Anthropology Newsletter Volume 8

anthropology S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y

D E PA R T M E N T O F

2014 - 2015 Newsletter •

Volume VIII

Features 2

Intradisciplinary Anthropology 3 Maron Greenleaf 4 Lauren Elizabeth Yapp 6 Nestor Silva 8 Annette Esquibel

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A Conversation with Jim Ferguson

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Duana Fullwiley on The Social Implications of Genetic Technologies

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In Memoriam: Arthur Wolf

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Anthropologically speaking: the continued rise of interdisciplinary student groups

I n Ev e ry I s s u e Letter from the Chair .................. 1 Department News .................... 17 PhD Letters from the Field ......... 26 Undergraduate Fieldnotes .......... 32 Alumni News ........................... 36 Student Achievements .............. 43 Anthropology Faculty ................ 45

Le tt er F rom t h e C ha ir

The 2014-2015 academic year was a productive year in the department, replete with achievements and milestones for our faculty and students. On the faculty front, Professor Liisa Malkki, who has been teaching in the department since 2002, was promoted to full professor. Three junior faculty -- Krish Seetah, Kabir Tambar, and Sharika Thiranagama-were reappointed to their second terms as assistant professors in the department, and all will be pursuing research and writing during sabbatical leaves next year. The department also undertook a successful job search for a tenure-track faculty appointment in archaeology. We are very pleased that Andrew Bauer (Phd University Chicago, 2010) will be joining the department next year as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. His research in South Asia and his work in geo-archaeology, geomorphology, remote-sensing and palynology add to the geographical scope and technical breadth of our archaeology program. Finally, several of our faculty published major books and were the recipients of prestigious awards (see pp. 15-20 of this newsletter).

Our doctoral students continue to be awarded an impressive number of training fellowships, dissertation research and writing grants, and postdoctoral fellowships, including from the Fulbright Foundation, Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies, and the Stanford Humanities Center. You can read about several of these amazing students, including those who are pursuing intra-disciplinary research projects, in the pages to follow.

This year the department also launched several initiatives to strengthen our undergraduate major and curriculum. To expand the appeal of our major and course offerings, the department awarded funds for the development of three new courses that offer an in-depth and rigorous exploration of a subject of broad interest. Each of these courses is cross-listed with at least one of the major interdisciplinary programs on campus. Professor Kabir Tambar's course, Citizenship and Power in the Middle East, focuses on the concept of citizenship that has been at the center of the tumultuous political events taking place in the Middle East over the past few years. Drawing on historical and anthropological research, this course addresses an issue that remains at the heart of discussions about democracy and revolution. Animals and Us is the title of the course developed by Professor Krish Seetah to explore the complex human-animal relationship from the Pleistocene to the modern day. He draws on a wide geographic range of case studies to explore the social, ecological and spiritual aspects of our interactions with animals, both domesticated and wild. Finally, Professor Lochlann Jain's new undergraduate seminar entitled Megacities introduces students to the unique contributions of anthropological theory and methods to the real-word issues of immigration, urban poverty, class disparity, economic development, noise, and transportation.

The department also initiated an annual award for Excellence in Teaching. Professor Sharika Thiranagama was chosen by our undergraduate students as the recipient of the award which was announced at the department spring picnic (see page 20 of this newsletter). In addition, the chair of our Curriculum Committee, Professor Tanya Luhrman, initiated a series of conversations among the faculty about strategies and best practices of pedagogy. We look forward to continuing these conversations and to developing further plans to enhance the profile of our undergraduate major in the coming year.

Best wishes to all,

Sylvia Yanagisako Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology

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Anthropology students are increasingly employing an intradisciplinary approach in their studies, taking courses in more than one of the three anthropology tracks offered by the department: Cultural and Social, Ecology and Environment, and Archaeology. By bridging multiple tracks and combining theories and methods from these tracks, students find that it not only strengthens their research, but also prepares them to communicate more effectively with diverse audiences. In this newsletter, we feature several students who have successfully adopted an intradisciplinary approach in their anthropology studies.

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Maron Greenleaf - Dissertation Writer

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ike many anthropologists before us, numerous Stanford anthropology graduate students now study human-environment relations. Our research fields are diverse, ranging from farms to labs to garbage dumps. Driven by varying research questions, we draw differently from the theories and methods associated with the department’s “Culture and Society” (CS) and “Environment and Ecology” (EE) tracks. Therefore my research, with its particular use of CS and EE methods and theory, is unique, and is not meant to summarize this form of “intradisciplinarity.” And yet my work is also indicative of a growing interest in environmental anthropology, broadly defined. Through my research, I have learned how the discipline’s diverse methods and theories can be used complementarily to study important questions about human-environment relations currently being addressed in anthropology.

I entered the Stanford PhD program with the broad contours of the topic I wanted to study established. I arrived fresh out of law school, where I had studied environmental law and researched the property rights dynamics of efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) that were emerging at the time. I decided to pursue a PhD in anthropology in part because I was dissatisfied with my legal research: there was only so much I could understand about REDD through library and online research. I wanted Maron Greenleaf talking to buyers and sellers of açaí berries in Acre, Brazil. to conduct extended empirical work myself. Through my time at Stanford, my project has developed, of course. I now study what many consider to be the world’s leading REDD program, located in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Acre. The focus of my research has been on the program’s development, to understand how new financial value is constructed from the forest’s carbon sequestering capacity, and the effort to create and distribute tangible financial benefits from that value.

In this research, I have drawn from a number of theoretical fields and methodological tools, including political ecology, anthropology of the state, capitalism, and development, and participant observation, interview, survey, and spatial methods. To study these diverse theories and methods, I took courses in both CS and EE. I had applied to the PhD program through CS but was admitted in EE, and from before I began in the fall of 2010, the department (through Shelly Coughlan, Student Services Officer, friend, and mentor to many of us graduate students) made clear to me that I could pursue studies in both. And so I did, taking all of the required courses in EE and most of them in CS, as well as spatial methodology courses in GIS and remote sensing.

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Lauren Elizabeth Yapp - Field Researcher

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he sun has only risen a few hours ago, and already I can feel the sweat running down the back of my neck and settling in the folds of the linen scarf I now cup over my mouth and nose. Heat and dust hang like curtains in the air, strung from the remains of arched entranceways and tapered columns. I hear a soft crunch beneath my feet and look down to a pockmarked surface, littered with fragments of ceramic tiles in pale green, pink, and grey; shards of broken red clay pottery, some still recognizable as former drinking cups and serving bowls; and the occasional mortar and pestle of carved volcanic rock. A dozen or so men and women pick their way through this jumble, some searching through the sediment for intact objects to be sorted and bagged by type at a nearby worktable, others sifting methodically through the finer rubble in the hopes of recovering smaller treasures previously overlooked. Myself, I make my way slowly through the ruins with camera, notebook, and audio recorder, documenting the things and spaces I encounter, stopping to talk with individuals as they pause from their labor, and asking them about the dusty objects they hold in one hand and the crumbling structures they point to with the other.

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Contrary to what this description might suggest, I am not standing in an archaeological site, and the activity that surrounds me is not an excavation – at least, not in the conventional sense. This is (or was) Pasar Johar, the largest and oldest market in Semarang, a bustling port city on the sweltering north coast of Java in Indonesia. First taking form in the mid-19th century at the strategic point where the city's Dutch, Chinese, and Javanese settlements met at the bend of a river, the market was most recently estimated to house at least 4,000 registered traders (and likely hundreds more unregistered) selling everything from fruit and shoes to toys and books in row upon row of tightly-packed kiosks. Then, on an otherwise quiet May evening, a fire mysteriously broke out in several stalls, spreading quickly along the rooftops to engulf nearly the entire complex. While thankfully no lives were lost, by morning the majority of Pasar Johar was reduced to piles of ash, melted plastic, twisted metal, and charred beams, the stock of so many traders (much of it purchased on credit in anticipation of brisk business during the upcoming month of Ramadan) literally gone up in smoke.

Perhaps surprisingly, the only structure that has remained intact, though blackened and cracked by flames, is also Pasar Johar's oldest: a sprawling concrete pavilion with high ceilings and elegant curves, constructed in 1939 by the celebrated Dutch East Indies architect Thomas Karsten as Semarang's grandest "modern" market. Recently listed as a cagar budaya or protected heritage site by the city government, the fate of Karsten's crippled masterpiece has attracted a flurry of attention and advocacy in recent weeks: semi-secret late-night gatherings of architects, conservators, photographers, artists, historians, and local urban activists to discuss strategies to protect the structure from hasty demolition and eager investors; slick social media campaigns to grow popular support for its restoration; and endless press conferences with the mayor, currently running for re-election, that lay out ambitious plans for the improved future of the historic "heart of Semarang."

In the process, Pasar Johar is being

transformed into a symbol, an image, a promise invoked by those players calling the shots, or those now clambering over each other to do so.

But all the while, its physical form and sensory dimensions – the pungent stench of charred salted fish, the heat of fires still burning beneath staircases days later, the crack of glass broken upon broken glass, the crumble of concrete and plaster gripped in a weathered palm – confront those traders who still return every morning to sift through the rubble (with as yet no assistance from any government agency) and to adapt themselves to this alien landscape they now encounter.

For me, bridging archaeology and cultural-social anthropology means constantly tacking back and forth between these various registers now so dramatically present in the tragedy of Pasar Johar: the discursive, the imagined, the sensed, the material. In the months before the fire, I was busy doing just that in the neighboring district of Kota Lama, the former core of the colonial Dutch settlement that has recently become the focus of several revitalization and preservation projects. Here, the political, social, and affective relationships between present day communities and tangible "things" from the past play out in a variety of forms, from bustling antique markets, to re-purposed colonial buildings, to aging infrastructures (seemingly mundane trains and trams, electricity grids, water pumps, drainage canals) now celebrated as "heritage" in and of themselves. While mainly drawing upon classic ethnographic methodologies of interview and participant observation with the dozens of organizations and communities swept up in Kota Lama's transformation, I endeavor to always anchor this work to such materials, structures, and spaces, taking these "things" seriously as agentive. The looming presence of a charred Pasar Johar, while originally falling outside the frame of my primary research on

Semarang's core colonial district, now poses several questions that lie at this same intersection between anthropological methods and archaeological sensitivities: How do the tangible and the spatial remains of the past furnish imaginaries of future possibilities, in my case, for the contemporary city? How are the physical reminders of multiple histories able to mold, and to be molded by, present day discourses and agendas? How, most fundamentally, are the biographies of people and things intertwined? Returning to Pasar Johar every morning to document the progress of the traders in sifting through the ashes and rebuilding their kiosks atop the rubble, and in each evening attending the impassioned discussions of rival heritage professionals simultaneously alarmed by the destruction and invigorated by the myriad of "opportunities" it now presents, the exploration of such questions in my fieldwork has only just begun.

But already this connection, near conflation, of the human and the material is invoked by onlookers in variations of the oft-repeated phrase: "May the Johar community remain as sturdy (kokoh) as Karsten's columns", as if the fates of the two have been fused together by the very flames themselves.

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Nestor Silva - PhD Student

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n article by renowned anthropologist Arturo Escobar begins with the connection between biology and history, and asserts the link between the two requires analysis of how diverse individual and collective identities and diverse social structures and practices are inter-connected with different ways of thinking about nature.

When I first read that article, I had just returned from my first fieldwork experience in Quito, Ecuador and in oil-producing regions in the country’s Amazonian region. While indigenous people often spoke of what Escobar calls “organic nature” (a non-Western conceptualization infused with ritual and religious beliefs) and city-dwellers often spoke of “capitalist nature” (nature as a source of natural resources), those divisions were clear. Fieldwork confirmed Escobar’s conclusion. It taught me that nature was in fact, “hybrid,” an agglomeration of individual and collective identities, social structures and practices. I became

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fascinated by, in that article’s terminology, the social origins and implications of hybrid natures, especially as they relate to the oil industry.

Applying to and eventually enrolling at Stanford were decisions based in part on the possibility of situating myself within Anthropology’s Culture and Society track while augmenting my studies with work in the Ecology and Environment track. Doing so has offered me the opportunity to engage faculty and graduate students who help me learn about how politics, economics, and the environment are imbricated, and about how they shape, and are shaped by, social practices. My classwork has directly and indirectly addressed this interconnectedness as it manifests in different facets of medicine, more general biological sciences, in environmental sciences, in archaeology, in the practices of capitalism and politics. The social and environmental consequences of the nature/culture di-

vide, of reifying and dissolving these categories, become more interesting as I keep working.

Geographically, my research focuses in Ecuador and Colombia. In both countries, discussion of the costs and benefits of natural resource commodification are often described by government, by NGOs, and by people living with natural resource production, as a discussion of “socio-environmental” issues. This grounded expression of the inter-relatedness of the social and the environmental is something that I research using qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as spatial analysis: methodological and analytical interests expanded upon through classwork at Stanford. In Ecuador, my research focuses on people who live at oil extraction sites in the country’s Amazonian region, and how their lived experiences propagate or challenge the discourses and practices of oil extraction being re-articulated under the ostensibly leftist governance of Ecuador. In collaboration with Ecuadorianist scholars who have extensive experience studying these issues, I have begun spatial analysis of household economics, time allocation, selfreported health in relation to the proximity and density of oil wells around Indigenous communities. A discussion of the effects of increasing market integration on indigenous culture and their subsistence practices, this research serves as empirical evidence of the substantive outcomes of social and environmental justice discourses promoted by the national government, evidence of how these discourses translate to the lived experience of Amazonian people who live around oil wells.

ronmental and national governance. This analysis links politics and the environment in a manner that reflects observations made by seminal social anthropologists who identify a linkage between ecological and political systems.

Multi-sited research, a multi-methods approach, seems critical to understanding complex “socioecological” systems, hybrid natures, or the inter-relatedness of nature and culture. Research on natural resource extraction, agricultural systems, land and water management, and conservation schemes are increasingly multi-sited, and use a suite of methodologies, all of which are intended to capture the nuance of issues that on the surface can seem intractable.

Classwork, conversations, readings, and research continue to suggest new avenues of analyzing these issues. As my research continues and I move from classwork into preparing for qualifying exams and writing a dissertation research proposal, I expect to deepen my engagement with investigation of the social practices that produce, and are produced by, the multiple and interconnected imaginaries entangling nature and culture.

While I continue to remain engaged in this Ecuadorian research as a means of understanding extraction-site communities, my doctoral dissertation research focuses on Colombia where I plan to research a population that is understudied in analysis of oil as a “socio-environmental” issue: the people who work for oil companies. While I expect to analyze macroeconomic data—oil production levels, imports and exports, and national budgets—my dissertation will primarily employ qualitative methods and analysis. Using steadfast ethnographic tools, participant observation, and indepth interviews, a portion of my research will focus on the ways in which oil workers conceive of the properties of oil and oil infrastructure, how these understandings convey certain understandings of environment, and how, when aggregated over time and across broad social contexts, those understandings become acts of envi-

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Annette Esquibel - Terminal Masters Student

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y two years in the Stanford Anthropology Department are quickly coming to a close. While it seems like just yesterday I was making initial contact with the Graduate Student Services Specialist from the back country of Arkansas, six quarters have come and gone during which said specialist has become an invaluable mentor and my graduate education has been influenced from many directions. I have concentrated on sustainable community development and environmental preservation frameworks throughout the tropics and focusing, in large part, on integrated conservation development projects. My interests necessitate a broad range of academic approaches, buoyed by my position as the only terminal Masters student in the Anthropology Department. I am straddling the line of academia between undergraduate students and PhD pursuers, garnering lessons and tools from each group. While some within Stanford would see this as a burden, I find it liberating and challenging: a chance to truly pursue my passions from all academic directions. During my

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first year at Stanford I immersed myself in graduate classes with my Anthro PhD cohort receiving a rigorous training in critical anthropological theory, methods, and approaches ranging from natural and cultural heritage to human behavioral ecology as well as gathering the pivotal wisdom of my more experienced compatriots. While key, this was only one aspect of my education, another being the critical pursuance of classes in the Human Biology, Latin American Studies, and Earth Sciences departments interacting with a wide range of undergraduate and Masters Students. It is from this exciting challenge of multidisciplinary learning that my thesis research work developed.

Over the summer and fall of 2014, I spent close to three months living in the forests of the Peruvian Amazon. I participated in the Tambopata Research Opportunity, a Stanford program in partnership with the Peruvian ecotourism company Rainforest Expeditions made available to undergraduate and Masters students in all disciplines. Five Stanford students, myself included, spent the summer at an ecolodge known as Refugio Amazonas in the Madre de Dios (Continued on page 14 )

A Conversation with Professor Jim Ferguson - by Josee Smith, Undergrad Anthropology Major

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n Monday, April 27, the Department of Anthropology hosted “Work and Welfare in the New Global Economy: A View from South Africa,” in conversation with Professor James Ferguson. The event was introduced by senior Josee Smith and moderated by seniors Andrea Hale and Nicole Follman.

