program, an opportunity she recommends to current graduate students interested in pursuing non-academic work. The PMF provides recent graduates with a job within an agency in the federal government with perks including an accelerated promotion track, eighty hours of training every year, and the ability to try out different jobs within the federal government. As a participant in this program, Dr. Eibl took a position at Health and Human Services for the first year and then moved to a position within the State Department. Her time as a PMF fellow provided her with a wide range of fieldwork and experience. The program has also enabled her to build a large network of contacts.

Following this experience, Dr. Eibl was hired by the State Department to work for the PEPFAR program, which she had examined in her dissertation research. This job has provided Dr. Eibl the opportunity to travel around the world to work with representatives of African governments, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. She has also worked with HIV clinics and outreach programs.

Dr. Eibl truly appreciated the experiences she had as a graduate student at MSU. These include the guidance provided by the connections she made within the MSU Center for Gender in Global Context, the African Studies Center, and the Center for Advanced Study of International Development (CASID), and her committee members and other professors in the department, including Dr. Anne Ferguson, Dr. Bill Derman, and Dr. Linda Hunt. She also values the feeling of community among the grad students and the support system they built to help one another advance through the program. For current graduate students, she offers this advice: “pick a subject that you will love for years, because to finish you must love it!”

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