Anthropology Newsletter Volume 17

Scholarship & Activism

Table of Contents

Letter from the Chair

Scholarship & Activism

Angela Garcia

Sharika Thiranagama

Ayana Flewellen

Robert Samet

Maura Finkelstein

Shantanu Nevrekar

Adela Zhang

Ronald Chen

Srihari Nageswaran

Amanah Nurish

Interviews

Faculty News

Department News & Events

New Staff

Letters from the Field

Alumni Updates

Student Achievements

Anthropology Faculty

“Anthropology & Activism”

“Black Scholars in Anthropology: Centering Liberation in Anthropological Scholarship”

A Conversation with Robert Samet

A Conversation with Maura Finkelstein

“The Crisis of the Applied: Anthropology, Policy, & Activism”

“Reflections on Scholarship & Activism”

“Reflections on Scholarship & Activism”

“The Treason of Intellect”

“Religious Activism as Collective Memory: The Indonesian Diaspora in ‘the Dreamland’ of the United States”

“The University & the Community” pages 3 - 6 pages 7 - 31 pages 41 - 49 pages 32 - 40 pages 50 - 52 page 53 pages 54 - 67 pages 68 - 76 page 77 pages 78 - 79 (7-8) (13-14) (15-16) (17-20) (21-22) (9-12) (23-24) (25) (26-28) (29-31)

Letter from the Chair

Thomas Blom Hansen

In the past decade or so, questions of the ‘climate’ on America’s campuses have been the focus of countless meetings, surveys, task forces and attempts at dialogue across antagonistic points of view. In 2016, the focus was on deepening political polarization; after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, the focus was on anti-Black racism and social justice; since October 2023, the term campus climate has referred mainly to campus protests against the war in Gaza, charges of anti-semitism, etc.

In the eyes of many university administrators, the problem is that neither faculty nor students properly understand the line between scholarship and activism. The standard argument goes like this: “if we all do our scholarship well and do not let our value judgements influence or shape our findings, and if we separate our academic pursuits from our private political convictions, the climate on campus would improve.”

Are matters really that simple? Is activism really the culprit here? And what does activism and value judgment actually mean? Max Weber, in his classic 1904 essay on objectivity in the social sciences, makes a more sophisticated argument. Weber admits that objectivity may be impossible to attain, but social scientists should, in his view, nonetheless strive to generate the best ‘facts’ available while being aware of how their own possible biases and value judgments may influence their interpretations. Weber adds that rather than dismissing value judgments as ‘irrational’ or as ‘contaminating’ pure facts, they need to be identified and critically analyzed as they decisively shape how facts are interpreted and public arguments and policies are presented.

These insights have been foundational to the critical scholarship in the social sciences for a century, including in anthropology. In fact, our discipline has been grappling with the relationship between activist commitments, advocacy and critical scholarship in a very nuanced manner for several decades. For some, engaged anthropology is to take a clear and public stance on its subject matter and participate in advocacy work. For others, anthropology should be a collaborative endeavor that engages and benefits local communities. For a third group, perhaps the largest, anthropology’s true mission is to elucidate, understand and describe the social worlds and horizons of the people, places and communities we work in and with so as to make their points of view, their interpretive schemas and their striving and value judgments a part of a larger, richer and more comparative conversation in the social sciences.

For each of these three positions, the relationship between social practices, facts, and value judgment among the people and situations we study, and for ourselves, is not reducible to a distinction between ‘pure’ scholarship and activism. Our focus is generally on the relationship between experience, social practice and moral horizons, that is, how ‘facts’ are produced as true in different settings, and how values become valorized, or demonized, within different communities. In this endeavor, the ‘neutral’ position can be hard to find, and ‘pure facts’ hard to come by.

In this year’s newsletter, I invited faculty and students to reflect on the relationship between scholarship and activism, and the distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘values’. I asked colleagues and students to reflect on a few questions: does the common distinction between facts and values make sense in a discipline fundamentally dedicated to exploring the multiple and differential ways people across the world imagine what is true, what is factual, and what is partisan? Does the distinction between fact and value, and its implied critique of engaged scholarship, pose a threat to free and critical inquiry? If so, how can anthropologists counter this implied charge of undue bias? What are the challenges of practicing engaged and collaborative scholarship?