The two moderators opened the event by asking Professor Ferguson to talk a bit about his research and the questions he was trying to answer. As he described it, he found himself faced with a puzzle and a desire to learn about what was going on in postapartheid South Africa.

“I was trying to make sense of what was going on in southern Africa by thinking about what I thought was going on in the world,” he said. “It’s a story about how more and more things are being turned over to the market, how more and more things are being privatized...In Africa we talk about structural adjustments...I was watching what was happening in South Africa, where they had a quite extensive system of social grants...and I thought ‘oh that won’t last long’...What I found was on the contrary. Year by year, this remarkable system of social grants steadily expanded, in the number of people who were eligible to receive grants, it expanded in the amount of money for the grants...This did not fit the story and it made me want to know what was going on.”

He then described the emergence of a new class of people who were living in the urban space but were not proletarians or workers or with any connection to the countryside. They had left the countryside and come to urban systems but had not found work, creating an interesting class of people that he was curious about and wanted to study further.

“They’d improvised their day-to-day living...

They’re people you just don’t know how to categorize,” he said. “Increasingly, they are most of the urban population. So now we must figure out how to understand these new urban classes. This got me interested in the expanding social programs.”

He was also interested in learning about how people get distribution and how they get a share of the society, when it’s not in exchange for their labor.

“Politically, morally, how do you established a basis for receiving these shares, if it’s not based on la-

bor?” he asked. “I'm especially interested in distribution based on citizenship...Someone might use that argument as basis for a rightful share in the form of a small payment, paid to everyone...I call it a ‘politics of distribution.’”

He then spoke about how he saw the benefit of anthropology in a globalized world and how some have felt that, since globalization might erase difference, anthropology might not be useful anymore.

However, he felt that it was important to look at things that people share across the world to understand how people differ.

“I had a lesson in that when I was visiting one of the big shopping malls in South Africa,” he said.

“The first thing that strikes you is that it is exactly like a shopping mall in America. It’s an upscale bunch of upper middle class consumers with money to spend. It’s a classic example of a slice of global culture. I was there with my son and bought him a pair of shoes. When we finished buying the shoes, they asked if we were going to keep the old shoes and we said no. So they took his old pair of shoes and put them outside of the store. I asked what they were doing and they said that in ten minutes they would be gone.”

“That shows you that it’s not the same social space as the shopping mall in the United States because the people shopping in a mall in the U.S. would not be interested in taking someone’s old shoes. The difference is that the black South Afri(Continued on page 16 ) VOLUME 8

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Professor Duana Fullwiley on The Social Implication of Genetic Technologies

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n January 2015 the Columbia, South Carolina Police Department released a computergenerated face based on DNA left at an unsolved murder crime scene. This was the very first time that a suspect’s anonymous sample would be assessed for ancestry genetic markers, and that a facial image would be created, circulated, and used to pinpoint legally “presumed innocent” individuals who might bear a resemblance to a digital, human-esque image produced in a laboratory.

The story was first covered by Fox news. The public was instructed to call CRIMESTOPPERS with leads if anyone saw a person resembling the young, black male face spawned from computer Image courtesy of New York Times algorithms correlating DNA, facial photos, and 3-D measures of facial morphology collected from consented of ancestry informative markers (AIMS) study subjects. Indeed, a few men were that are often used by consumers, televibrought in for questioning and asked to sion stars, and study subjects to find out submit a DNA sample after more than how “African,” “European,” “Asian,” or “Naa hundred people had already been tive American” they are for genealogical tested prior to the circulation of the purposes, were used to do the same for “digital mug shot.” To date, no one has the suspect’s sample left at the South matched the DNA from the crime scene.

Carolina crime scene. The developers of Nonetheless, this face, and the promise this test, which is now used in forensics of others like it, set in motion new hopes and sold by a private company called for policing. This specific application Parabon Nanolabs, have spent years of genetic ancestry markers is called testing AIMS on student volunteers and “molecular photo fitting,” or, alternately, others who were also willing to submit “DNA phenotyping.” a photograph of themselves. Their goal has been to assess the degree to which What many may not realize is that a given individual possesses certain the industry of genetic ancestry testing, patterns of genetic allelic variants in a made popular by television shows such marker panel, and how any one person’s as PBS’s “African American Lives” and DNA results correlate with their actual “Finding our Roots,” has always also faces. The researchers also measured been deeply committed to forensics. key points on the face, like the distance In this case of what the February 23rd between the eyes, nose size, lip breadth, New York Times science pages called a face shape, and head forms.

“DNA-generated face,” the technology

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The AIMs technology was born under a different name in 1997.

At that time it was called “Ethnic Affiliation Estimation” by researchers who inferred such estimates by looking at what they called “private,” “population specific markers.”

These DNA markers were in fact shared among populations, but appeared at different frequencies in people across the globe. This work was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics and the target audience was forensic scientists. The developers later changed their language to “Ancestry Information Markers.”

They were specifically trying to optimize a model where genetic variants that occurred at high or low frequencies in select populations in the specific continental contexts of Africa, Europe, Asia, and pre-Columbian Native America, could differentiate these groups from one another. The AIMs model is artificial in that it lumps and splits human groups in ways that resemble societal racial categories, while it is deeply American in its vision of what the salient divisions between human groups of interest might be. Superficial factors influenced by selection, like skin pigmentation, freckling, red versus black hair color, and malaria resistance, are the low hanging fruit of such endeavors. In this way, the cultural frame of what is also called “biogeographical genetic ancestry” easily lends itself to racial thinking. Culturally, however, it is also a flexible technology since many consumers and genealogists increasingly rely on its notion of ancestry for personal interest and in some cases for “fun,” even as it is simultaneously deployed for more serious matters of racial typing in police work.

To this point, its architects readily claim

that it can infer the “genetic component of race,” and, or, “deconstruct” race as hypodescent in the United States. By this they mean that it gives results that an individual can have segmented ancestry, comprised of multiple origins and identities in a cultural and historical context where many people have recently mixed heritage.

I detail the liberal and well-intentioned motives of the scientists involved in this field, coupled with the real racializing effects of their work, in my recent paper The “Contemporary Synthesis”: When Politically Inclusive Genomic Science Relies on Biological Notions of Race. It appeared in the Journal of the History of Science Society, ISIS, the month before the first DNA-generated face made news headlines.

In reading the background papers for Parabon Nanolabs’ application of ‘DNA phenotyping’ it becomes clear that from a social justice perspective there is a troubling element contained in the very make up of this technology. That is: it was largely developed using black populations, or, more precisely, people who possess “West African ancestry” with varying degrees of “European ancestry,” i.e., African Americans. Other populations that approximate African Americans in terms of ancestry, Brazilians and Cape Verdeans, were also used to construct the database. This is a clear instance of bias being built into a technological apparatus. At the same time, there is nothing in the marketing or in the rollout of this technology that acknowledges this fact. The initial basic research for this tool was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Justice.

With companies like ancestry.com, Family Tree DNA, African Ancestry, African DNA, 23&Me and dozens more that offer various kinds of ancestry tests, direct-to-consumer personal ancestry and personal genetic pursuits are on the rise. We are witnessing a de-cloistering of scientific knowledge. Elements of

population genetics are coming out of the lab and people are integrating bits of DNA knowledge into everyday life. Many find this trend democratizing and liberalizing, but it also leads to cause for concern. Not every aspect of the scientific products in question is transparently available for public view and consumption in the same way as the test “results” are. For instance, when private companies are involved, and databases are proprietary, it is hard to know where, and if, firewalls exist between personal genetic data used for recreational genealogical purposes and those used to compile data for forensics.

Law enforcement can issue a court order to run crime samples against samples in genealogical databases. Researchers can share data and use this information across the domains of “fun” and “forensics,” not to mention medicine and drug development. In some cases academic researchers have started their own companies that are involved in ancestry genetics and forensics. Does it matter?

Should we care? At the very least, we should be informed.

The issues that I raise here are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. For this reason educators, geneticists, and social scientists who comprise the Harvard Medical School-based Personal Genetics Education Project, or Pg-ED, approached the offices of Congresswoman Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to host a panel to brief congress on the messy current state of affairs. I was one of four speakers invited to participate in the briefing called Genetics and Law Enforcement: Improving public safety, ensuring justice, and balancing civil rights. The hearing focused on how new genetic technologies and privacy laws are influencing forensics and the criminal justice system. Specifically, all four of the panelists discussed the collection, storage, and analysis of DNA, the development of new technologies that are seen as creating new possibilities VOLUME 8

for law enforcement, and their implications for privacy and racial justice. The public’s understanding of these issues is central to an on-going dialogue about a safe and fair integration of genetics into society.

The congressional briefing led to a second invitation for me to brief the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) specifically on the potential disparate impacts of “DNA phenotyping” on minority communities. I also discussed issues of informed consent more generally with

Photo courtesy of Mark Finkenstaedt

regard to DNA procurement for genetic ancestry, forensics, and the massive one million-person database envisioned for President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative. Anthropologists know how easily objects circulate in society— and that the social life of technologies are hitched to the social concerns and anxieties of the humans who make and use them. DNA identification techniques are no exception. They are not immune to the dominant racial projects, medical hopes, identity quests, or policing biases that characterize our contemporary moment and that deserve our sustained attention.

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Maron Greenleaf (Continued from page 3 )

Once I completed coursework, the boundary between the two tracks became even less substantial. Instead, my research questions and the most appropriate methods and theoretical frames for addressing them came to dominate. My committee members, drawn from both tracks at Stanford and other universities, and the department administration have been flexible in allowing me to write research proposals, conduct fieldwork, and select a dissertation structure and style that most suited my specific work.

Maron Greenleaf with interviewees and hosts in Acre, Brazil.

Using a variety of methodologies shaped and strengthened my research. My fieldwork in Acre began with a collaboration with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), an international forestry research organization based in Indonesia. My work as a field research supervisor for the Acre site of CIFOR’s Global Comparative Study on REDD+ combined some CS and EE components of my work. I managed and helped to conduct an extensive largescale quantitative and qualitative survey of 240 farmers, gathering far more data for my dissertation than I would have been able to on my own. This data includes information about farmers’ income, land use practices, tenure rights, and experiences with Acre’s REDD program. Working with CIFOR in this capacity also constituted an important participant observation component in my work: I was able to study how Acreano foresters and other urban residents (who

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comprised my research team) engaged with the state’s rural areas and residents, as well as how globally circulating knowledge about these Amazonian areas and REDD is produced through such research.

This survey work with CIFOR had important impacts on my subsequent independent ethnographic work. In particular, it led it me to focus some of my research on agricultural extension work, which I had begun to study through the survey work. Such agricultural extension work was, I found, an essential space of contact between Acreano farmers and the state government’s efforts to reduce deforestation.

To study it, I built on relationships that I had developed through working with CIFOR to gain access in relevant state institutions and to spend time with agricultural extension workers, both in their offices and through accompanying them to “the field,” as they put it. The CIFOR survey work also helped me to focus on what I wanted to understand through spending more time with farmers. I could draw from and delve into the quantitative data we had gathered in a more qualitative way, with a much small number of farmers. This experience revealed to me how complementary anthropology’s diverse methods can be.

My cross-track engagement has continued into the dissertation-writing phase of my PhD. Since I decided to write my dissertation as an ethnographic manuscript, I have joined the CS students in their dissertation writers’ seminar with Liisa Malki and am taking Lochlann Jain’s ethnographic writing course this spring. Having the CIFOR survey data on livelihoods and land use among a larger number of farmers also gives me the opportunity to integrate other forms of data into my dissertation. I am also continuing to work with CIFOR now through collaborative and comparative work on REDD. The diversity of theory and methods that I have gained through working across the CS and EE tracks has prepared me to teach in both an anthropology department and in growing interdisciplinary environmental programs. Importantly, my work in both tracks has also equipped me to communicate more effectively with the diverse audiences who are increasingly interested in the work of environmental anthropologists.

IN MEMORIAM

Arthur P. Wolf 1932 - 2015

Arthur P. Wolf, the David and Lucile Packard Professor in Human Biology and Professor of Anthropological Sciences, passed away on May 2, 2015. He was 83

Arthur Wolf was born on March 2, 1932 in Santa Rosa, California. Growing up in a family of ranchers and loggers, Wolf started working at an early age, picking prunes in grade school, then working as a logger in high school. While attending Santa Rosa Junior College, he supported himself by working as a miner and logger, even travelling to Alaska one summer to work in the gold fields.

After receiving an Associate Degree from Santa Rosa College, Wolf received a Telluride Fellowship to Cornell University where he received his bachelor's degree in English literature and doctorate in Anthropology. During the early Cornell years, he married Margery Jones, who herself became a noted anthropologist.

Before coming to Stanford, Wolf was an assistant professor of anthropology and psychology at Cornell University. Two highlights of his career were a year he spent in England lecturing at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1964 and another year he spent as a visiting fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University in 1974.

Wolf spent many years doing field research in Taiwan, amassing a vast archive of information on early 20thcentury Taiwan households. This work and other studies in comparative Taiwan/Dutch demography continued at Stanford while he taught in the Department of Anthro-

pology between 1968 and 1998, and the Department of Anthropological Sciences between 1998 and 2015.

Wolf 's research focused on how biology and culture jointly shape the human condition. He examined family practices (including marriage and adoption), the transmission of property, and population trends, as he simultaneously undertook traditional social anthropological and not-so-traditional human biological field research in Taiwan. He was the author or editor of numerous books and articles, including Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck, Marriage and Adoption in China, 18451945, and Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo.

William Durham, Stanford professor of anthropology and human biology, co-edited Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo with Wolf, said: "The book was an outgrowth of a unit Arthur and I taught together for more than 25 years in the Human Biology Core. We staged it as a debate between different perspectives on the incest taboo, putting the students in the role of judge which they loved. He knew the topic so well, and his data were so convincing, that the best I could do most years was a tie. His writings on the topic rank as an anthropological classic and will be read for years to come."

Wolf 's last book, Incest Avoidance and the Incest Taboos.

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Arthur Wolf (Continued from page 13 )

Two Aspects of Human Nature, completed the year before he died, gave his argument for the connection between biology and culture in humanity's variable incest prohibitions.

An engaging speaker, Wolf was a popular teacher and was once called “the best lecturer in the department” by one of his former graduate students, Steven Sangren, now an anthropology professor at Cornell University. “Wolf has the talent of communicating very complex ideas very effectively; he simplifies them so well that people don’t always realize the penetrating analysis that underlies them,” said Sangren. In 1976, Wolf received the Dean’s Award for Teaching in the School of Humanities and Sciences. "Wolf ’s lectures were a masterful combination of ethnographic narrative and social analysis," said Sylvia Yanagisako, the Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and professor and chair of Department of Anthropology. "He

was also a generous and effective mentor of junior faculty."

Wolf ’s participation in Stanford's Program in Human Biology began in 1976, and his teaching and curricular innovations were a tremendous asset to the program. "I taught the Introduction to Human Biology with Arthur for 15 years, and each time, I benefited again from his exceptional ability to explain how culture and biology interact to make us human,” said Wolf 's close friend Richard Klein, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and professor of anthropology and biology.

Wolf is survived by his wife Hill Gates, whom he married in 1990. Getting back to his roots, he and Gates maintained the Wolf family ranch in northern Sonoma County where they had sheep, deer, feral pigs, and turkeys. They were in the process of building a writers’ retreat on the property using lumber logged from the land and doing the work themselves.

Annette Esquibel (Continued from page 8 )

state of Peru conducting independent research studies in the fields of psychology, ecology, biology, and anthropology. Through constant mentoring and support of one another, all of our projects became quite interdisciplinary, resulting in stronger and more interesting applications of our collective knowledge and skills.

This collaboration resulted in my research taking the form of a spatial data collection, biodiversity inventory and satisfaction investigation rolled into one. In this way, a more holistic approach to understanding ecotourism in the Peruvian Amazon was taken, resulting in

applicable and intriguing results for not only Refugio Amazonas Ecolodge and the ecotourism community at large but also travel and tourism researchers, vacation marketers, conservation biologists, community development economists, ecologists, and applied anthropologists. It is my sincere belief that such a multidisciplinary approach truly makes the results of my research worthwhile, and I have made an effort to convey the impacts of my findings to many different groups of scholars, including presentations within the Anthropology Department, at the Center for Latin American Studies, and even at a Symposium on Latin American Development. With the indispensable help of faculty and staff within the Anthropology Department and throughout Stanford, I am proud to say that not only have my two years on The Farm made me a more critical thinker, innovative researcher, and informed activist, but also an interdisciplinary scholar who will be able to apply a wide range of viewpoints in my continued work with communities in conservation development strategies.

To read more about the Tambopata Research Opportunity please visit http://stanford.edu/group/tro/index.html. A complete version of Annette’s Masters Thesis research “Look at That: Faunal Sightings and Tourist Satisfaction in the Peruvian Amazon” can be found at http://www.linkedin.com/ in/aesquibel under Academic Projects.

