Barbara Rose Johnston began her interest in Anthropology with undergraduate courses at San Jose State University she transferred to University of California Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA and honors for her thesis on “Native California Medicinal Ethnobotany.” She continued her studies at San Jose State University earning a masters in Environmental Science with her thesis “A Problem of Water: A Cultural Ecological Study of St. Thomas, USVI”. For her PhD she studied Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, publishing a dissertation on “The Political Ecology of Development: Changing Resource Relations and the Impacts of Tourism, St. Thomas, USVI”.

Dr. Johnston has used the Center for Political Ecology as her primary affiliation, as this allows her to do the science and human rights work that has characterized her professional life. A prominent leader in the American Anthropological Association, she has served on the Environmental Task Force, as a founding board member of the Anthropology and Environment and the Feminist Anthropology sections, as chair of the AAA Human Rights and the Ethics Committees, and she just completed a 5-year term as Public Anthropology associate editor for the American Anthropologist. Her work as an advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, US EPA, UNESCO, the Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal and indigenous survivors of massacre and genocide in Guatemala is chronicled in some 150 publications.

She began her MSU relationship with Dr. Anne Ferguson, Dr. Bill Derman, and other colleagues who shared interests in human rights and the environment. They were brought together in professional advocacy through the Society for Applied Anthropology Human Rights and Environmental Committee which Dr. Johnston organized and chaired in the 1990s. In 1993, Dr. Ferguson invited Dr. Johnston to give an endnote address at a MUS-sponsored gender and environment conference. In 2004, the Anthropology Department invited Dr. Johnston to join as an adjunct full professor. She has served as an outside advisor and referee for MSU students and periodically visits to give lectures on topics related to her research.

In 2011 Dr. Johnston received the Society for Medical Anthropology’s New Millennium award for her  “Consequential Damages of Nuclear War – The Rongelap report”. Her most recent publications include a UNESCO and Springer co-published text entitled “Water, Cultural Diversity, and Global Environmental Change: Emerging Trends, Sustainable Futures?” which she served as the editor-in-chief. This interdisciplinary text uses case-specific examples to make a global case that water is a fundamental human need and right, and is a primary sustaining force in biodiversity and cultural diversity.

In 2012, Dr. Johnston also saw the Left Coast Press publication of  “Life and Death Matters: Human Rights, Environment and Social Justice.” It contains essays that consider the question of how social and environmental systems and struggles have been re-conceptualized within a post-9/11 security and biosecurity framework, when global warming and resource scarcity are not fears but realities, when global power and politics are being realigned, and when genocide, ethnocide, and genocide are daily tragedies.

[This article is featured in the Winter 2014 Department of Anthropology Newsletter]

Dr. Helen Perlstein Pollard has wanted to be an archaeologist as long as she can remember. Despite her occasional thoughts of being a tightrope walker or ballerina, her focus never changed. When it came time to choose a college she decided to attend Barnard College. During the summer after her first year in college, she used her savings to pay for an archaeological field school in the Southwest through UCLA. The following summer she taught at the field school, this time in Northern California, and also worked for the California Highway Department in a salvage project studying shell midden sites near San Francisco. Her last summer in college was spent at Columbia taking classes in Spanish, and re-analyzing the collection of William Duncan Strong from his excavations in the Nazca region on the coast of Peru. By 1967 she finished her degree at Barnard and had considerable experience in the field and the laboratory, and had taken several postgraduate courses focusing her attention on prehistoric civilizations of Latin America.

Dr. Pollard remained at Columbia for her graduate work, where she gained experience in the Andes and later in Mesoamerica. Her particular focus in western Mexico was something that occurred by chance during the spring of 1969. Taking a graduate seminar entitled Ethnography and Archaeology, she dutifully immersed herself in a region that was well known for its ethnography: the Tarascan region of west-central Mexico. The semester was ending when she realized that the wealth of ethnographic data was not accompanied by an equally abundant archaeological information. Her doctoral field work in 1970 focused on making a full-coverage survey in Tzintzuntzan. Relying on the advice of Pedro Armillas and the presence of Gordon Ekholm and Pedro Carrasco on her committee, she carried out her first fieldwork in Michoacán.

Enough questions remained to fuel over forty years of research. One of her greatest joys has been encouraging a new generation of both Mexican and American students to see the possibilities and rewards of research in this otherwise neglected region.

Dr. Pollard has carried out archaeological and ethnohistoric research in western Mexico since 1970 and been a faculty member in the Michigan State University Anthropology Department since the fall of 1986. Her research and teaching deals with two broad issues: human ecology and the emergence and evolution of social, political and economic inequality. Her studies of prehistoric states focus on the emergence and evolution of social stratification, political centralization, and the political economies of archaic states and empires. Specifically, her research deals with central and west Mexico, especially Michoacán and the Purépecha\Tarascans, and the development of social theory in archaeology to understand the evolution of inequality by class, ethnicity, and gender. In addition to her work in western Mexico, Dr. Pollard has carried out archaeological research in the Andes and the U.S.