Our community produced a wonderful set of reflections on these foundational questions. We begin with a reflection by Angela Garcia where she narrates her journey from her days as a Berkeley undergraduate deeply engaged in protests against the US government’s unwillingness to combat the unfolding AIDS epidemic, to her engagement in the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa and later to her anthropological scholarship on addiction. As she concludes ‘anthropology and activism are inextricably bound.’

Sharika Thiranagama discusses the role of the university as a critical site and symbol of freedom and human emancipation. Sharika illustrates this with the story of the Jaffna University in northern Sri Lanka that was targeted and contested during Sri Lanka’s long civil war. The university was kept open by a courageous group called University Teachers for Human Rights that never gave up on the idea of the university as a space of freedom. Her mother was one of those professors. At a time when all of Gaza’s twelve

universities have been physically destroyed after having been declared potential havens of terrorism, Sharika asks us to be mindful of this crucial value of universities across the world.

Ayana Flewellen reflects on the colonial and racist history of anthropology and the foundational critiques of the discipline by Black anthropologists throughout the 20th century to the present. Ayana describes her work in historical archaeology as part of a larger effort to make African Diaspora history visible and tangible, ‘so that the threads of the afterlife of slavery make themselves legi¬ble and demand redress.’

We then turn to two interviews with alumni of our department. We begin with Robert Samet, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Union College. He discusses his current research into rightwing activism–the sovereign citizens’ movement, Christian nationalism and similar groupings that are unified by a deep skepticism of democracy, science and reformist legislation. Robert considers how this type of conservative activism also manifests in the ongoing debates and confrontations around campus protests against the war and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

The next interview is with Maura Finkelstein, Associate Professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania for many years. Maura reflects on the challenges and joys of combining her ongoing anthropological scholarship with a deep engagement in pro-Palestinian activism, including teaching classes with colleagues in Palestine. Maura tells the story of how these classes and her activist commitments eventually led to her recent dismissal from the College. Maura is appalled by this decision, but she has no regrets. In her own words,

‘I hope that every anthropologist who called for “decolonizing anthropology” is actively invested in using their platform to call for a free Palestine. What is our voice good for, if not for this?’

Shantanu Nevrekar reflects on the customary distinction between pure and applied research. Anthropology, he argues, has often veered towards pure research and critique of the effects of policy interventions rather than towards application of anthropological methods and theories in various domains. At this point, Shantanu argues, anthropologists ought to think of new ways to apply their insights in ways that make a difference on the ground.

In her contribution, Adela Zhang also turns to the distinction between pure and applied research in anthropology. Rather than relying on the distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ or scholarship versus activism, Adela asks us to consider the premise of accountable research, the assumption, in her words, “that one’s research starts with a constituency to which it is accountable. As the ‘client,’ the anthropologist’s interlocutors actively shape the scope of the research agenda and the questions asked.”

Ronald Chen discusses his ongoing work on customary law and human rights-based legal activism in Jordan. He asks us to consider the deceptively simple question: who are we doing our work for? The communities and individuals we work with and depend on? The discipline? A general public? Our own careers? All of the above? There are no easy answers, Ronald concedes and he adds that, ‘the myth of “neutrality”—that some scholarship is irreducibly political, and choosing what to study, is itself an ethical decision.’

Srihari Nageshwaran reflects on the discrepancy between the freedom of the mind that the university affords and the great difficulties of realizing basic forms of freedom that is the experience of the great majority of people in the world. This insight should make us less insular and more engaged in the realization of freedom wherever we are, Srihari concludes.

In her reflection, our Fulbright scholar from Indonesia, Amanah Nurish, discusses the proliferation of

religious activism among members of the Indonesian diaspora in America. This activism is based on a shared desire to come together to share memories, food and cultural activities. Amanah reminds us that these gatherings are about religion and faith but are based on the need, in her words, to ‘preserve a dreamland fantasy’.

