MSU has received an award from CASE: Council for Advancement and Support of Education for its promotion of the Saints’ Rest excavations. We have been told that MSU University Relations will receive its Circle of Excellence Silver Medal Award in the Special Public and Community Relations category for 2006 for the Saints’ Rest Archaeological Project.
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New Course Announcement – Bioanthropological Perspectives on Health, Disease and Socio-ecological Changes in Developing Countries
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 9:10-1:00INSTRUCTOR: 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.
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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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ANP 2010 Photo Contest Results
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.
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In memory of Patricia Ruth (Jenks) Whittier
Born: March 15, 1944
Died: May 11, 2010Patricia 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.