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Anthropologically Speaking: The Continued Rise of Interdisciplinary Student Groups

by Annette Esquibel, Terminal Masters Student

O

ver the past two years there have been a number of student led pop-up groups within the Anthropology Department.

These groups all start with a similar purpose- to dig deeper into a shared interest, to engage in collaborative thinking and discussion, and to take ownership over the direction of one’s learning. Graduate students who are organizing and participating in these groups find that they provide an intellectual freedom and comradery that traditional class settings may lack. These student groups of the past couple years were founded on a variety of topics from climate theory to ruination to environment and society. Student organized and led groups within the Anthropology Department are by no means a new phenomenon as there have been many reading groups organized by past cohorts on a variety of topics. The question of “What does it mean for different disciplines to approach universalizing concepts?” is as relevant for today’s scholars as it was for yesterday’s guaranteeing a continued pursuit of the answer through student led academic groups within the department.

Anthropology students participating in this year’s groups have all expressed a great satisfaction with the success of the groups as well as the benefits they provide to the individuals and the department as a whole. All of the groups are made up of graduate students in differing cohorts, tracks, and even varying departments. This diversity has fostered friendships throughout cohorts as well as provided a means of supporting students within the department that have interests spanning multiple tracks. Such groups also set a precedent of support by the department for students who are interested in gathering together to engage in free-ranging discussion about topics of mutual interest. Students involved in the Environment and Society Group of 2014- 2015 report a richer intellectual community within the department as participation in the group has provided a forum to address shared interests and explore broader issues that may not fall into one individual class topic as well as solidified collaborative and friendly bonds between the participants. In this way students have expanded academic support networks within the department to include peers and mentors throughout the various tracks, creating a stronger departmental culture overall.

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Anthropologically Speaking (Continued from page 15 )

ing, ruins in postmodern landscape, and the interplay between defaunation and indignity, to name a few. While some of the groups are about specific intellectual ideas or theories, others are more practical in organization with individuals benefiting from feedback on research ideas, tips about living in the field, and even discussions of the dissertation writing process.

Many first year PhD students have found that participating in the groups has provided refinement of their research ideas as well as a grounding of where they should be in their personal research process and what to expect from various stages of the program ahead of them.

Individuals within the Climate Theory Collective of 2015 found that student groups allow for more freedom in the range of topics discussed as well as an ability to spontaneously direct the conversation towards issues of concern in an informal manner. Co-organizers of the Ruination Reading Group of 2014 found that students involved in groups have much higher ownership over the material and the direction of the group as many were involved in designing the syllabus resulting in an enthusiastic and devoted group. While many of these groups have the input of faculty members, they are all student directed, allowing graduate students to engage with each other and think expansively or speculatively on topics without the pressure of directly addressing a professor that one would in a formal classroom setting. Specific topics range broadly throughout the groups, including discussions on the politics of global warm-

When asked if students believed the student pop-up groups should continue, all expressed a contagious optimism. As stated above, first year students found the groups extremely helpful for orienting themselves within the department. However, it is not only newer graduate students who have benefited from the process: Multiple dissertation writers found the groups make them more holistic academics. Co-founders of the Climate Theory Collective believe that even if that particular group does not continue past the end of the quarter, there is a growing momentum for students to gain agency in addressing differing themes of interest within the department, and they see a possibility for the merging of small student groups in the future.

No matter which direction the future of the student groups may take, it is doubtful that the value of addressing broad, overarching questions that cut across multiple disciplines and rethinking anthropological approaches on one’s own terms will wane.

Jim Ferguson (Continued from page 9 )

cans, shopping with money to spend, don’t need those shoes but they know someone who does. Usually they have relatives who are not middle-class or consumers but very poor people in rural areas. When they go to visit [their relatives], they will bring home things, such as the old shoes, and their relatives will appreciate them. There’s something about these social relations that becomes interesting when you make it visible. It woke me up to the revealing nature of what seems to be the same [globally] but isn’t quite.”

He also advised the importance of what he calls “positive politics,” wherein one is not just attacking or critiquing systems or ways of governing but is actually offering real solutions or alternatives in a way that enables one to look forward and try to make real change. For him, these social grants show the way that kind of politics can work.

“I think southern Africa is an extreme case...but I think you see things like that happening in many parts of the world, where unemployment is ceasing to look temporary and more like a durable part of society,” he said. “People are really think-

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ing about what that means now, and not just nostalgically pining for the days when people had jobs, but rather to think about what a realistic politics going forward would look like.”

The conversation was followed by a Q&A session with the audience, where Professor Ferguson was given the chance to answer clarifying questions and expand on his previous statements and thoughts.

Moving forward, Professor Ferguson finds himself in the lovely space of having finished a book and not yet having committed himself to any other projects.

“I kind of want to leave that open for a while, just to savor it, but also to think ‘to what extent am I really prepared to take off and do something very different?’” he said. “And I think it would be really renewing to do that. But of course I have sustained interests and commitments that are regionally based and one doesn’t walk away from that...But it’s something that I’m thinking about.”

Department News

New Books James Ferguson, Professor Give a Man a Fish Duke University Press Books (May 8, 2015) In Give a Man a Fish James Ferguson examines the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa, in which states make cash payments to their low income citizens. More than thirty percent of South Africa's population receive such payments, even as pundits elsewhere proclaim the neoliberal death of the welfare state. These programs' successes at reducing poverty under conditions of mass unemployment, Ferguson argues, provide an opportunity for rethinking contemporary capitalism and for developing new forms of political mobilization. Interested in an emerging "politics of distribution," Ferguson shows how new demands for direct income payments (including so-called "basic income") require us to reexamine the relation between production and distribution, and to ask new questions about markets, livelihoods, labor, and the future of progressive politics.

Lynn Meskell, Professor Global Heritage: A Reader Wiley-Blackwell (June 2, 2015) Global Heritage: A Reader examines the practice and politics of global heritage preservation and its resulting social implications. Chapters are organized to include a review of relevant, recent literature as well as providing detailed descriptions of innovative projects, studies, trends or problematics that chart the way forward for future studies and heritage directions.

Contributors discuss the productive tensions, new challenges and emergent areas that students and professionals need to be aware of in the decades to come. This structure reveals the dynamic nature of the field, and is as geographically inclusive as possible, reflecting the many perspectives and writings that have been produced in various fields, whilst exposing the complex nature of contemporary heritage issues.

The Reader explores new directions in heritage scholarship, acknowledging and building upon fundamental established perspectives from archaeology, anthropology, politics, nationalism, ethics and materiality studies.

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Department News

Conferences and Workshops Civility, Trust, Recognition, and Co-Existence (April 17 - 18, 2015) The Civility, Trust, Recognition, and Co-Existence workshop starts with the premise that civility is a normative value, a cultural practice, and a form of political life. It aimed to bring into focus the ethical charges and political implications of attempts to act civilly. The workshop explored some of the following questions: How might one conceptualize civility and its associated concepts in new ways and/or with new histories? What are the forms, practices, and claims about civility that shape people’s everyday interactions? Which actors have

Urban Beyond Measure (May 8 - 9, 2015) Cities in the global south are not only growing at unprecedented rates, they are also taking shape in novel forms.

These new cities, often labeled as mega-cities or informal cities, are challenging conventional assumptions about how cities develop, what they look like, what they provide, and who they are for. In many regards, our scientific means of framing the city and how it is changing is in a process of catching up, leaving us with a sense of the urban beyond measure.

In May the department, in conjunction with Stanford Global Studies and the Vice-Provost of Research, hosted a twoday conference to explore ways of knowing urban environments in the global south. Gathering scholars from around the world and from a broad range of disciplines, the conference explored how claims to know and measure urban life are made and how making knowledge about the urban is constitutive of emergent publics and politics. The concept of registers helped to identify the knowledge practices, research methodologies, modes of representation, and sensory regimes through which scholars, residents, and planners know, inhabit, and act upon cities.

Bookended by two keynote lectures, the conference included dialogues on "slums and quality of life," "sanitation and waste," "urban hydrology and ecosystem services," "pollution and environmental health," and "aggregating metrics of urban sustainability." The conference also featured film screenings and a photo exhibit, inviting participants to consider how artistic forms of knowledge production and representation can contribute to registering the urban environments.

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Honors and Accolades

particular stakes, and why, in claims about civility?

What normative frames and forms of accountability are involved in such practices? How do claims of civility relate to wider inequalities and violence?

What is the relationship between urbanity and civility? The two-day workshop was sponsored by the Anthropology Department as well as by a number of different units across the campus including Stanford Global Studies, Stanford Initiative for Religious and Ethnic Understanding and Coexistence, Freeman Spogli Institute, Center for South Asia, ABBASI Program in Islamic Studies, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Center for African Studies, University of Edinburgh (UK), and Stanford Humanities Center.

The April 2015 issue of Journal of Archaeological Science honors Richard Klein’s outstanding contribution to archaeology through his seminal role as a senior editor for the journal. Titled Scoping the Future of Archaeological Science: Papers in Honour of Richard Klein, this special issue is a tribute to Klein, who had joined the JAS Editorial Board in 1978 and became a senior editor in 1981. Under his guidance, JAS has grown to become the leader in its field, increasing its publications by 10-fold and expanding its range of topics to include an immense array of ideas and methods that are now firmly incorporated within the broader discipline of archaeology.

Scoping the Future of Archaeological Science brings together papers that traverse the entire range of archaeological science to acknowledge the role of Klein in the history of the discipline and to honor him on his retirement from his senior editorial role.

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Department News

Awards and Grants Sharika Thiranagama was awarded grants from the National Science Foundation grant and the Wenner Gren Foundation for her project titled "The Locallevel Social Life of Global Ideologies" How do global political ideologies, such as communism, become locally rooted and perpetuated over generations? Stanford University anthropologist, Dr. Sharika Thiranagama, will address this question through an investigation into the microprocesses through which ideological affiliations are perpetuated in everyday sociality. The research will be conducted in the southern Indian state of Kerala. This is an appropriate site for the research because in 1957, Kerala saw the installation of the first ever democratically elected communist government and communist parties have been part of the ruling coalition ever since. Communism in Kerala has survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and the waning of the organized left in most of the world. This project addresses the question of why and how this has come about. While much research in the social sciences evaluates and measures political affiliation through the examination of electoral votes and formal institutions, Dr. Thiranagama will instead examine the percolating and pervasive effects of political ideologies through how they are manifested in everyday practices in the family and in public spaces. This project will both contribute to an understanding of how political ideology might persist by shaping non-political realms of people's lives and also to an understanding of the long afterlife of the communist movement outside of the Soviet, Chinese, and Eastern Europe Bloc.

The research will be carried out in Kerala in the districts of Palakkad and Kannur, both of which have long been communist strongholds. Dr. Thiranagama will focus on exemplary institutions: the public library system and the private "communist family." Both have been deeply implicated in the public and private promulgation of communism in Kerala. Kerala's unique library movement introduced reading rooms, mass literacy, deliberative political discussion and communism into everyday life. The "communist family" sought to reconfigure ethics and the practice of intimate life. Data will be gathered in two neighborhoods and with library users and staff using a mixed methods approach, including interviews, participant observation, household surveys, and life history interviews. In addition, archival research will be undertaken to construct longitudinal social histories of the library and the family. Findings from this research will help to understand one of the enduring questions of modern times: how global ideologies are taken up and made to persist in ordinary people's daily lives.

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Ian Hodder received funding from John Templeton Foundation for his project titled "Consciousness and Creativity at the Dawn of Settled Life: The Test-Case of Çatalhöyük" The project addresses the relationships between the origins of settled agricultural life and cognitive change by studying the archaeological data from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. The unprecedented volume of data from this site will be used to test a series of claims made by authors including Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin, Colin Renfrew, and Jacques Cauvin, about the Neolithic as a key moment in the gradual process by which human consciousness, an awareness of an integrated personal self, and the horizons of human possibility (innovation and creativity) all increased. Through empirical archaeological research, the project will test competing expectations about the timing and causes of these changes. The activities that constitute this project are (1) excavation at Çatalhöyük, (2) data analysis, (3) fellowships, (4) a workshop and conference, and (5) publication. The output to be generated by this study will include four new monographs, a more popular book, a conference proceedings, and at least 20 peer-reviewed articles. This project aims to make a difference by showing that rich and scientifically collected archaeological data can be used to test hypotheses about how we evolved cognitively. It aims to show that the Neolithic was a key moment in the gradual forging of the modern mind and that the causes of this change can be discerned by careful analysis of a rich body of archaeological data collected over more than 20 years. The enduring impact is to show the "process by which potential man realized more and more of his possibilities" in the words of Teilhard de Chardin.

Rebecca Bird received a National Science Foundation grant for her project titled "A Co-Evolutionary Approach to a Complex Adaptive System" Do humans always have devastatingly negative impacts on the environment? Decades of environmental work has documented a host of species extinctions and population losses due to disturbances from human economic activity, from land clearance for agriculture and forestry, to commercial hunting and fishing. On the other hand, there is considerable work in ecology that suggests large vertebrate consumers and predators (like us) can play an important role in an ecosystem, either by constructing diverse habitats for other organisms, as a beaver does in damming a stream, or by keeping populations of herbivores in check through predation so that they don't overgraze plant communities, as wolves do for elk and deer. Many cases have now accumulated suggesting that the removal of such important species, often called keystone species, can cause catastrophic change in an ecosystem, often leading to rapid extinction of a wide range of species that can no longer co-exist without the positive effects provided by the keystone. The hypothesis that humans could be an important keystone species seems to be strongly disproven by the extensive evidence for our widespread negative impacts. However, ecologists also point out that the scope and scale of disturbance matters: if beavers were to dam over huge areas, diversity would likely decrease, rather than increase; if wolves took too many elk, the elk population would crash and streams would be choked with too much vegetation, causing fish to suffer. Likewise, too few beaver ponds or too little predation of elk has little effect on the environment. There is a sweet spot of intermediate disturbance with the most positive effects. Our best hope of finding cases where people might act as keystone species is to look at small-scale societies, where environmental impacts tend to be more intermediate in scope, where they've hit the sweet spot of interference in an ecosystem. One of the most significant ways humans in small-scale societies can affect ecosystems is through the use of fire; especially in seasonally dry environments, and there's mounting evidence that indigenous burning has, for millennia, helped to shape the distribution of plants and animals in many parts of the world. Today, there are few places where traditional indigenous use of fire is still part of the picture, and in these regions where fire has been suppressed, like California, indigenous communities have lost many of the native plants and animals that were formerly a huge part of their traditional subsistence base, forcing them to rely more on government aid and poor quality market foods; as a result, health, well-being, and food

security suffers. If indigenous populations function as a keystone species, native plants and animals may have coevolved with burning for millennia, such that preventing people from burning and hunting in traditional ways may be contributing to this decline in the health of both native species and native people. However, there is yet little data to support this idea. Our project investigates whether traditional burning by an indigenous population has positive impacts on both native plants and animals, and in so doing, helps to support indigenous welfare by increasing reliance on traditional foods. As few indigenous communities in the US are able to burn in traditional ways, we investigate these questions in Australia, in a remote community in the arid grasslands of Western Australia where burning has continued for millennia.

Our project surveys plant and animal species distributions to see how they are affected by human hunting and burning activities. We compare places where people don't go, with areas where they hunt and burn more moderately and more intensively, to see how species respond to each of these kinds of treatment, including how people themselves fare in each type of environment. We will map out the history of fire use across the landscape in each region by looking at satellite imagery and aerial photography over a 25 year period. The data that we collect will be used to develop a computer model of human fires and hunting across this landscape over time, to see how the impacts of human use affect populations of especially critically endangered native species. We can use the model to see whether extinctions become more likely as human hunting and burning declines. While the model will be developed for the Australian grassland case, it is generalizable enough that it can also be used to model similar dynamics in other fire-dominated ecosystems, like California, and as such, we intend to bring the model to colleagues and collaborators in the Yurok tribe, who are currently attempting to restore many of their native ecosystems and traditional foods with prescribed fire. Our work will have important implications for conservation and land management policies, particularly in regions of the US where indigenous groups and government agencies often seem to have conflicting interests. If our work shows that indigenous populations can act as keystones, the ecological goods and services they supply through traditional management may be quite significant, saving millions of dollars annually in habitat restoration and prescribed fire.

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Department News Barb Voss Received Funding from the Chinese Historical & Cultural Project to Digitize San Jose Newspapers for Research and Education The Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project received funding to support digitization of San Jose newspaper records. The resulting digitized newspaper records will be made publically available on the Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project website: http://marketstreet.stanford. edu/2014/07/historic-newspapers/.