We then turn again to interviews with affiliated faculty, visitors, and a new member of the faculty. Elizabeth Gravalos, postdoctoral scholar in the department and Stanford Archaeology Center, discusses her work on ceramics, craft production and landscape in the pre-Hispanic Andes. Beth reflects on the strengths and challenges of conducting collaborative research with local Andean communities as well as colleagues and interlocutors at Peruvian research institutions.

We briefly return to Amanah Nurish who shares details about her ongoing work with Islamic organizations in Indonesia as well as in the US. She also describes how she combined research at Stanford with teaching classes on Zoom in Indonesia at 4a.m.!

We then turn to an interview with Ioanida Costache, an ethnomusicologist who was appointed as assistant professor in the Department of Music at Stanford in 2023. Ioanida along with her ethnomusicology colleague Denise Gill was recently appointed as affiliated faculty in the Department of Anthropology. Ioanida discusses her extensive work with Roma communities in the Balkans, specifically songs of sorrow, prison songs and funeral song, research that is at the heart of a forthcoming book on Roma sonic performances and subjectivity.

We finally turn to an interview with Emma Shaw Crane, our new colleague who will join the department as assistant professor of Anthropology on September 1, 2024. Emma discusses her new exciting work with ex-combatants in Colombia as well as ongoing work on Homestead, Florida, a Miami suburb that houses a major US military base, a large migrant detention center and an extensive plant nursery that employs hundreds of Maya-speaking workers from Central America. We are excited to welcome Emma into our midst in the coming academic year.

The past six months have been a time of celebrations: first our celebration on May 13 of Tanya Luhrmann who was awarded the Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research in New Mexico. Secondly, our celebration of the intellectual legacy of Sylvia Yanagisako who last year retired after more than four decades of service in the department. On March 1st, the Department hosted eight speakers, all former students of Sylvia, as well as many others who joined our day-long celebration of Sylvia. On January 20, 2024, many former students and former and current faculty gathered to celebrate the life and work of the late professor George Collier. The event was a moving and convivial celebration of Collier and his presence in the department. Finally, we carry a brief note by Kevin O’Neill (UToronto) that bids farewell to Liisa Malkki and James Ferguson who are both retiring this year after many years of teaching and service in the department. Kevin along with other former students, department faculty and staff are planning a celebratory event for Liisa and Jim in the Spring of 2025.

We welcome four new members of our staff–Maria Kristina Guillen, Roya Aghavali, Victoria Hunter and Dylan Cha. After some years of staff turnover following the pandemic, we are now fully staffed and we have a great team facilitating the department’s many activities.

We conclude our newsletter with letters from graduate students doing fieldwork. Utsavi Singh takes us on a walk around the Old Leh town, capitol of Ladakh situated at the northern border of India, and now increasingly a center of heritage tourism. Kristin McFadden takes us to a community meeting at St. John’s Island, South Carolina, where local Black residents are struggling to restore rights to land that was stolen from their families several generations ago.

Tien Dung-Ha describes her work with forensic scientists and researchers in Vietnam who are working to identify the remains of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers who perished during the long decades of war. Like for so many Vietnamese, this is also personal for Tien Dung. Her grandfather was one of those fallen soldiers. The final letter is from Ayodele Foster-McCray who is following the work of doulas and volunteers providing both natal and ante-natal care to Black women in underserved and marginal rural counties in southern Georgia.

This is my last year as department chair, and this is my last departmental newsletter to edit. I wish to thank colleagues, students and staff for many years of great collaboration and shared effort to ensure that Stanford Anthropology remains an intellectually vibrant, inclusive environment, situated at the progressive forefront of the discipline.

Finally, I wish to congratulate Angela Garcia on her promotion to full professor. I also want to thank her for her stepping forward to serve as the next Chair and steward of the department.

“Anthropology & Activism”

“Had I not been an activist, I would never have been an anthropologist.”