In retirement, Dr. Pollard is concentrating her efforts on completing two monographs based on field and lab research from 1990-2009 including one on the Prehispanic ceramics of the Tarascan Region, and one based on the archaeological site surveys and excavations in the southwestern portion of the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin. The second direction of the manuscripts she plans to produce will be based on archaeological and ethnohistoric research done over the last 20 years. This book will be designed to be a synthesis of our understanding of how and why this civilization emerged in a form accessible to all interested educated readers, not just archaeologists.

[This article is featured in the Winter 2014 Department of Anthropology Newsletter]

Mara Leichtman decided that she wanted to be an anthropologist during an internship with Citibank Maghreb in Casablanca. She had taken a year off from pursuing her Master’s degree in International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies to live and work in Morocco. She brought with her a number of books, including the memoirs of Clifford Geertz. Reading Geertz in Morocco was inspirational, as was visiting Sefrou, the town where many anthropologists had conducted fieldwork.

Dr. Leichtman decided to pursue her Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology at Brown University. There she studied the Lebanese community in West Africa, an understudied population with significant ties to Lebanon that has contributed to the development of French colonial and post-colonial Senegal. Considering a majority of Lebanese in Senegal today are Shi‘i Muslims, she focused on this minority religion. Her research examines how migration, cosmopolitanism, and governmentality contribute to the fluidity of ethnic and religious identities across various historical moments.

She came across a growing network of indigenous Senegalese “converts” from Sunni to Shi‘i Islam, inspired by the 1979 Iranian Revolution as well as interactions with Lebanese. Their goal to contribute to education and economic development in Senegal does not call for an Islamic state and their religious identity (unlike that of the Lebanese) is not linked to nationalist Middle East politics. Dr. Leichtman contests the dominant framework for analyzing Shi‘i movements by questioning the assumption that they necessarily follow Iranian revolutionary ideologies. Her book Shi‘i Cosmopolitanisms in Africa: Lebanese Migration and Religious Conversion in Senegal will be published by Indiana University Press in 2014.

Dr. Leichtman has published numerous other book chapters and articles in journals such as Anthropological Quarterly, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Religion in Africa, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Contemporary Islam (forthcoming). She is collaborating with European and West African colleagues in a multi-country research grant funded by the French government. “Religion and the Private Sphere: Religious Dynamics, Everyday Experiences, and the Individual in West Africa,” will compare Islam and Christianity in Senegal, Benin, and Burkina Faso. Her research on Senegal will become part of a second book project that explores how religious movements are increasingly presenting themselves in the institutional form of non-governmental organizations by comparing Shi‘i Islamic NGOs in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

This is Dr. Leichtman’s eighth year in the Department of Anthropology, and she is also a faculty member of the Muslim Studies Program, African Studies Center, and Center for Advanced Study of International Development. She enjoys teaching courses on religion and culture, Islam in Africa, Middle East anthropology, globalization, transnational migration, and ethnographic field methods.

[This article is featured in the Winter 2014 Department of Anthropology Newsletter]

The Department of Anthropology is proud to introduce our new Undergraduate Advisor, Jackie Lillis-Warwick. Jackie has been a proud MSU Spartan since she was an undergraduate student here. She graduated from MSU in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology, and then pursued her masters from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Anthropology and Museum Studies.  Following graduation, she worked for the cultural research management company, Commonwealth Cultural Resources Group, in the Midwest for six years. She was excited to return to MSU to assume the position of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act collections manager for the MSU Museum.

Currently, Jackie works in as both the NAGPRA collections manager and as the Undergraduate Advisor. As as advisor, Jackie meets with undergraduate students to help plan their schedules and coursework, advises new students at orientation, aids with planning degrees, conducts outreach for recruiting new Anthropology majors, and participates within broader academic affairs. She is excited to work with undergraduate students; she likes seeing their enthusiasm for the discipline, hearing about their different interests, and helping them plan for life after graduation. Jackie believes that her own experience as a Spartan helps her to better communicate with the students.

[This article is featured in the Winter 2014 Department of Anthropology Newsletter]

Summer of 2013 the department launched the seventh and eighth courses in our planned expansion of online course offerings. These courses are important for a number of reasons. In today’s world many students find an online course helps them fit more into their schedule, graduate sooner, and some simply prefer the venue.  Some students find online courses give them more, or a different kind of opportunity to be interactive with their instructor and classmates. There are also innovative ways of presenting content that are not possible in a classroom setting.

Our graduate students teach most of these courses in the summer, and several have helped develop online versions of courses. This experience is important in today’s job market where such skills are increasingly in demand.  Another undeniably important aspect of these courses is that the MSU system is set up to allow the summer online courses to bring revenue to departments.  With the continued trend of marked reduction in public funding for universities, this revenue source is essential to our mission.

In the near future, we will call on other sources of support and expertise, including our alumni, to further strengthen the department and insure that our students continue to experience exemplary instruction, personalized mentoring, and experiential learning in foundational anthropological skills and technological advances.

[This article is featured in the Winter 2014 Department of Anthropology Newsletter]