The initial pilot phase of the newspaper research was funded by two Stanford programs, the UPS Fund and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Ongoing funding for student research assistant wages is provided by a Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education faculty grant. The pilot phase focuses on January 1886 – June 1886, a critical period in immigration politics in San Jose. Funding from the CHCP HELP fund would enable us to expand this study to include two other critical months: April 1887 and May 1887, the period before and after the May 4, 1887 arson fire.

The Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project is a community-based research and education partnership among Stanford University, Chinese Historical and Cultural Project, History San José, and Environmental Science Associates. The Project was formed in 2002 to study and interpret artifacts from the 19th century Market Street Chinatown. Established in 1862, the Market Street Chinatown was home to over 1,000 Chinese immigrants, and its stores, temples, opera houses, restaurants, and other businesses served an additional estimated 2,000 Chinese immigrants living throughout Santa Clara County. On May 4, 1887, the Market Street Chinatown was destroyed by an arson fire during the height of the

anti-Chinese movement. The study of this fire has become one central research theme in the Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project.

The Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project is working to digitize materials from San Jose newspapers that relate to the history of the Market Street Chinatown.

With Barb Voss’s guidance, staff and student assistants will systemically review and transcribe articles that report on events related to Santa Clara County Chinese individuals and communities and the anti-Chinese movement. The digitized newspaper materials include articles, editorials, advertisements, court reports, letters to the editors, and minutes from Common Council and Board of Supervisor meetings. The resulting searchable files, organized by month, are presented in .pdf format and .csv spreadsheets. The files include the full text of the newspaper article, along with the date of publication, name of the newspaper, type of article, byline or wire service credit, and number of words.

These newspaper materials provide a rich source of documentary evidence about journalists’ perceptions of historic Chinese communities and of the public debates about Chinese immigration at the time. They can be used by researchers and by Chinese Americans today who wish to search for information about people and businesses in San Jose’s historic Chinese communities. They can also be used by educators as readily-available primary sources, allowing students to learn about history in the words of those who witnessed these events.

Sharika Thiranagama received Excellence in Undergrad Teaching Award

Beginning this year, the undergraduate students in the Department of Anthropology were asked to nominate a professor to receive the Excellence in Teaching Award. A committee of undergraduate students and one graduate student reviewed all of the nominations and determined which professor should win the award based on the responses of the survey and the committee’s own experience with the professors.

During the Spring Picnic, Assistant Professor Sharika Thiranagama was awarded The Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award for Anthropology. Students nominated Professor Thiranagama based on her approachability, strong engagement during classes, and willingness to help students think through their projects and research. As one student said, "[her classes] have been incredibly comfortable spaces for me to attempt to contribute to discussion, and judging by the amount of class participation in each of them, other students felt the same.” For another student, Professor Thiranagama “helps students synthesize difficult concepts about culture, race, ethnicity in tactful and meaningful ways that is accepting and open to everyone,” and “encourages students to speak up even if they that what they are saying is insignificant.” The Department of Anthropology and the Undergraduate students thank Professor Thiranagama for her contributions to the department.

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Undergrad Events Majors Night – Oct 1 2014 This year, Major’s Night was held in Paul Brest Hall and was a great success! Freshmen and sophomores were greeted by friendly faces of the Department of Anthropology. UG Committee Chair-Sharika Thiranagama, Peer Advisors-Sarah Moore and Julia Raban, UG Student Services Specialist-Anahid Sarkissian, and Grad Student-Nisrin Elamin were all on hand to field questions related to Anthropology and share the many research opportunities available to them.

Meet the Department Dinner – Nov 5, 2014 During the beginning of Autumn Quarter, undergraduate students met with faculty and department affiliates over a dinner social. Faculty members presented their research interests and shared the courses they plan to offer in the upcoming year! Afterwards, students were welcomed to engage with faculty that they found shared similar interests.

Undergraduate and Graduate Student Dinner and Networking Social – March 4, 2015 A dinner was held for both Undergrads and Graduates to meet and talk about their experiences studying anthropology at Stanford. It was an eye opening occasion that allowed students to gain a deeper understanding of the vast possibilities of research within the field of anthropology.

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Department News Anthropology Career Night “What job can I get with that? Careers After Anthropology!” - Feb18, 2015

The Department of Anthropology Career Night Event, provided attendees an invaluable opportunity to meet and talk to professionals who studied anthropology and are now working in fulfilling careers in the fields of law, medicine, technology, and non-profit sector. Our panel included the following: Roberta Katz- Associate Vice President for Strategic Planning, Stanford University Kim Grose Moore - Community Organizer, Executive Director, and Leadership Coach Emily Lee- Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, UC San Francisco Ronda Macchello- Physician, Internal Medicine, Palo Alto Medical Foundation Diana Langston- Director of Content Strategy & User Engagement, Product Management Team, Extole

42nd Annual Western Dept of Anthropology and Sociology Undergraduate Research Conference – Apr 18, 2015 Anthropology Seniors Jocelyn Smith, Nicole Follmann, and Elon Hailu were selected to present their research at this year’s Anthropology and Sociology Conference held at Santa Clara University.

Admit Weekend Open House – April 24th 2015 The anthropology undergraduate Peer Advisors tabled outside of the department during Admit Weekend. Newly admitted students stopped by to find out more about the major and what anthropology entails.

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Honors Hour Every month, all undergraduate students are invited to discuss their honors research, exchange new ideas, and get support from their peers who are pursuing the Anthropology Honors Program.

Honors/ Master Presentation – May 18th 2015

Spring Picnic – May 18th 2015

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Letter from the Field

Kathryn Takabvirwa - Doctoral Candidate, Dissertation Writer “Afamba apota” - Shona proverb: “He who has travelled has disappeared around a bend”

I

am sitting on a combi as I start to write this, on my way to church. I want to tell you about how I sang this morning, as I bathed. About how water came out of the taps for the first time in months. Months. It was the color of mud and rust, but I was so happy! I cannot tell you what a relief it is to be able to flush the loo without having to first hoist a bucketful of water. I want to tell you that it’s been raining for the last couple of days, so my pretty black heels are caked in fresh mud. That the massive potholes have turned into overgrown puddles. Mini-dams. That I laughed with someone as I waited for the combi about how we would soon be fishing in the potholes-turned-ponds. But this morning’s news has interrupted the laughter, and so, I must tell you this instead:

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Men, women, and children are being burned alive in South Africa, by riotous mobs. Their crime: being poor, black, African and foreign in South Africa. When a massive wave of xenophobic violence rocked South Africa in May 2008, it seemed such an excess of violence, it seemed unlikely to be repeated. Then it happened again in 2010 and again in 2012. When the beatings and the burnings started in 2010, I was living in Johannesburg, doing research on xenophobia and ‘social cohesion’ at Wits University. There were speeches, rituals, promises after, and South Africa swore such hateful attacks would not happen again. But here we are again. April 16th, 2015, The Herald newspaper’s headline reads: “800 Zimbabwe-

ans Displaced, 1 Dead.” On the cover of The Chronicle are two large color photographs, each of a man being attacked. In the one to the left, a man stands over his victim, a rock in his hand, poised to bring the rock crushing into the man’s skull as a crowd stands by, watching. In the other, the attacker wields a big stick. Again the crowds, watching, jeering.

When I went to buy bread at the tuckshops the other day, I asked one of the women there how her trip to South Africa had been. She takes a bus down weekly to buy goods to bring back to sell in Zimbabwe. She answered that she had just been to Messina, just across the border, and that there was no xenophobic violence in that part of South Africa. “Messina is just Zimbabweans, everywhere you go,” she said. Another woman, hearing us, walked over. “Xenophobia? What’s happening in South Africa is terrible,” she said.

She sat down on the stone bench and told us about the two little children. A little boy and a little girl, or maybe they were both boys. She had seen a video online. Seen them, kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs, leaning against each other, “munhu kubhara machisa,” [“a person – to strike a match,”] she said, making the motion of striking a match and then throwing it, “and set them on fire.” She shook her head slowly, looking dazed. The videos are all over Facebook, the photos, threats, and inevitable jokes forwarded on Whatsapp.

The violence itself is not new. South Africa History Online has a timeline on their website (www.sahistory.org.za), of xenophobic attacks. They chronicle attacks dating back to 1994, when Nelson Mandela became President, and the ‘Rainbow Nation’ was born, the ‘New South Africa,’ slated to be a clear break from the Apartheid state that preceded it. It is indeed a ‘new’ day for South Africa, yet the ghosts of its past haunt the present. One of the methods used to kill foreigners – ‘necklacing’ – is a hallmark of the antiApartheid struggle. Wikipedia actually has a description of it: “Necklacing is the practice of summary execution and torture carried out by forcing a rubber tyre, filled with petrol, around a victim’s chest and arms, and setting it on fire. The victim may take up to 20 minutes to die…”

I am trying to understand why it is necessary to kill people in this way. Why does such violence continue? Migration scholars, like those at the African Center for Migration & Society, often attribute it to four factors: (i) the violence of Apartheid, these attacks being Apartheid’s legacy of deep-seated racisms, poverty, and inequality, (ii) the failure of the post-Apartheid state both to effectively address these factors, and to come up

with proactive plans that prevent violence, rather than just acting as firemen after the flames have been lit, (iii) politics, which uses foreigners as scapegoats on whom to lay the blame for all that ails South Africa: crime, unemployment, housing shortages, poor service delivery, etc., and (iv) a weak state response to xenophobia, one incommensurate to the scale and nature of the violence.

This year, in these April attacks, there are two South African politicians in the spotlight: the Zulu King, Zwelithini, who is widely blamed in media reports for having fanned the violence into flame, and Julius Malema, the head of the Economic Freedom Fighters party, who blames the South African President for the violence – for promoting a culture of violence, and for failing to speak against instigators like his son (i.e. the President’s son) and the Zulu King. King Zwelithini and Malema’s words have been circulating among Zimbabweans: On April 8th, King Goodwill Zwelithini said at a rally he was addressing, that foreigners tell themselves: “let’s go and eat the inheritance of the stupid people” of South Africa. Granted, he said this while reprimanding South Africans for not working, for not being true to the inheritance they had received from those who fought to end Apartheid. He said that it is seeing the way South Africans are failing that foreigners decide to immigrate, to “eat the inheritance of the stupid people.”

Newspapers report that he referred to foreigners as ‘lice’ and ‘ants,’ saying, “We must deal with our own lice. In our heads, let’s take out the ants and leave them in the sun” (translated quotes from The Herald). The King later claimed he had been misquoted, mistranslated, and misunderstood, that the context of the reprimand had been lost in the quoting. Be that as it may, the first major attacks occurred in his kingdom, in Durban, shortly following his speech. And I have listened to his speech in Zulu. I wanted to hear it for myself, to see if the papers had got it wrong. You can hear him say something that sounds an awful lot like: “Siyacela abantu bokuhamba bathathe imithwalo yabo babuyisele emuva,” just before the crowd cheers: “We ask that immigrants take their things and leave.” The Herald’s translation: “We are asking that immigrants… take their bags and go where they came from.”

No wonder Julius Malema asked President Zuma why the President had not taken the King to task for his remarks, or urged people in KwaZulu-Natal not to act on the King’s words.

This second man, Julius Malema, once close to the President and once the darling of the ruling party, the ANC, blamed the President and the ANC for the xenophobic violence. In his address to the South African Parliament, Malema said the state and the President personally were responsible for the culture of violence in the country. “It was through the state that our people were told that resolution to differences should be through violence,” he said. Referring to the 2012 Marikana massacre in which South African police opened fire on mineworkers protesting over wages, killing 34 people, Malema told the (Continued on page 44)

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Letter from the Field

Emily Beggs - Doctoral Candidate, Dissertation Writer

D

on Paulino pulls up by bicycle as our taxi approaches his front yard, just in time to welcome us in as we unload our bags. Unrelenting heat and drought have bathed the village of Tabasquito in a gray veneer of dust, dampening the bright turquoise exterior of his home. Down the road, a vacant soccer field glows gold in the low afternoon light, abandoned by spring rains that show up later and later each year, according to local farmers.

I introduce Don Paulino, a farmer in his late sixties, to my brother, J.T., who has come to stay with me for a few weeks. I’m fortunate that he has traveled to the Yucatan Peninsula to visit during my fieldwork, and I’m excited to introduce a member of my family to the families who will participate in my research.

When I explain my brother’s name, Don Paulino nods his head and pauses for a moment then jovially proclaims “Juanito!” dubbing my towering younger brother “Little Juan” with a mischievous grin. He tells us that his wife, Doña Sofia, is out responding to news of marauding cattle grazing in

As we head out to the garden, a few other members of the women’s group emerge from airy palapas, thatched roof homes, to join us and assess the damage to their crops. Most members of the community have two buildings on their property, one built from cement and cinderblock, often provided by the government, and another made from local pole wood and palm fronds, which afford superior ventilation on languorous days like this one.

Ambling down the road through wilting scrub forest, we eat coconut popsicles frozen in small plastic bags and listen as Flor recounts her recent move from Cancun back to the rural community of Tabasquito where she grew up.

Cancun is roughly five hours away by bus and few members of the community have spent time on the coast, yet sprawling tourism hubs of the Riviera Maya grow ever closer through the social ties of extended families who straddle the rural-urban divide. While farm work has become unprofitable and unpalatable to many local young people, Flor and her daughter Sofia have enthusiastically integrated themselves into a small-scale organic agricultural project aimed at increasing women’s capacity to grow and market sustainable produce.

Six-year-old Sofia bounds ahead of us as we reach the low stone walls delineating the women’s garden from surrounding forest. She offers my brother and me a tour of the raised beds and the crops sewn within them, inspecting the hoof prints left in the cilantro and trampled rows of last season’s tomatoes. It looks like the destruction is minor, and perhaps fortuitously, has drawn a small crowd of onlookers just in time to help water a large patch of habanero chilies.

Figure 1: Don Paulino in his Milpa

the irrigated market garden managed by her women’s group. Not long after we set our bags down in the front room, Doña Sofia’s daughter Flor and granddaughter Sofia (named after her grandmother and just as audacious) stop by and ask if we’d like to check out the crime scene.

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Sofia, my brother and I are directed to a row of weedy lettuce which has been left to flower. Flor hands us a folded scrap of cardboard and we go to work harvesting dandelion-like lettuce seeds for next season’s plantings. Sofia tells us to mind the white sap that oozes from the lettuce flowers as we pinch off the seeds, and then shows us how to untie black irrigation hoses in order to wash our sticky fingers.

The convivial scene from sunset at the women’s market garden bears little resemblance to the

harvested. Each year he grows two hectares of corn, which isn’t much for a family of five, but it’s the best he can do given labor constraints.

Most of his children are in school and one now lives in Northern Mexico. Today he must fell old corn stalks, young saplings and brittle shrubs, in order to make way for this season’s crops.

Figure 2: Seed saving: corn dried on the cob for planting

hundreds of other farm plots dispersed across 6,000 hectares of communally held land in Tabasquito.

Virtually all farmers rely on rain fed agriculture to grow a modest corn, bean and squash crop for home consumption, while some integrate bees, cattle, or orchards into their farming activities.

Diversity in their fields comes from local landraces or vegetable varieties developed over generations by Maya farmers, along with useful and edible wild species permitted to thrive in cultivated fields.

Perhaps most strikingly, farming has become a markedly asocial endeavor undertaken by ever fewer older men. Just a generation ago, large families worked cooperatively to provision themselves and local markets with staple crops, with children’s education and socialization embedded in agricultural production. Today, schooling and employment opportunities in urban centers draw the majority of young people outside the community for at least some portion of their lives. When my brother and I ask to visit milpas, or corn, bean and squash fields, farmers are surprised that we’re curious about them and even more astonished when Juanito asks if we can try our hand at wielding a machete to assist with field clearing.

My brother offers to help and Don Fernando hands us a machete with a look of humored disbelief. We work together, taking turns to clear the land until my hands are too blistered to swing the machete any longer. The temperature is rapidly rising to a high of 107 degrees. Together we’ve cleared about one mecate, or one twenty-fifth of a hectare, before it gets too hot to stay in the field.

When we ask Don Fernando how the work looks, he replies “mas o menos” with a patient smile, indicating that it will require a second, closer chopping at the hands of an experienced milpero. With the rainy season imminent, a drought stricken orchard to tend to and a small collection of beehives to maintain until flowers bloom again, it will be a long, hot race to clear and burn his milpa in time to plant.

Later, in his orchard, Fernando hands us a small green and burgundy pineapple with pink tipped fronds, the tangy local variety reserved for home consumption. It’s a gesture of thanks and a tacit approbation of my brother’s first attempt at making milpa. “And Juanito”, he asks, “When will he be coming back?”

My brother’s interest in milpa work and ebullient enthusiasm for local cuisine, despite a limited Spanish vocabulary, make Juanito an instant favorite among the cooks and farmers of Tabasquito.

Food is an essential component of getting to know the village, both its social and physical landscape.

Our first dinner consists of chicken tamales and sweet potato baked in an underground earth oven at the home of Doña Mercedes and Don Fernando.