Angela Garcia

Professor, Department of Anthropology

I lived in San Francisco in the 1990s, at a time when the city was witnessing countless deaths due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. As a member of the LGBTQ community, I was accustomed to attending memorials for friends who died of the disease. My grief was overwhelming, and it led me to become involved with the grassroots, queer-led activist group ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). We were a diverse bunch, united in the fact that we were angry: angry at the misinformation and stigma that surrounded AIDS; angry at the U.S. government’s lack of action to research the disease and find drugs to cure it; angry at the spread of homophobia; and angry about the lack of support for those living with, and dying from, AIDS. My weekends were spent engaged in direct actions that sought to bring attention to the AIDS crisis and, ultimately, end it. I helped write advocacy pamphlets, participated in protests, and stenciled the streets of San Francisco with ACT-UP’s famous slogan: ACT-UP! Fight Back!

At the time, I was also an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. My area of study was uncertain until I took an anthropology course. I was immediately taken by anthropology’s commitment to understanding complex social phenomenon through fieldwork, and I found inspiration in the lives of anthropologists who were politically engaged. I soon realized that I could

take the tools of the discipline to better understand the forces that facilitated the spread of HIV, as well as the intimacies that flourished in the virus’s shadow.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, I took a job at Project Inform, a San Francisco-based activist organization that advocated for the development of treatments for HIV and Hepatitis C. I wrote publications that addressed issues that women living with HIV faced, including decisions about starting HIV medications during pregnancy. I also worked on Project Inform’s treatment hotline, taking calls from frightened men and women who just received an HIV diagnosis. In some ways, it was the experience of working on the hotline that helped shape the way I conduct anthropological interviews, in so far as I emphasize listening over questioning.

My work with ACT-UP and Project Inform eventually led me to South Africa, where I worked with Doctors Without Borders and a South African-based activist group called Treatment Action Campaign. My days were split between advocating for HIV medications for the millions of South Africans living with the disease, as well as

supporting women who needed to make difficult decisions around pregnancy and breastfeeding. I worked in a perinatal clinic in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town. I was painfully aware that the 2 doses of the antiretroviral medication AZT that the clinic provided pregnant women was intended to prevent the spread of HIV to their babies, not treat the women themselves. It was this recognition that inspired me to apply to graduate school to study anthropology. I simply felt that I had more to learn, especially about the structures that limited women’s life chances.

Over the years, my activist and scholarly focus has shifted from issues around HIV/AIDS to those concerning drugs and addiction. Since 2021, I’ve drawn on my research findings about addiction in Mexico in expert testimonies for court cases involving the deportation of Mexican immigrants with addiction problems. For me, this kind of work is a form of activism. Perhaps it’s quieter than my years of direct actions with ACT-UP, but it’s no less powerful and necessary. And it’s just as informed by my activist past as it is by my years of anthropological training and research.

“For me, activism and anthropolgy are inextricably bound.”

“The Univeristy & the Community”

Sharika Thiranagama Associate Professor Department of Anthropology

The relationship between scholarship and activism is something I have been conscious of all my life, the child of an academic who grew up in a war, and then went on to work explicitly on war and political violence. To some extent, in my mind such themes have been largely restricted to thinking about my research. However, in the last few months, as I have watched the progression of the war on and in Gaza and the West Bank in historic Palestine/Israel proceed, the profound devastation and destruction visited upon the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by the Israeli government as vengeance for Hamas violence on October 7, I have been brought to a more active reflection on what it means to be a teacher and academic at this moment. What has been most difficult for me, however, is seeing the conversations around mass violence against Palestinian communities from the other side. I see what it is like to be, not the population bombarded, but instead as part of an audience who discuss the seeming rights and wrongs of mass destruction from a position of distance. My work engages intensely with the effects of mass violence, ethnic discrimination and cleansing and genocide on minority communities. I have been teaching students, for now nearly seventeen years, classes on race, ethnicity and violence where I have taught students to think deeply about long histories of violence and the structures that produce what appear to be episodic violence. I have been teaching them to analyze the effects of colonialism, inequality, ethnic discrimination and the dangerous and effective propagation of stereotypes and racial imaginaries that end up legitimizing violence against those perceived as others or as lesser. Our intellectual contribution to our students’ lives is to help them think deeply, to make analyses that understand changing historical and cultural forms rather than blindly accept what they see in front of them. In difficult classes around mass violence, we engage in critical conversations that fundamentally respect the dignity and humanity of all we discuss, and that leads students to understand that mass collective violence against communities that seek to destroy all they hold dear must be interrogated. More than classes at Stanford though, I have been thinking about the role of the university, which itself is a very personal one for me.

