Department of Anthropology 2008-2009 Newsletter Volume 2
Letter From the Chair - James Ferguson Contents 1
Letter from the Chair
2
Welcome New Faculty
3 New Books By Anthropology Faculty 4 External Faculty Awards 6 Other Department News 9 PhD Letter from the Field: The French ‘Evolution’: Fossils and Flint from Mediterranean France 11 PhD Letter from the Field: Field Work Class/ Class at Home and in the Field 13 PhD Letter from the Field: Trying to Move Llamas in Boxes 15
Undergraduate Fieldnotes: The fragility of our consciences versus the delicacy of the rainforest
16 Undergraduate Fieldnotes: Local vs. Global: Where I Chose to Conduct my Field Work 18 Department Faculty 21 Alumni News 30 2008-2009 Awards
As the new, unified Department of Anthropology completes its second full year, there is a strong sense of having settled in successfully to new routines and new structures. We are comfortably lodged in our new quarters (in Buildings 40, 50, and 300), and the disruptions of last year’s move are a distant memory now that we have settled into our new space. The new curricular structures that were created last year (graduate and undergraduate) are now working smoothly, and the day to day workings of the Department now (thankfully) have more to do with maintaining and administering structures than with creating them. The main challenge we faced this year is one we shared with colleagues all across the country, namely budgetary woes related to the financial crisis and subsequent recession. Like other universities, Stanford has had to make major cutbacks in response to declining investment revenues, and we in Anthropology have definitely felt the pinch. I am confident that the university leadership is dealing with the university’s fiscal problems in a capable and fair-minded way, and I feel sure that both Stanford and the Department of Anthropology will come out of the crisis in excellent shape. But there has unquestionably been some pain this year. In addition to cuts to our visiting teaching budgets and freezes on salaries, we have also had to put temporary holds on several authorized faculty searches. We are hoping that at least some of these searches will be re-authorized for next year. We have so far managed to preserve full funding for graduate fellowships, and have not had to reduce our numbers of admitted Ph.D. Students. A major bright spot was our success in recruiting Professor Lisa Curran from Yale. Lisa will be the new Lang Professor of Environmental Anthropology, starting this July. We are delighted to welcome her to the Department. As described elsewhere in this newsletter (p. 2), Lisa studies the structure and dynamics of tropical forests in Borneo, and seeks to understand better how the environment is altered by human activities. She will be a central presence in our “Environment and Ecology” graduate track, and she can also help us to forge connections between anthropological approaches to environmental issues and research done in other disciplines (her appointment will be split between the Department and Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment). We are also in the midst of negotiating a recruitment for a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in South Asia, and I hope to be able to report on the results of that recruitment in next year’s newsletter. As soon as the economic climate improves, we should be able to continue to build the faculty even further (with at least three additional searches already authorized). In the meantime, we are doing our best to ride out the fiscal storm with as little disruption as possible to our core missions, which remain educating our students, and pursuing research at the highest level of excellence.