Early the next morning Don Fernando shows us his field from which the ingredients for the meal were

Figure 3: Don Miguel with his bees

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Letter from the Field

Fanya Becks - Doctoral Candidate, Dissertation Writer

I

am writing to you from Stanford, California.

For me, the field is the greater San Francisco Bay Area, although at times it has spanned out to other areas in Northern California.

I am seeking to explore the relationship between members of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area and their ancestors, as well as their ancestral homeland, through interviews, through analysis of ethnographic notes and texts created from conversations with elders within the Muwekma families in previous generations, and through the analysis of archaeological plant remains from sites excavated by tribal members.

One major task in my dissertation research has been to process soil samples by removing botanical remains and small artifacts through water flotation. As I began my field season, I was intent on achieving the highest possible recovery rate from my botanical samples. The recovery of botanical remains is a delicate process, however, and it is something that I could not begin without careful planning and methodological adaptation. A great deal of literature has been written on the topics of soil flotation systems and soil flotation recovery rates in paleoethnobotany. This is because sample recovery is critical to the ability to interpret data.

Any potential issues with the sample processing can squander what can often be sparse botanical remains, and can seriously skew archaeological interpretations of the ways that people ate, lived, and died in the past. Trying to find the best balance of acceptable recovery rate and acceptable soil samples has been a difficult and involved process.

In the previous summer, I processed four test samples using a bucket decanting system, where one bucket was mounted to a table with a wire holder that allowed for pouring. A second bucket was set up with a strainer and a drainage pipe attached to the bottom of it so that the sample would not be flooded with water. Using this system, I placed a soil sample in the mounted bucket, slowly and gently filling it with a light spraying hose (which is never aimed directly at the sample). I then agitated the sample by stirring it with a frequently cleaned, wooden dowel. Then, tilting the bucket, the material floated to the top is decanted off into a strainer lined with chiffon for light

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fraction materials. I continued this process until the water became clear, at which point I removed the light fraction strainer. I then rinsed the remainder of the materials into a second strainer, gently cleaned them, and placed them into a chiffon for drying. I hung both fractions of the soil sample to dry for 1-3 days to be analyzed later.

Having processed four samples in this manner, I was presented with some issues that needed to be addressed. One issue with this set up is that it cannot handle samples that are more than two liters at a time, thus making the process very time intensive. As I underwent my paleoethnobotany training, this method was further scrutinized for the fact that it is only as good as the steadiness and the attentiveness of the processors. While this is true for all flotation setups, it is more so for a system where the entire process is completely manually controlled. After ruling this first system out, I turned to a machine procured from China by Stanford’s Field Conservation Facility (FCF). I was allowed to use it under the condition that I made it work satisfactorily. This was a huge undertaking, but I made it work.

A standard test of the recovery rate for a flotation system is to use a set number of test seeds collected from a different region and add them to random samples without processors' knowledge. After floation, the number of test seeds remained is calculated and the rate of recovery is expressed as a percentage. One such test used by paleoethnobotanists is to place carbonized poppy seeds into a machine to test the .5mm to 1mm size fraction recovery rate. Analyzing macrobotanical materials is thought of in terms of the size fraction because light and heavy fractions of samples are sieved and separated by size for ease of identifying archaeological plant remains (which are most often charred remains, but can also be desiccated or waterlogged). For archaeological seed identification, it is generally beneficial to separate the processed samples into greater than 2mm, 1mm to 2mm, .5 mm to 1mm, and less than .5mm fractions because it is easier to look through, and identify materials of the same size.

Given the sensitive nature of the samples that I am analyzing, it seemed completely inappropriate to either place test items into the samples or use those specific samples for tests. Instead, I set up a number of faux samples with dirt collected from various campus locations, which I seeded with charred coriander seeds to represent seeds that are larger than 2 mm, charred chia seeds to represent seeds between 1 and 2 mm in size, and charred poppy seeds to represent seeds between .5 mm and 1 mm in size. For the

satisfactory recovery rates.

So, after six unsatisfactory tests with the FCF machine, I visited the UC Berkeley Archaeobotany Lab and was assisted in creating a flotation tank based on Dr. Rob Cuthrell’s design, using a twelvegallon bin, metal flashing, nuts and bolts, caulk, a bucket, and a strainer. This system proved to be very simple, and both the mesh for the heavy fraction and the chiffon for the Figure 1: Flot Machine at Stanford Field Conservation Facility light fraction could be A) Water/Shower Head Controls; B) .5mm plastic mesh for collecting heavy fraction with shower heads underneath and plugged basin; C) Chiffon is placed here and the strainer is attached to machine with removed and hung to bungee. As the tank fills light fraction rises above divider and goes into the half circle compartment dry after processing which feeds into the attached strainer. Heavy fraction is collected from the plastic screen. each sample. This new system addressed my first three tests I used 100 of each seed, and for the last six main concerns over sample loss, cross-contamination, tests I used 50 seeds of each. and the potential for treatment of sensitive materials that could be construed as disrespectful. It reliably In the first tests using the FCF flotation machine, the recovered 100% of the coriander seeds, 92% of the chia recovery of coriander and poppy seeds was 100%, but I seeds, and 96% of the poppy seeds, and it was perfect was only recovering 0-9% of the chia seeds. After confor larger volume samples. However, it was very labor ducting these tests, I suspected the chia seeds were being intensive because it sat on the ground. To use it, an lost because they did not immediately float to the top like individual must bend over it to set things up, agitate the poppy seeds, and were possibly small enough to fall the sample, and after the samples have been collected, through the plastic mesh. In response, I created a square dump out ten to twelve gallons of water. plastic mesh basket with .53 mm weave. This didn’t work because seeds and dirt appeared to be getting stuck between the sides of the basket insert and the metal basket, and therefore, did not make it into the sample. The second .53 mm mesh basket that I made had lower sides so avoided catching the materials in the same way. It resulted in 100% recovery for the coriander seeds, 96% recovery for the chia seeds, and 98% recovery for the poppy seeds.

However, despite these recovery rates, it was difficult to remove the processed heavy fraction from the mesh and therefore proved impractical for processing many samples due to possible loss or contamination. This proved to also be an insurmountable issue when I created a third short basket using the 1mm plastic mesh, which also had quite

In the end, I returned to modifying the FCF flotation machine. My plan was to remove the bottom of the metal basket, but again ran into a problem when I attempted to remove it with tin sheers and metal sandpaper. Thankfully, with the help of a fluid dynamics Masters student from Stanford, the bottom of the basket was removed, so I could then use the same removable 1mm tent mesh for the heavy fraction. This method used less water for small samples and had a perfectly acceptable recovery rate: 96% of the coriander seeds, 100% of the chia seeds, and 98% of the poppy seeds.

Finally, I can now get back to focusing on processing samples, and conducting interviews.

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Undergrad Fieldnotes

Real Change: My Ethnographic Work with Homeless Street Newspaper Vendors

by Julie Raban - Undergrad Anthropology Major

I

n the middle of one of my interviews with homeless street newspaper vendors at the organization Real Change in Seattle, a woman told me that being homeless was like falling off a ladder. “You know, that corporate ladder you move up?” she looked at me, unsure. “I was down…not just on the bottom rung, but I had fallen off.” Low-income people with housing, no matter how poor, have a social place; it is understood that members of each class function as individuals within the larger order.

But for the homeless, that understanding dissipates; they are no longer the lowest of the low. Instead, they have become socially invisible, off-frame, and in many ways, nonexistent as persons and citizens. When institutionally visible, they are “problems.”

In his piece “Dependence, Recognition, and the State,” James Ferguson addresses the issue of why a group of people who are considered marginalized but “free” is also yearning to be subjected and made servants. He describes how black out-of-work South Africans forwardly and openly seek a dependent status. They seek the social inequality that comes from being placed in (and “belonging” to) a hierarchy—as opposed to the asocial, segregated—and to so many, abstract—inequality that is now increasingly pervasive all over the world. There are certain culturally specific factors that have to do with this seeking out that Ferguson describes, but there are also factors that transcend location, like the human desire to be placed within a structure and hierarchy of individuals—a desire that goes beyond individual accomplishments, a desperate search for a social and societal place.

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My undergraduate research attempts to portray the ways in which homeless people are made to feel “off the ladder”—or reduced to a kind of bare humanity, devoid of sociality or conviviality with people inside the larger order. Giorgio Agamben pioneered the concept of “bare life” in Homo Sacer, where he uses it to describe the way in which politics is founded upon that which it excludes from politics. “Bare life” can be understood as “life exposed to death,” especially in the form of sovereign violence. This is absolutely true for homeless people—they often spend most or all of their day out in the streets, and are left to fend for their own day-to-day survival. The government does their best to exclude homeless people from politics—you cannot register to vote without an address—and the type of violence inflicted upon them is so often sovereign.

However, I want to focus on a less physical and political version of bare humanity, and instead emphasize a more social and cultural one. In Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, Joåo Biehl uses the concept to depict people who are no longer considered people—who have been abandoned by their families and friends and, essentially, left to die. In his work, he explores the social and political implications of what it means to consider someone a human being, but not consider them a person—and ultimately, as you can see in the title, he comes to the conclusion that this kind of bare life has a lot in common with falling off the social and economic ladder.

In addition, I hope to show the ways in which understandings of work, flexibility, sociality, and organizational structure can cast light on larger political and cultural questions. Beyond shifts in identity and understandings of selfhood, what are the implications and

ramifications of this kind of work? What kind of political and social changes can be understood as possible or desirable on the basis of what I learned from these vendors? What policy recommendations can be made?

I found Kathleen M. Millar’s article “The Precarious Present: Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil” central in shaping my ideas around the potential significance of my project. She writes about trash collectors (catadores) in city dumps, and describes both how their unstable work destabilizes daily living, and how the unstable daily life in poverty destabilizes work. But there is an advantage to this instability: “the ability to come and go from the dump allows catadores not only to manage everyday emergencies but to pursue life projects amidst these disruptions.” It was the mention of these “life projects” that gave me pause.

In Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance, Vincent LyonCallo’s hallmark text on the social and political theory surrounding economic inequality, he writes that: “As the failure of the continuum of care to decrease homelessness should make clear by now, the problems causing homelessness lie not so much in how services are delivered, but rather in what the services do and do not do.” –p. 12 “Through their experiences in the shelters, many homeless people are thus produced (and reproduced) as political subjects who are more likely to engage in selfblame and self-governing than in collective work against structural violence.” –p. 53 The types of service that Real Change provides not only mitigate some of that self-blame and self-governing inherent in a homeless person’s conception of his or her “bare humanity,” but the structures and norms regarding work allow the kind of flexibility that catadores experience—flexibility that enables them to pursue larger projects.

With lessened self-blame and the ability to control their own time, these vendors have the capability (and many, the intention and follow-through) of engaging in collective work against structural violence. Indeed, one could argue that simply by selling the paper they are already engaging. The potential for organizations like Real Change to make positive change in the world is significant. In order to do so, more organizations like it have to emerge and flourish. But ultimately, I believe that vendors at Real Change, and participants at similar organizations, can shape not only their selfhoods, but also organizational and legal policies, budgets, and programs.

Photo: Real Change vendor Doug Wallace selling Real Change on the corner of Fifth and Pine, downtown Seattle. (Credit: Jon Williams, Real Change Photo and Art Director)

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Undergrad Fieldnotes

Farm Friction: Sustainability in Central Iowa Agriculture

by Nicole Follmann - Undergrad Anthropology Major aren't destroying the earth […] We’re taking “ We better care of our land now than ever. ”

This is the claim from Chuck, an industrial corn and soybean farmer in central Iowa—he uses GMOs, large, fossil-fuel-burning machinery, and chemical pesticides and herbicides. This type of industrial agriculture—commodity farming, or modern agriculture, as Chuck would put it—is accused by many environmentalists of causing immense pollution, habitat loss, and soil erosion. How is it that so many farmers like Chuck have come to describe themselves as conservationists and sustainable farmers when, by other accounts, they are vilified as “factory farmers”?

This has been one of the mobilizing questions of my honors thesis in anthropology, and it arose from an interest in the often polarizing debate between “industrial” and “sustainable” agriculture and my perspectives on that debate in both my home state of Iowa and northern California, as well as in South America, South Africa, and Spain. Around the world, the buzzword of sustainability has a lot of purchase. Attributed with a host of different definitions and understood most basically as the ability [of something] to be maintained, sustainability is able to mobilize people for a host of different purposes: sustainable development, sustainable business models, sustainable funding, etc. I’m interested in the traction—or friction—that this concept gains

in the context of central Iowa agriculture, and what types of potential collaborations this friction can produce.

To learn about this productive friction, I analyzed sustainability as a universal in the way that Anna Tsing describes universals in her book, Friction. She calls universals “aspirations for global connection” which are never truly global and are much more culturally and historically specific than we tend to think (Tsing 2004:1). They gain traction or become effective as what Tsing calls engaged universals in “particular historical conjunctures.”

When the “universal” of sustainability attempts to become effective in the particular context of central Iowa, where industrial corn is king, it encounters a set of values and political economy that are different than those prevalent in the California Bay Area, where sustainability is mobilized for a number of local and organic farming initiatives. There is no smooth transfer of northern California organic ideals to the Heartland, however. For Tsing, this encounter across difference is crucial to her concept of friction, what she describes as the “grip of worldly encounter”, “where the rubber meets the road,” or “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (Tsing 2004: 1, 4, 6).

This creative or productive quality she refers to is friction’s tendency to produce new cultural forms and unexpected linkages and alliances. “Sustainability,” as it is frequently imagined in the context of alternative agriculture that is opposed to industrial, corporate agriculture, confronts a very specific context in central Iowa. Yet, the word does not simply become ineffective when it moves to that site.

Instead, the friction created in this different context produces new ways of imagining sustainability—industrial sustainability—creating unexpected connections between commodity farmers and sustainability groups.

My research shows that farmers’ personal histories of land ownership and values of preserving farms into the future align with the positive representations of farmers’ conservation practices

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order to deny that there is need for such government regulation.

put forward by the agriculture industry. These images enable farmers to talk about their profession using the language of sustainability, in a way that serves their interests. By explaining how farming with GMOs and industrial efficiency is the most sustainable mode of production, farmers work to defend their profession from critiques by those who advocate for organic agriculture.

Owning land and passing it on to the next generation, in good shape, was important to many of the family farmers I spoke with. Many who were involved in conservation methods spoke about how these were all investments for their own good, and were preceded by a history of conservation practices that simply hadn’t been coated in a language of sustainability. Agricultural methods like no-till farming and crop rotation, touted by alternative agriculture advocates, are not entirely outside the realm of farmers’ experiences and do not conflict with farmers’ commitments to their land.

A major exception to this, however, is the debate over organics. Many farmers do not view a wholesale transition to organics as possible or even desirable. Some of this aversion has to do with the amount of labor involved in organic production.

Another part can be traced to industry representations explaining how infeasible and unsustainable organic agriculture is and why industrial agriculture is, in fact, sustainable agriculture.

Monsanto advertises itself as a sustainable agriculture company. Agribusiness corporations tout how environmentally friendly their seeds, chemicals, and methods are. Large commodity promotion groups award prizes for farmers’ environmental conservation, and praise renewable fuels like ethanol for being sustainable. Industry representatives write op-eds about how intensive, modern agriculture is much more efficient than organic agriculture, resulting in less need for deforestation as it becomes necessary to “feed the world” with a growing population.

Armed with these industry arguments, farmers are able to showcase their sustainability to critics who would say that their methods are destructive. This is not simply to promote a positive self-image. This advocacy often has the explicitly political and economic aim of avoiding government regulation.

In Des Moines, the city’s water treatment facility is suing three northern Iowa counties for failing to enforce the Clean Water Act and allowing excessive nitrates to pollute the water source of 500,000 Iowans (Smith 2015). Since this lawsuit could result in fines upon the enforcement of these regulations, farmers emphasize their voluntary efforts towards sustainability in

Even if farmers are sustainable for their own best interests, farming certainly has externalized costs and farmers do not have a strong incentive to monitor the air or downstream pollution. With this in mind, one might say that sustainability has been coopted—it no longer holds any meaning and is only used by the industry as a marketing strategy.

However, my research shows the hopeful possibility of battles over the meaning of universals. Words are not the property of any one group of people, and meanings can be contested and changed.

Though sustainability may have shifted to include the large-scale industrial practices of commodity farmers, it has also become an integral part of farmers’ identities. This point of identification can be an unlikely point of collaboration between groups who seem politically and ideologically opposed. Those environmentalists who would rather that farmers adopt radically “green options’’ can now engage with farmers based on a common language—even if they attribute it with different meanings.