The war between the Sri Lankan state and the separatist LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), popularly known as the Tigers, drew in Sri Lanka’s three largest ethnic groups, the majority Sinhalese and minority Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims. Tamils and Muslims were the subject of my research. From 2002 onwards, my research was on this thirty-year war and the new social processes and personas that it constituted, examining the effects of profound internal displacement, militancy, political violence and familial and generational relations for both northern Tamil-speaking minorities differently positioned with regard to the state and the LTTE, both of whom exerted authoritarian force over minority populations. This war ended incredibly brutally, the primary areas of LTTE control were northern and eastern Sri Lanka, until May 2009, when the Sri Lankan Army pushed the LTTE and around 300,000 civilians into an ever-shrinking northeastern coastal strip. The state bombarded this strip including areas it had declared as safe-zones-in a few short months more than 40,000 Tamils were killed. May 2009 marks the official end of the civil war when the LTTE leader Prabhakaran and most of the senior leadership were killed-though revelations about the terrible atrocities and war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan army continue to be revealed. The state proceeded to incarcerate 285,000 Tamils in camps for a year before they were allowed to return home. Subsequently, the Sri Lankan state expanded the army, failed to demilitarize minority areas and postponed political reform. As a whole, Sri Lanka still ranks as number two in the world for enforced disappearances across these many decades. As of 2022, Sri Lanka is also in the midst of a profound economic collapse. I have worked not only on this history, but also on this continually transforming terrain of war

and political violence that has shaped intimate and familial life for all.

I am a Sri Lankan Tamil and grew up for the first ten years of my life in the war zone in northern Sri Lanka in Jaffna. My mother, Dr Rajani Thiranagama, was a medical doctor and also held a PhD in Forensic Anthropology, spending three years at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. My sister and I lived with her for one and half of those years in the UK, where she wrote her PhD and took us to rallies and demonstrations around protesting apartheid in South Africa to spaces of Black and Brown collective organizing. We learned from a very young age that activism was about nurturing life. All this was largely outside of the university itself. The day after she defended her PhD, the three of us returned back to Sri Lanka and our northern Jaffna pour home where we had grown up and where our grandparents lived. My mother returned to teach at Jaffna University at a time when so many Tamils especially from the University were leaving the country. That year we returned, 1986, was a horrific time. Sri Lankan Tamils throughout the 1980s had joined militant groups in the thousands as a response to continued state discrimination and most recently the 1983 anti-Tamil riots in the southern capital Colombo. The Sri Lankan state embarked upon a concerted bombing campaign on northern Sri Lanka. In 1985, one Tamil militant group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, had decided its way to liberation was to eliminate the other groups and internally purge left-wing Tamils, dissidents and others whom they felt were anti-social actors. After a bloody year where we found bodies every day in our streets, they engaged in combat with the State. In 1986, we all built bunkers in our gardens as the earth shook around us. In 1987, the Indian government sent in the Indian Peace Keeping

Forces, the IPKF, ostensibly to keep the peace and enforce a new accord. Soon the IPKF began fighting with the LTTE and a new terrible phase of the war began: curfew, shelling, bombing, mass displacement, disappearance and arrest, and large- scale rape by the Indian army. For the most part, the churches, the mosques, the temples were filled with people seeking shelter as the bombs rained down on us.

