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.”  

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/

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.

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)

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.