You can see this in the organization Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), which supports the more moderate, “reasonable” changes like cover crops and no-till that farmers are not particularly opposed to. Yet, within the organization, there lies a critique of industrial agriculture buried just beneath the surface. Once they have built a relationship of trust with the organization, farmers can begin to implement changes towards a PFI interpretation of sustainability. That means an orientation towards local production—if not fully organic then chemical-free—with both the values of passing the land on and enriching it through diverse farms.

Works Cited Smith, Mitch, 2015 Conflict Over Soil and Water Quality Puts ‘Iowa Nice’ to a Test. Electronic document, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/us/conflictover-soil-and-water-quality-puts-iowa-nice-to-a-test. html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0, accessed 04/24, 2015.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005 Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press.

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Alumni Updates

1950

Ronald P Rohner (1964 PhD) Prof. Emeritus, Anthropology & Human Development, Director, Ronald & Nancy Rohner Center for Study of Interpersonal Acceptance & Rejection, Executive Director, International Society for Interpersonal Acceptance & Rejection.

Nancy M Williams (1950 AB) Honorary Reader in Anthropology, School of Social Science, University of Queensland. I have continued as co-editor of Oceania and peer reviewer of native title research. I also continue work on a long-term project on the relationship of Aboriginal hunters and the animals they hunt.

Colleen S Rand (1967 BA) [Colleen Wright] Retired. PhD Stanford, Psychology 1971, Faculty, University of Florida Dept of Psychiatry 1977-2000. Retired. Artist: www. randart21.com, www.bigbunny.net

Charles O Frake (1951 BA) Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, Stanford University & State University of NY Buffalo.

Published paper--probably my last--in 2014 in HUMAN ORGANIZATION on recent Philippine Indigenous struggles.

Carole J Allen (1968 MA) [Carole Jeannine Swall Allen] Retired.

Ann Hitchcock (1968 AB) Senior Advisor Scientific Collections and Environmental Safeguards. Led team to establish benefits-sharing policy and procedures for the National Park Service.

See http://www.nature.nps.gov/benefitssharing/. Benefits sharing occurs when NPS receives monetary or non-monetary benefits from the commercial use of a discovery or invention resulting from research originating under an NPS Scientific Research and Collecting Permit, or other permit or authorization.

Joanna Kirkpatrick (1951 AB) Retired faculty, Bennington College, 196794. Now independent researcher, writer, reviewer.

1960 Lynda Lytle Holmstrom (1961 BA) [Lynda Lytle] Professor Emerita, Boston College, Department of Sociology, Chestnut Hill, MA. I'm still at Boston College as Professor Emerita and keep professionally active—supervising independent student research projects (often prize-winning ones), making a short video about rape trauma syndrome (with co-researcher Ann Wolbert Burgess), and promoting the interests of semi-retired professors within sociological professional societies.

Carolyn M Nomura (1969 AB with Distinction) Meridian International Center and Office of International Visitors, U.S. Department of State. My work in public diplomacy brings me into contact with professionals from all over the world. Over the past year, I have created programs in New York City for groups from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Korea, Israel, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Southeast Asia, South Africa.

1970

Alan Howard (1962 PhD) Professor Emeritus, Anthropology Dept.

University of Hawaii. Since retirement in 1999 have: Co-authored one book, co-edited two journal special issues, authored or co-authored 20 journal articles and book chapters.

Kenneth K Tanaka (1970 AB) Professor, Musashino University. I was appointed this year as Dean of Buddhist Education at my university. I served as President of two academic associations, the International Association of Shin Buddhist Studies and the Japanese Association for the Study of Buddhism and Psychology. Several years ago I produced and appeared in a weekly year-long Buddhist T.V. program that was aired on cable channel in southern California on Sundays.

My recent publications include Amerika bukkyo (American Buddhism) Musashino University, 2010.), which is the first book that I managed to write in Japanese.

Sandra Barg McKivett (1961 AB) Working with non-English speakers from Asia and Central America.

Susan C. Seymour (1962BA) I have recently published Cora Du Bois: Anthropologist, Diplomat, Agent (Nebraska Press 2015). Du Bois was a prominent anthropologist who became the first woman to hold a tenured professorship at Harvard. She also served as a high-ranking OSS officer during WW II and in the State Department as a Southeast Asia expert during the Cold War.

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David E Young (1970 PhD) Retired. Professor Emeritus, University

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of Alberta, Canada. I am a co-author of a new book coming out this Spring: A Cree Healer and His Medicine Bundle: Revelations of Indigenous Wisdom: Healing Plants, Practices, and stories by David E.Young, Robert Dale Rogers, and Russell Willier. North Atlantic Press. This book is the sequel to a 1989 book by the University of Toronto Press: Cry of the Eagle: Encounters with a Cree Healer by David Young et. al. The book reveals traditional medicinal knowledge that was too “secret” to be published in 1989 but is now endorsed by Aboriginal elders in Canada due to the fact that such knowledge is rapidly being lost as medicine people die. Robert Rogers is an ethno-botanist and Russell Willier is the Cree healer featured in both books.

Carolyn Clark (1971 BA) Tenured Professor, Dept of Communication, Salt Lake Community College.

Created SLCC's first fully-online AS degree, modified our f2f courses for online delivery, created a set of interactive Java learning games through which students apply what they are learning , supervise and mentor our large group of adjunct instructors.

Carolyn J Marr (1971 BA) Librarian, Museum of History & Industry.

Naomi Quinn (1971 PhD) Professor Emerita, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University. Co-edited book: Attachment Reconsidered: Cultural Perspectives on a Western Theory, ed.

Naomi Quinn & Jeannette Marie Mageo (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Delivered paper: “Cultural Experiences That Shape the Self,” conference on Varieties of the Self (Scripps Humanities Institute, Claremont, CA, March 2014) Christine N Witzel (1971 AB) Retired. I've continued to give talks on the book I published last year: She Also Served: Letters from a Navy Wife, available on Amazon in print and electronic formats. In the first section, Virgilia, my mother, vividly describes living with rationing in Menlo Park and Palo Alto during WWII. To date, the highlight of the year was seeing the book featured in the cover story of the Menlo Park Almanac (April 1, 2015).

Martha A Taber (1972 AB) Occupational Therapist - self employed.

Mostly, I invent therapy items and curriculum for students with disabilities to access education. It has been the best thing about switching careers, when I was 50 - to be able to be creative. Before occupational

therapy, I was an export manager for companies, both here and in Europe, who handled bulk commodities. I got into that field via a masters degree in international business. Stanford was the only school I ever attended wherein I got the opportunity to just study what interested me, for the fun of it. I was a little stumped upon graduation as to how it could further me, career-wise. My study of foreign cultures led me to a business school, specializing in foreign culture and business (Thunderbird); I must admit that anthropology was just a stepping stone. That's not the way I viewed it while at Stanford, though.

Annette M Adler (1973 MA) Retired.

Dennis Criteser (1973 BA) Program Director, Blue Bear School of Music. Just published online the translations of all of the songs of Fabrizio De Andrè, sometimes called the Bob Dylan of Italy. deandretranslated.blogspot.com Connie M Dennis (1973 ) [Constance Miller] Associate Editor, Self & Society, Journal of the International Association of Humanistic Psychology.

Mary Ann Hurlimann (1973 BA) Partner, law firm.

Diana G Ahlem (1974 BA) CEO, Intelligent Analytical Services, Inc. Susan H Arbuckle (1975 BA) Consultant with Woodside Research Consortium. Working as a consultant on projects funded in schools, at all grade levels, to provide external evaluation for funders.

Projects range from teacher professional development, to teenage pregnancy prevention, to the inclusion of under-served students in STEM career preparation. I rely on my background in Cultural Anthropology to inform my evaluation of educational programs.

Dean Chavers (1975 MA) [Pasqual Dean Chavers] Director, Catching the Dream (formerly Native American Scholarship Fund). We have helped 848 Native American students to earn college degrees. The organization was launched in 1986 to meet the needs of Indian tribes, schools, hospitals, businesses and social service agencies for more trained Indian professionals. Six tribal leaders asked for the organization to incorporate. Over 85% of our graduates work in Indian Country. More than a dozen have been graduated from Stanford.

Terry T Gerritsen (1975 BA) [Terry Tom] Self-employed novelist. I'm the author of 26 published suspense novels, including the series featuring Detective Jane

Rizzoli and Medical Examiner Maura Isles, on which the TV series “Rizzoli & Isles” is based.

Government agencies and civil society organizations to support children´s rights in a context of armed conflict, landmines, intra-family violence, sexual abuse and other challenges. Team produced Study of Children Demobilized from Armed Groups and implemented demonstration projects to prevent child recruitment, landmine/ UXO accidents and commercial sexual exploitation of children.

Margie M Burton (1976 BA) [Margie Ann McDowell] UCSD Levantine and CyberArchaeology Laboratory, Department of Anthropology, University of California San Diego. Recent publications: Burton, M. M. A. A. Muniz, P. L. Abbott, D. L. Kimbrough, P. J. Haproff, G. E. Gehrels, and M. Pecha.

2014. Sourcing sandstone cobble grinding tools in southern California using petrography, U-Pb geochronology, and Hf isotope geochemistry. Journal of Archaeological Science 50:273-287. Quinn, P. S. M. M. Burton, D. Broughton, and S. Van Heymbeeck.

2013. Deciphering Compositional Patterning in Plainware Ceramics from Late Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Sites in the Peninsular Ranges, San Diego County, California. American Antiquity 78(4):779-789.

Dan Callahan (1979 BA) VP, Cloud Services, CGNET. I spent ten days last fall in Islamabad, managing an IT migration for a customer. My Anthropology background has proven very useful, for instance in understanding given name/ family name conventions in different Asian countries.

Donald L Donham (1979 PhD) Distinguished Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis.

Nancy J Roth (1976 AB) Software engineer with VMS Software Inc.

Michael D Gebers (1979 AB, AM) Education Specialist Hawaii Community Correctional Center.

Gary R Edson (1977 BA) President - Conservation International, www.conservation.org, www.natureisspeaking.org. Previously served as: (1) CEO of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, 20102013, supporting Haitian reconstruction after the devastating 2010 earthquake. (2) U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy National Economic Advisor, 20012004. In that role, co-led development of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the largest commitment ever by any nation to combat a single disease; established the Millennium Challenge Corporation to fight global poverty; and served as the President's chief negotiator for summits of G8, Latin American and Asia-Pacific leaders. (3) Managing Director at the Albright Stonebridge Group; General Counsel to the U.S. Trade Representative (1989-1992), and Chairman, PAR Systems, Inc.

1980 Ursula Funk (1980 MA) Independent Expert for Development Cooperation, Gender, African Studies, SocioCultural Anthropology in Practice. End of March 2015, Ursula Funk completed her almost 25 years of engagement at the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation. In her last position she was, on behalf of Switzerland, in charge of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), as well as of the oversight over the advancement in the implementation of the gender equality commitments of the UN and the World Bank, after having worked as Country Director for Switzerland in Niger for 5 years and Benin, West Africa for 6 years.

Katherine Verdery (1977 PhD) CUNY Graduate Center. My book Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania's Secret Police was published in 2014, from the Natalie Zemon Davis lectures I delivered in Budapest. I am now working on my fieldwork memoir, entitled My Life as a “Spy”: A Memoir from a Secret Police File.” For the month of March I am enjoying a fellowship at the beautiful Bogliasco Center in Italy, where I am eating like a pig.

Janice M LeCocq (1980 PhD) [Janice LeCocq Fortmann/Janice Mabry LeCocq] Chair & CEO, Parvus Therapeutics Inc. Took over CEO position for company developing therapeutic platform for restoration of immune tolerance in autoimmune disease.a pMCH coated nanoparticle with a disease specific peptide tag that causes expansion of T-regulatory cells diseasespecifically with no off target effects in multiple animal models of autoimmune diseases. In preclinical development.

Frederick Spielberg (1978 BA) Specialist in Child Protection and Humanitarian Action. Led team of 6 protection professionals in support of Colombian VOLUME 8

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Alumni Updates

Alumni Profile: Mike Watkiss (1980 BA) I was amused recently when I heard someone mocking Liberal Education and using the study of Anthropology as an example of a useless and trivial academic pursuit. I got an undergraduate degree in anthro from Stanford in the early ’80’s and have found it to be a great asset in almost every one of my professional endeavors.

For decades I have been a television reporter traveling the world and covering every nature of mischief, malfeasance and murder committed by our species. Much of my career has focused on the practice of polygamy in America with a special emphasis on the FLDS cult along the Utah/Arizona border and its notorious and now incarcerated Prophet Warren Jeffs.

Ten years ago I produced the Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning documentary “Colorado City and the Underground Railroad” which pulled together many years worth of my work on the topic and I think, most people familiar with the subject would agree, was the first and arguably most influential piece of reportage on the practices of the FLDS community in modern times. It is the story of some extraordinary women who escaped the secretive polygamous underworld and began speaking out and raising hell about the abuses they had suffered.

Charles Raison (1980 BA) Raymond Pearl Award in 2014 for "contributions to our understanding of evolutionary biocultural origins of mental health and illness", Human Biology Association; James L. Stinnett Honorary Lecture, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania in 2015; Founding Director, Center for Compassion Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ; starting June 2015, I will be the Mary Sue and Mike Shannon Endowed Professor for Mind-Body Family Well-Being, School of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI.

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And even in my coverage of murder and mayhem de jour, which has also been a big part of my career, I have found the knowledge and insights I gained in my study of anthropology very helpful in approaching and understanding people and the often crazy things they do.

As a sideline, I also do some acting and have appeared in about a dozen films. And here again I believe the study of people and their cultures has benefited me, perhaps not as directly, but certainly it has made me more sensitive to the human animal and the social structures that we concoct and devise.

Let’s just say if an old man like me had it to do over, I would again study Anthropology.

Alexis H Johnson (1981 AB) Attorney. Still standing upright; still married to Amy Jelliffe, AB '81; still parent of two wonderful kids; and, still breathing.

Blessed.

Carol Thomsen (1982 BA) [Carol Putnam] Co-Founder, All Five. What do Anthropology and Early Childhood Education have in common? At least two Stanford alums: Kaitlin Beaver Smith, class of ’07 and I (’81) are Co-Founders of All Five, an early childhood education program founded to eliminate the opportunity gap before it starts. My journey began over 30 years ago at Stanford and included studies under Professors Shelly and Renalto Rosaldo and two years in Indonesia - mostly through Volunteers in Asia. This was followed by

Michael R Dove (1981 PhD) Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Co-Coordinator, Joint F&ES/Anthropology Doctoral Program, Curator, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Fellow, Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University. Current Projects: My most recent books are “The Anthropology of Climate Change: A Historical Reader” (Wiley/Blackwell 2014), “Climate Cultures: ANTHROPOLOGY

Having come from polygamous ancestors, I approached this work as the study of a people and their culture and the mechanisms they employeed to sustain and perpetuate that culture.

Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change” (coedited with Jessica Barnes, Yale University Press 2015), and “Science, Society, and Environment: Applying Physics and Anthropology to Sustainability” (coauthored with Daniel M. Kammen, Routledge 2015). My current research takes a multi-species ethnographic approach to critical views of the environment in South and Southeast Asia.

Emily Bunker (1981 BA) Math and SAT tutor.

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The documentary chronicles the rise of Warren Jeffs and in many ways helped precipitate his fall. I have always looked at the this work as basically an ethnography, similar to the those that I read and enjoyed while studying in the classes of Louise and George Spindler, and my then advisor Sylvia Yanagisako.

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many years of teaching and parenting with an eye to the cultural aspects of child development. Kaitlin and I met two years ago and have been working together for over a year. As quality early childhood education across socioeconomic and cultural groups becomes more important for our economy, our society, and our communities, All Five is uniquely designed to meet the needs of children and families with cultural sensitivity and economic equality.

Francisca James Hernández (1985 BA, 1991 MA, 2007 PhD) Instructional Faculty, Pima Community College, Research Associate, Southwest Institute for Research on Women (SIROW), University of Arizona.

Organized a performance at my college by Teatro Chicana, a California-based Chicana feminist community theater troupe.

Invited commentator at upcoming conference of Latin American Studies Assn. where I will get to see and collaborate with my dear friends, Rosalva Aida Hernández and Liliana Suárez, from our Stanford grad days. Puerto Rico here we come!!

Julia Offen (1986 BA, MA) Freelance Anthropology Researcher and Writer. National interviewing and media

research (some recent topics: attitudes about government decision-making; local, state, and federal taxes and services; and protection of rights of those with cognitive and mental disabilities and illnesses).

Appointment as new Fiction and Narrative Editor for the Journal of Anthropology and Humanism. Continuing teaching the craft of narrative ethnographic writing through AAA workshops (and forthcoming book with Rowman & Littlefield).

Lisa K Hoffman (1987 MA) Director of International Initiatives, Minga Perú (www.mingaperu.org). Since graduating, I have worked with social change organizations in the U.S. and globally on issues ranging from preventing gender-based violence to youth leadership and disability justice. I am now working with Minga Peru, a Peruvian NGO that partners with rural, indigenous communities to collaboratively build gender equity, environmental stewardship, and culturally informed social justice in the Peruvian Amazon, Dominican Republic, Panama and Ecuador. A key focus of our work is helping indigenous communities to heal from the internal and external effects of colonization through an intentional process that reinforces linguistic and cultural identity and shared values. Other aspects of my work include training women and youth community-based leaders to build awareness, skills and action around human rights and developing radio programs and other communications strategies to shift the public discourse and increase protection of local resources such as people, culture, language, traditions, knowledge, land, and other natural resources.

Claudio Lomnitz (1987 PhD) Professor of Anthropology/Columbia University. Publication of: The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books, 2014), won the 2015 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Award. Lectures: 2015 B.N.Ganguli Memorial Lecture, Center for the Study of Developing Societies (New Delhi, India). Spring 2015 invited lectures at University of Vienna, Bagazici University (Istambul), University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, University of California-San Diego, UCLA, Stanford.

Conference organizer (with Karen Barkey): Emergent Religious Forms in Contemporary Mexico (Columbia University) Jason G Williams (1987 BA) Director of Information Security and Compliance, University of Notre Dame.

Murphy Halliburton (1988 AB) Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology,, Queens College and the

Graduate Center, CUNY. In 2014, completed 8 months of fieldwork in Kerala, India, supported by a Fulbright Senior Research grant. The fieldwork examined why India has, according to the WHO, the best recovery rate from schizophrenia of any country studied.

nal. Palmer, D. Martínez, R. Henderson, K, & Mateus, S. (2014) Reframing the debate on language separation: Towards a vision for translanguaging pedagogies in the dual language classroom. Modern Language Journal.

Amy Galland (1992 MA) Founder/CEO NTWC. I recently launched Plume, a private messaging app designed for flirting. The interface is based on what people say their needs and concerns are when flirting on their mobile phone. It is fun, safe, and playful. Our mission is to transform peoples' sexual scripts by providing respectful, sensual, representations of gender, race, age, size, and sexuality.

You can learn more about the app and our social responsibility program at: www.theplumeapp.com. We would like to provide imagery relevant to different nationalities and cultures as we grow. I’d love for you to reach out to me about the project and meet anyone who may be interested in getting involved.

Carol E Lee (1988 BA, 1990 MA) Full Professor, University of Wisconsin. A seminar Publication cited over 1000 times, $4+ million NSF grants, Keynote talks at conferences in Europe (Germany) and Asia (China) last year.

Alejandro Sweet-Cordero (1989 BA) Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine. Continuing to run a research lab and attend on the oncology service at LPCH. Nothing too related to anthropology I am afraid, although I think studying anthropology, taught me a great deal about understanding the diversity of human experience, and I use this knowledge every day when taking care of sick children and their families.

Hugh Gusterson (1992 PhD) Professor of Anthropology & International Affairs, George Washington University.

President-elect, American Ethnological Society Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Published “Toward an anthropology of drones” In Matthew Evangelista (ed.), The American Way of Bombing.

1990 Troy Anderson (1990 MA) CTO, iModules, Inc. Still working on the Milluk language. Making inroads bit by bit.

Kim G Moore (1990 BA) [Kim Grose] Social Justice Coach/Consultant, and student in Sati Center Buddhist chaplaincy training program. As part of the path to my own freedom, I have recently been learning to co-lead a mindfulness meditation group at Soledad state men's prison: daunting and inspiring work! I continue to coach and develop grassroots, immigrant leaders in Santa Clara County to make powerful change in their communities and schools, and recently have developed and offered training to non-profit managers in culturally responsive management skills/ practices.

Joel Streicker (1992 PhD) University of San Francisco, Assistant Director, Corporate and Foundation Relations.

Dee A Espinoza (1993 BA) [Dee Ann Jones] Owner/Principal Investigator, Espinoza Consulting Services. This last year has been incredibly busy. My consulting firm, Espinoza Cultural Services (ECS), has seen steady growth and holds contracts, many multi-year, with numerous federal agencies. We are purchasing our second commercial building this year and are now operating in seven states. ECS specializes in cultural resources, natural resources, and environmental services and staffing of Special Material Experts in these and other fields. Look us up on LinkedIn or drop by our website at www.ecs-arch.com. On a personal note, I became a Trustee for the Town of La Jara, Colorado and we were blessed with the arrival of our third grandchild, Trayson.

Deborah Palmer (1991 BA) Associate Professor of Bilingual/Bicultural Education Department of Curriculum and Instruction, The University of Texas at Austin. Some recent articles: Palmer, D. Zuñiga, C. Henderson, K. Wall, D. & Berthelsen, S. (2015) Teaching Amongst Mixed Messages: Implementing Two-Way Dual Language in Third Grade in Texas.

Language Policy. Henderson, K. & Palmer, D. (In Press) Teacher and Student Language Practices and Ideologies in a Third Grade Two-Way Dual Language Program.

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Nancy M Mithlo (1993 PhD) [Bitsy, Kennedy] Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Arts, Occidental College and Senior Researcher, Autry National Center.

Co-Curator and Editor of “For a Love of

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Alumni Updates His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw” Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, NYC. The Yale University Press catalogue received recognition from the NYT as one of 50 Gift Guide books of 2014 and was reviewed by NYT arts critic Holland Cotter: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/arts/ design/photographs-by-horace-poolawat-national-museum-of-the-americanindian.html?_r=0

the Smithsonian but have settled in Austin, TX with my wife, Maura, and we now both work for UT Austin. We love Austin!

Rebecca Brams (1998 BA) Writer, self-employed. I am a novelist and have been working on a series of books set in South America during the Inca Empire. After I graduated with my MFA in Creative Writing from St. Mary's College of California, I spent a year in Peru on a Fulbright Fellowship. I took some time off to have my two sons (now 8 & 4), and now I'm working on the books again. To pay the bills, I write for nonprofits to help them grow their programs and deliver on their missions. This includes grant materials such as proposals, marketing materials, and program-related reports for environmental and social services organizations. I also have an occasionally updated blog at www.thismamawrites.com

Mark Reed (1993 AB) Principal, Alembic Community Development, Founder, Contact Fund LLC. Complete rehab of 76 unit low-income housing apartment building in Inwood neighborhood of NYC. Complete rehab of historic school building in Central City neighborhood of New Orleans.

Mun Wei Chan (1994 BA) Divisional Director, Corporate Planning, Sentosa Development Corporation.

Micah H Carvalho (1999 BA) Grad student, Milken Institute School of Public Health, George Washington University.

Beatriz C Williams (1994 AB) [Triss Chantrill] Writer. New York Times bestselling author of historical novels, including A HUNDRED SUMMERS, THE SECRET LIFE OF VIOLET GRANT, and the upcoming TINY LITTLE THING and ALONG THE INFINITE SEA.

Daniel M Shafer (1999 MA) Attorney / Owner, The Law Office of Daniel M. Shafer, 2021 The Alameda, Suite 200, San Jose, CA 95126. Started my own law firm in 2014, focused on business/corporate, intellectual property, and media/ entertainment law.

Eva E Bunker (1995 BA) Alert Logic. December 2014, sold Internet security software company, Critical Watch to Alert Logic, a leading cloud security company. Now product manager for security content across all Alert Logic products.

2000

Julia K Macias (1997 BA) Director, the Annika Rodriguez Scholars Program at Washington University in St. Louis. I have returned to the field of Anthropology, pursuing my Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis.

Victoria Sanford (2000 PhD) Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, Director, Center for Human Rights & Peace Studies, Lehman College, City University of New York. Just finished co-editing The State & Gender Violence with Katerina Stefatos and Cecilia Salvi (in press, Rugers University Press). Will publish a book about the Ixil Genocide in Guatemala with F&G Editores this summer (co-authored with Sofia Duyos-Alvarez).

Tajai D Massey (1997 BA/Honors) Associate, Sabi Design/Build, Partner, Hieroglyphics Enterprises. Recently earned my Master of Architecture degree from Berkeley. Currently a designer at Sabi Design/Build in Emeryville. Souls of Mischief recently released the LP, “There Is Only Now” with super-producer Adrian Younge.

Kate Golden (2001 BA) Investigative reporter and multimedia director, Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

Gilbert Borrego (1998 BA, 2000 MA) University of Texas at Austin Digital Repository Specialist. I co-curated the Smithsonian Natural History Museum exhibit: Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America. http://library. si.edu/exhibition/once-there-were-billions, I was also awarded a grant to develop online exhibitions of Women and Latino naturalists for the Smithsonian. I sadly have moved on from DC and my work with

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Ezra Erb (2003 MA) Surgical Center Administrator/CEO. Completed two Molokai Hoe races, Won 2014 Maui paddling OC-1 season (novice division). Fixing up a 1946 Kahlui Railroad Physician's House.

Nicole Fox (2003 BA , 2004 MA) [Nikki Probst] Policy Advisor for African Affairs in Secretary Kerry's Office of Global Women's

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Issues at the U.S. Department of State. I spent January 2013- October 2014 as the Public Diplomacy Officer at U.S. Embassy Harare (Zimbabwe) where I monitored the 2013 elections and designed various exchange, entrepreneurship, education, and media programs. In December 2014, I returned to Washington DC to take the role of Policy Advisor for African Affairs in the U.S. State Department's Office of Global Women's Issues. I design and implement programs and policies that promote women’s political participation, economic empowerment, and entrepreneurship. I also inform policy on cross-cutting issues such as gender-based violence, food security, health, and education.

Charu Gupta (2003 BA) Heart Transplant Fellow at University of California San Francisco.

Marisa E Macias (2004 BA) Postdoctoral Fellow, Human Origins, American Museum of Natural History. I recently completed the degree requirements for my Ph.D. at Duke University. I am now working at the AMNH studying selection in the upper limb for arboreal behavior and tool use in australopithecines.

Kevin Medrano (2004 BA) Corporate Associate, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. Kenan J Zamore (2004 BA) Senior Research Epidemiologist, Division of Epidemiology, Disease Surveillance and Investigation, District of Columbia Department of Health. I currently work in disease surveillance, developing surveillance systems for chronic and infectious conditions, estimates of the cost burdens of disease, and the monitoring, evaluation and implementation of variety of population-level health initiatives to assess and improve the health of District of Columbia and the Greater Washington Metropolitan area residents.I previously worked in HIV surveillance and intervention after completing my graduate training in Epidemiology at Tulane SPHTM, and I'm excited for the new challenges and opportunities that exist as our healthcare and surveillance paradigms continue to shift.

Leila M Ben-Youssef (2005 MA) EM Resident Physician, Highland General Hospital | Alameda County Health System.

Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholar 2012-2013 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Investigating re-vaccinating children with HIV against measles, exploring reproductive choices among HIV-discordant couples, and examining measles antibody load in HIV-discodrant couples. National

Kenya Athletics Coach 2012-2013. Annals of Emergency Medicine Dec 2014 publication “Barriers to Calling 911 and Learning and Performing Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation for Residents of Primarily Latino, High-Risk Neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado.”

A. Nikki Borchardt Campbell (2005 BA, MA) Associate Director of the National American Indian Court Judges Association. I work as the Associate Director of the National American Indian Court Judges Association where I design and provide training and technical assistance to tribes, courts, attorneys, and legal organizations.

I was formerly an attorney at a boutique Indian law firm in New Mexico and an ethnographer with HRA Inc. Marcy A Brink-Danan (2005 MA, PhD) Associate Professor of Anthropology, Hebrew University. Lecture nationally and internationally on Judaic Studies and linguistic anthropology.

Evan W Fox (2005 BA) Foreign Service Officer / U.S. Dept of State. Served as an economic officer covering environmental issues for the U.S. Embassy in Zimbabwe. Recently joined the U.S. Dept of State as a Foreign Service Officer.

German Dziebel (2006 PhD) EVP, Head of Strategy, GSW Worldwide; Senior Partner, Frontera Project. Prepared “Comprehensive, Interdisciplinary Bibliography of Kinship Studies” (4 volumes). To appear in 2016. Built an anthropologicallyoriented department at a healthcare advertising agency. Founded an anthropologically-oriented strategy and research consultancy. Runs www.anthropogenesis. kinshipstudies.org. Presented paper at the 2014 AAA Meetings in Washington, DC, entitled “The Study of Kinship Systems and Terminologies in the Soviet Union and Contemporary Russia: a Short History and the Current State of a Discipline at the Intersection of Ethnography and Social Anthropology.”

Krista Kiyosaki (2006 BA) Resident Physician, Stanford University Hospitals and Clinics, Department of Otolaryngology Head & Neck Surgery .

Matt Zafra (2006 BA, Honors) Currently based in Singapore, as part of the Health and Life Sciences consulting practice of OLIVER WYMAN. Christian Mesia (2007 PhD) Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola, Graduate School, Faculty and Academic Director.

Recently appointed Academic Director of

San Ignacio de Loyola´s Graduate School.

Author of the following papers published in 2014 and 2015 “Feasting and Power during the Late Formative Period in Chavin de Huantar”, “The Formative Period in the northern Andes and their relations with central Andes” ,“Application of the Boone Index in the analysis of stratigraphic deposits of Chavin de Huantar” and “Finding Identity in National Museums: The Peruvian National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History and the National Museum of Peruvian Culture”.

Published the Spanish translation of John Hyslop´s book “The Inca Road System”. I continue doing archaeological research at the site of Chavin de Huantar, Peru and in the field of archaeological and anthropological museology.

Farms. Since fall 2013, Cora has been teaching Anthropology part-time at her alma mater, Merritt Community College, where she was first introduced to the field of Anthropology.

Lauren King (2008 BA) [Lauren Horton] Resident physician at Emory University in Pediatrics.

Carolyn Mansfield duPont (2008 BA) Graduate student, MIT Sloan and Harvard Kennedy School. I'm halfway through my three-year grad school program, enjoying life in back in Boston where I grew up.

I had a great summer working with the Gates Foundation last summer and am now running a project on the use of green bonds for land conservation finance.

Kathryn A Mariner (2008 BA) [Kate Ludwig] PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Chicago (through June 2015), Starting July 1, 2015: Post-doctoral Fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Rochester. Starting July 1, 2016: Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. With the support of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, I recently defended my doctoral dissertation, “Intimate Speculation: The Flows and Futures of Private Agency Adoption in the United States,” in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. I will be graduating with my PhD in Anthropology in June and moving to Rochester, NY, where I will hold a post-doctoral fellowship in African and African American Studies for the 2015-2016 academic year, before beginning a faculty appointment in the Department of Anthropology in 2016, both at the University of Rochester.

Maria Esther E Rodriguez (2007 BA) Project Manager, RGV FOCUS/Educate Texas.

Jocelyn C Brabyn (2008 BA) Ranch Manager in Sonoma County. Plan to attend Sonoma State University this fall to begin my MA program in Cultural Resource Management with an emphasis on Northern California historical archaeology.

Matt Champoux (2008 MA) Yoga Instructor with Yoga Tree and The Mindful Body, San Francisco. I currently teach yoga in San Francisco and lead retreats nationally and internationally. I'm interested in collaborating with organizations to develop yoga classes/ workshops as philanthropic channels to promote non-profit and NGO efforts in the developing world - especially regarding local empowerment and conservation initiatives. I recently taught in the Peruvian Amazon at two ecolodges and supported a small conservation non-profit. matthew. champoux@gmail.com

2010

Molly K Cunningham (2008 BA, MA) University of Chicago, PhD Candidate. I'm in the field! Sending love from Detroit!

Kendra Allenby (2010 BA) Bartender/Cartoonist. Recent accomplishments include paying rent every month, making great manhattans and occasionally getting my cartoons published. In both beer pouring and cartooning I find my degree in Anthropology extremely useful - it's all about people and the crazy things we do. Cartoons at thedrawnoutdays.com

Sam Dubal (2008 BA) Medical student, Harvard Medical School.

I graduated from the joint medical anthropology PhD program at UCSF and UC-Berkeley in May 2015. I am now finishing my last two years of medical school at Harvard, after which I hope to come back to California for my medical residency.

I'm looking forward to integrating my anthropological and medical training with activism in the coming years.

Cora L Garcia (2008 BA, MA) Adjunct Instructor, Anthropology, Merritt Community College, AND, Development and Communications Manager, City Slicker VOLUME 8

Liese Pruitt (2010 BA) General Surgery Resident, University of Utah. I spent a year in Ibadan, Nigeria researching healthcare worker awareness of breast cancer. I will be graduating from the University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine in June and starting general

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Alumni Updates surgery residency at the University of Utah with a focus on global surgery.

Redescription in Cultural Heritage,' edited

by Kathryn Lafrenz-Samuels and Trinidad Rico, will be published around August 2015 with the University Press of Colorado.

Erica L Williams (2010 PhD) Associate Professor of Anthropology at Spelman College. I was awarded tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in April 2015. My first book, Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements, was published in November 2013 by the University of Illinois Press. On a personal note, my husband and I are expecting a baby boy in late May 2015 (my first child)!

Damian Satterthwaite Phillips (2011 PhD) [Damian Satterthwaite-Phillips] Owner, Phillips Research & Analytics, Inc. Damian Satterthwaite-Phillips, Nohra MateusPinilla, Jan Novakofski. (2014). Fatty acid analysis as a tool to infer the diet in Illinois river otters (Lontra canadensis). Journal of Animal Science and Technology 56. Nelda A. Rivera, Jan Novakofski, Hsin-Yi Weng, Amy Kelly, Damian Satterthwaite-Phillips, Marilyn O. Ruiz, Nohra Mateus-Pinilla.

(2015). Metals in obex and retropharyngeal lymph nodes of Illinois white-tailed deer and their variations associated with sex and CWD status. Prion. Samantha K. Carpenter, Nohra E. Mateus-Pinilla, Kuldeep Singh, Andreas Lehner, Damian Satterthwaite-Phillips, Robert D. Bluett, Nelda A. Rivera, Jan E. Novakofski. (2014).

River otters as biomonitors for organochlorine pesticides, PCBs, and PBDEs in Illinois. Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, 100:99-104. Lead scientist and author for the Northwest Arctic Borough's “Subsistence Mapping Project” and atlas, Alaska (in prep for June, 2015)

Kelsey Broderick (2011 BA) Master of Science in Foreign Service Candidate, Georgetown University, Class of 2016. After graduating from Stanford University I lived and worked in China for three years (Hunan Province, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu) before entering graduate school for international affairs.

Tiffany C Cain (2011 MA) PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. I am in the third year of the doctoral program in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and have recently passed my PhD qualifying exams and advanced to candidacy. I will be beginning my dissertation fieldwork in Quintana Roo, Mexico, in association with the Maya community of Tihosuco, this April. This is a communitybased heritage preservation and development project whose historical archaeology program I will be spearheading. As a partnership between the Museo de La Guerra de Castas, the Ejido of Tihosuco, and the Penn Cultural Heritage Center, the project is anchored by community and scholarly interest in the Caste War (or Maya Social War) of Yucatan, one of the most successful indigenous uprisings in the Americas.

Elif M Babul (2012 PhD) Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Mt. Holyoke College. Won an ACLS Fellowship for sabbatical in 2015-2016 academic year. - Article published in the American Ethnologist 2015 February issue: “The Paradox of Protection: Human Rights, the Masculinist State and the Moral Economy of Gratitude in Turkey.”

Hannah Grune (2012 BA) Program Coordinator with the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Trinidad Rico (2011 PhD) Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University at Qatar. In the current academic year I was awarded two Qatar National Research Fund NPRP grants: 'Materiality and Preservation in Islamic Contexts' (2015-2017) and 'Cool Living Heritage in Qatar: Sustainable alternatives to air-conditioned urban development' (2015-2018) I joined the editorial Board for the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology in late 2014. I became editor for a new book series titled 'Heritage Studies in the Muslim World,' Palgrave MacMillan Pivot, starting in 2015. Our edited volume 'Heritage Keywords: Rhetoric and

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Rita K Lomio (2012 MA) Trial Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Special Litigation Section.

Susannah R Poland (2012 BA) Associate Director at Putney Student Travel and National Geographic Student Expeditions. After graduation Susannah researched contemporary African women artists and African feminisms as a curatorial assistant at the National Museum of African Art. She left D.C. in spring '13 to conduct ethnographic research on Mount

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Everest for a project on decision-making in extreme environments with Umea University. She recently moved to southern Vermont, and now designs and directs global educational programs for Putney Student Travel and National Geographic Student Expeditions, including programs in Nepal, Rwanda, and France.

Austin G Zeiderman (2012 PhD) Assistant Professor of Urban Geography, London School of Economics and Political Science. I recently took up a tenure-track position in the Department of Geography & Environment at the LSE in London. I'm enjoying my adoptive disciplinary home and have started teaching courses on urban studies, ethnographic methods, and race to both undergraduates and master's students. I'm also putting the finishing touches on my book manuscript, Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá (working title), which will be published by Duke University Press.

I had to miss the AAAs in 2014, but I'm looking forward to catching up in Denver in November!

Adrian T Myers (2013 PhD) Archaeologist & Project Manager, Amec Foster Wheeler. Adrian graduated with a PhD in May 2013. He is now an Archaeologist and Project Manager with the global engineering firm Amec Foster Wheeler.

Adrian lives in Vancouver with his wife Stephanie and son Leo. Bruce O'Neill (2013 PhD) Assistant Professor, Saint Louis University.

Elizabeth Rosen (2013 BA) English Language Assistant at the French Ministry of Education.

Brianna N Kirby (2014 BA with honors) Teacher at Bing Nursery School, Stanford University.

Anna Malaika G Ntiriwah Asare (2014 BA) MPhil student at the University of Cambridge - Multidisciplinary Gender Studies.

I've mainly been busy pursuing my MPhil degree, my research focuses on Black feminism and culturally relevant pedagogy. My ultimate goal is to be a cultural critic and public intellectual and I recently became a blogger for the Huffington Post which is a big part of this overall goal.

Hantian Zhang (2014 PhD) Quantitative researcher, MSCI.

S tuden t Achie v em e n t s Beagle II Award

2015 Undergraduate Honor Papers

Reade Levinson “The Ecology of the Afterlife”

Amelia Farber Nicole Follmann Elon Hailu Andrea Hale Laura Marsh Sarah Moore Julia Raban Jocelyn Smith

Ashley Overbeek “ahurea i roto i kai: The Sustainable Culture of Maori Cuisine from Forest to Fork” Madeline Lisaius “From Bush Meat to Cacao: Exploring the Transitioning Economy of the Waorani ” Grace Klaris “Investigating Cultural Barriers to Skin to Skin Care in Rural India”

Franz Boas Summer Scholars Meredith Pelrine “Where Asexual and Queer Meet: Counteracting Exclusion in an Aggressively Heterosexual World” Renjie Wong “Refashioning The Noble Savage: Situating the Neapolitan Bespoke Tailoring Community in the Italian Luxury Industry”

Tambopata Summer Research Scholars Joseph Hack “Hummingbird Hierarchies: Assessing Species Dominance Patterns of Peruvian Rainforest Hummingbird Communities Across A Gradient of Deforestation” Jacob Glassman “Hummingbird Hierarchies: Assessing Species Dominance Patterns of Peruvian Rainforest Hummingbird Communities Across A Gradient of Deforestation”

The Michelle Z. Rosaldo Summer Field Research Grant Mariam Kyarunts “Determining the Impact of Help Desk on Patient Satisfaction of Low income population in the Emergency Department” Isabelle Barnard “Household Tigers, Jungle Dogs: Domesticity and HumanAnimal Relations among Kichwa People of Amazonian Ecuador”

Distinction List Nicole Follmann Andrea Hale Laura Marsh

Phi Beta Kappa Nicole Follmann Julia Raban

2015 Undergraduate Awards Nancy Ogden Ortiz Memorial Prize for Outstanding Performance in Anthro 90B Theory in Cultural and Social Anthropology Elon Hailu Isabelle Barnard Anthropology Award for Outstanding Performance in Anthro 90C Theory in Ecological, Environmental, and Evolutionary Anthropology Allison Perry The Joseph H. Greenberg Prize for Undergraduate Academic Excellence Andrea Hale The James Lowell Gibbs, Jr. Award for Outstanding Service to the Department in Anthropology Julia Raban Sarah Moore Jocelyn Smith The Robert Bayard Textor Award for Outstanding Creativity in Anthropology Julia Raban Firestone Golden Medal for Excellence in Research Nicole Follmann Department Award of Merit Elon Hailu VOLUME 8

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Student Achievements

2015 Graduate Awards

New Job Placements

The Bernard J. Siegel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Written Expression by a Ph.D. Student in Anthropology Helen Clare Human

Maria Fernanda Escallon Black Studies Dissertation Fellow, Black Studies Department, University of California Santa Barbara

The Robert Bayard Textor Award for Outstanding Creativity in Anthropology Veysel Firat Bozcali

Helen Human International Scholarship and Fellowship Advisor, Washington University in St. Louis

The Anthropology Prize for Academic Performance Eleanor Alice Power

Lindsay Montgomery Postdoctoral scholar, Denver museum of nature and science

The Anthropology Prize for Outstanding Graduate Research and Publication Allison Jane Mickel Jenna Dawn Rice Jenna Dawn Rice The Annual Review Prize for Service to the Department Samuel Thomas Holley-Kline Samuel Peter Maull The Anthropology Prize for Academic Performance by a Masters Student Laura Gayle Marsh

Adrian Myers Archaeologist, AMEC Environment & Infrastructure Lisa Poggiali Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship and Constitutionalism, University of Pennsylvania Elly Power

Omidyar Fellow, Santa Fe Institute

Hantian Zhang

Quantitative researcher, MSCI, Inc.

Kathryn Takabvirwa (Continued from page 27)

President: “When you disagreed with people in Marikana, you killed them… When people had problems in Relela, you killed them. When people had problems in Mothutlung, demanding water, you killed them. When Tatane protested against this state, you killed him...” Malema’s indictment of the President continued: “Mr. President you taught our people that everything… must be resolved through violence. And therefore you must take full responsibility… You have lost control of the country because you have lost control of your own family. Your own son continues to say [that] these people must be killed. You stand up here and you do not say anything” (transcribed from the original video). Violence against foreigners will continue in South Africa as long as those who lead fail to speak clearly against it. As long as Presidents and Kings misuse their podiums, and men stand by or join in, as mobs kill unarmed men and women.

These waves of violence against immigrants have left so many of us shaken. And which is worse, horrific though the violence is today, it is not new. Xenophobic attacks have been part of the story of South Africa at least since 1994, probably before then. Black African foreigners in South Africa have been targets of violence for at least two decades; attacks happen, outrage follows, promises are made, calm, then the cycle repeats itself,

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again and again. When will it end?

The last Zimbabwean census stakes our population at 12 million. Yet, migration reports suggest there could be up to 1.5 million Zimbabweans in South Africa. That is an 8:1 ratio. For every eight Zimbabweans in Zimbabwe, there is some loved one in South Africa, in jeopardy. So again, I must ask: when will it end?

I have been trying to unsee the images that have been in the news, that are burned now into my memory, of fathers and mothers engulfed in flames simply for being in South Africa and being black and non-South African. Thus, I leave you the image on page 29, instead, of a chair that my beloveds sit in whenever they come home. They are among the 3 million in South Africa, in jeopardy for being foreign, being Zimbabwean.

Devoted to South Africa, their second home, they believe still that there is a place for them yet in the Rainbow Nation. South Africa is lucky to have them. They can’t be here because they must be there. I will sit in this chair and wait for them to come home, as I finish off my fieldwork. Yet, for so many, whose beloveds will not be coming home, their chairs will remain empty.

An t hrop ol ogy Fa c u l ty Rebecca Bliege Bird (Associate Professor; Ph.D. UC Davis, 1996) Behavioral ecology, landscape ecology, subsistence decisions, public goods, anthropogenic fire, gender, prestige, Australia/Oceania.

Lisa Curran (Professor; Ph.D. Princeton, 1994) Political ecology of land use; governmental policies/transnational firms; natural resource sector; ecological dynamics; land rights/rural livelihoods; NGOs/protected areas/donor agencies; REDD carbon payments; corruption; Asia/Latin America.

William H. Durham (Professor; Ph.D. Michigan, 1977) Biological anthropology, ecological and evolutionary anthropology, cultural evolution, conservation and community development, resource management, environmental issues; Central and South America.

Paulla A. Ebron (Associate Professor; Ph.D. Massachusetts at Amherst 1993) Comparative cultural studies, nationalism, gender, discourses of identity; Africa, African-America.

James Ferguson (Professor; Ph.D. Harvard, 1985) Political economy, development, migration and culture; neoliberalism and social assistance, Southern Africa.

James A. Fox (Associate Professor; Ph.D. Chicago, 1978) Linguistic anthropology, historical linguistics, biology and evolution of language, archaeological decipherment, settlement of the New World, mythology, computational methods; Mesoamerica, Americas.

Duana Fullwiley (Associate Professor; Ph.D. UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, 2002) The Anthropology of science; Medical anthropology; Genetics and identity; Economic anthropology; Global health politics; Africanist anthropology; Race; Health disparities; Environmental resource scarcity as a source of ethnic conflict, Senegal, West Africa, France, and the United States.

Richard Klein (Professor; Ph.D. Chicago, 1966) Paleoanthropology; Africa, Europe.

Matthew Kohrman (Associate Professor; Ph.D. Harvard, 1999) Medical anthropology, governmentality, illness experience, gender, China.

Tanya Luhrmann (Professor; Ph.D. Cambridge, 1986) The social construction of psychological experience, social practice and the way people experience their world, the domain of what some would term the "irrational."

Liisa Malkki (Professor; Ph.D. Harvard, 1989) Historical anthropology; historical consciousness and memory; mass displacement and exile; racial essentialism and mass violence; nationalism and internationalism; the ethics and politics of humanitarianism; religion and contemporary missions in Africa; religion and globalization; social uses of the category, art, and the politics of visuality.

Lynn Meskell (Professor; Ph.D. Cambridge, 1997) Archaeological theory, ethnography, South Africa, Egypt, Mediterranean, Middle East, heritage, identity, politics, embodiment, postcolonial and feminist theory, ethics, tourism.

John W. Rick (Associate Professor; Ph.D. Michigan, 1978) Prehistoric archaeology and anthropology of band-level hunter-gatherers, stone tool studies, analytical methodology, animal domestication; Latin America, Southwest U.S. Krish Seeta (Assistant Professor; Ph.D. University of Cambridge, 2006) Zooarchaeology, human-animal relationships, colonialsm, Indian Ocean World.

Kabir Tambar (Assistant Professor; Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2009) Religion and secularism, pluralism and nationalism, the politics of affect, Islam, Middle East, Turkey.

Angela Garcia (Assistant Professor; Ph.D. Harvard, 2007) Medical and psychological anthropology; violence, suffering and care; addiction, morality and science; subjectivity; ethnographic writing; Unites States, Mexico.

Sharika Thiranagama (Assistant Professor; Ph.D. University of Edinburgh, 2006) Ethnicity, Violence, Gender, Kinship, Displacement, Political Anthropology and Political Theory, Sri Lanka, South Asia.

Thomas Blom Hansen (Professor; Ph.D.) South Asia and Southern Africa. Multiple theoretical and disciplinary interests from political theory and continental philosophy to psychoanalysis, comparative religion and contemporary urbanism.

Barbara Voss (Associate Professor; Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 2002) historical archaeology, archaeology of colonialism, culture contact, Spanish-colonial archaeology, overseas Chinese archaeology, postcolonial theory, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, cultural resource management, public archaeology, communitybased research, California archaeology.

Ian Hodder (Professor; Ph.D. Cambridge, 1974) Achaeological theory, the archaeology and cultural heritage of Europe and the Middle East, excavations in Turkey, material culture.

Miyako Inoue (Associate Professor; Ph.D. Washington University, 1996) linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, semiotics, linguistic modernity, anthropology of writing, inscription devices, materialities of language, social organizations of documents (filing systems, index cards, copies, archives, paperwork), voice/sound/noise, soundscape, technologies of liberalism, gender, urban studies, Japan, East Asia.

S. Lochlann Jain (Associate Professor; Ph.D. U.C. Santa Cruz, 1999) Extra-legal forms of communications, such as warning signs and medical apologies; queer studies; art and design.

James Holland Jones (Associate Professor; Ph.D. Harvard, 2000) Human ecology, population biology, formal methods, family demography and kinship, social epidemiology, HIV/STD epidemiology, conservation biology; Africa, Asia, Americas.

Michael Wilcox (Associate Professor [teaching]; Ph.D. Harvard, 2001) postcolonial approaches to archaeology; ethnic identity and conflict; political and historical relationships between Native Americans and anthropologists and archaeologists.

Sylvia J. Yanagisako (Professor; Ph.D. University of Washington, 1975) Kinship, gender, feminist theory, capitalism, ethnicity; U.S., Italy.

EMERITI Clifford Barnett, Harumi Befu, George A. Collier, Jane F. Collier, Carol L. Delaney, Charles O. Frake, James L. Gibbs, Jr., Renato Rosaldo.

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Department of Anthropology Bldg. 50, Main Quad, 450 Serra Mall Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2034

2014-2015 Newsletter Volume VIII Department of Anthropology Stanford University Editors: Ellen Christensen, Emily Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop, Jennifer Chalupnik, Sylvia Yanagisako

Newsletter Design & Layout: Emily Bishop

With special thanks to all of our contributors for more information on department programs and events, contact us at: Tel: 650-723-3421 Fax: 650-725-0605 E-mail: anthropology@stanford.edu Web: http://anthropology.stanford.edu