The University Teachers for Human Rights, Jaffna branch, came about in this time, set up by academics such as my mother Rajani Thiranagama (Medicine), Rajan Hoole (Mathematics), K Sritharan (Mathematics) and a whole collection of university students, many of whom died soon after killed by the LTTE, the Sri Lankan state and the IPKF. One particular incident stands out. The Indian army pursuing the LTTE in one of their campaigns grenaded and bombarded Jaffna Hospital full of patients, physicians, nurses, orderlies and others. The steps of Jaffna Hospital, close to where I lived, ran with blood down into our streets. After this, my mother and a few other academics and students began to collect information to write a report. At a time when people were too scared and had three different military actors vying to kill us, the students and faculty began to gather information, to start a network of standing up for ordinary people. The university had a place in the community. As my mother wrote in a letter: “Someone, some few have to stand up and fight for the survival of this community.” In another letter she wrote: “Within my limited role I feel that running the University, getting students to come together, staff to come together, would serve as a way of working together against forces of suppression.”

The university itself was also under threat. The Indian Army had closed Jaffna University soon after its entry.

The Vice Chancellor of the University had heard of it on the radio. The academics, however, decided to reopen it. My mother and a few others reentered the university despite curfews and with the help of some brave janitorial staff they started to get the university ready. My mother fixed locks to doors and cleaned the medical facility, and then began teaching. At first, less than a handful of faculty were there; my mother was the only one in the medical faculty teaching huge classes, but in the end the university opened again. It was battered, damaged by shells, filled with frightened people. The Indian army constantly came to harass my mother in her office, sometimes some of them asked her for medical advice. But the university stayed open. No army could keep it closed when its faculty and students returned. A university can be a place to which we are dedicated.

It is in the end a tragic story. Many students who were most active in the left disappeared taken by the LTTE as well as the Indian army. I don’t want to romanticize the university. Jaffna University is still an elitist place with deep caste discrimination against many of its students and its janitorial staff. Sri Lankan Muslim students are discriminated against and marginalized by Sri Lankan Tamils. It is comprised of a deeply hierarchical administration with some committed teachers, and others preserving the status quo. All this and more was true in 1987, so …. why did my mother open the university again? What did my sister and I learn in those long and horrible nights, as we clung to our mother and our grandparents? My mother Rajani Thiranagama believed, and I believe, because she taught me so, that the university can be a precious place that is not only there to give out degrees. It is there, not only for its students, but to play a part in the life of the community at large. The Univer-

Scholarship & Activism

sity Teachers for Human Rights Jaffna remained the only independent human rights organization in Sri Lanka for decades. Even though its members were made to leave Jaffna in 1990, they continued to live underground and write reports at great cost to their lives. People who work and study at universities have a responsibility towards the community at large, not to shut themselves away. Learning and pedagogy are not only goods in themselves, they are part of a panoply of actions and life that make a new world possible, but only in conjunction with others, never away from them. People fight all over the world to keep universities open, to keep the military out, to insist that places of learning should be places of debate and passion about human rights, not disciplined into never mentioning the truth of what we all see around us. I see university students across the United States of America renewing the purpose and strength of universities along just this line.

Let me remind you, my reader, that every university in Gaza has been destroyed. All 12 of them. Some by controlled explosion. Students, faculty, staff, administrators, cleaners, cooks, gardeners killed, displaced, and abandoned. Palestinian communities deeply prize education, young people opt for it above all. We have failed when we say nothing about the complete destruction of what people hold dear, of our colleagues, our friends, our students elsewhere. A university is not more precious than a home, or a mosque, or a bakery, or a shop, or a municipal building or a hospital. I am not trying to elevate scholasticide over everything else. But I work in a university because I believe in research, pedagogy and collegiality as a site, as a place and as a possibility. The right to education and educational access is something I believe in deeply. It is enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1960 Convention against Discrimination in Education, 1965 International Convention on

the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. I teach my students that we should care about such violations. Am I to teach them now that these should have little impact when they encounter it in their lives? I stand in solidarity with my colleagues, students, and staff in universities in Gaza whose vocations and desires have been cruelly and inhumanly interrupted, even as they have pursued education despite continual blockages to their ability to learn freely and with dignity.

Our professions have a vocation. Old-fashioned though it may seem, doctors, nurses, teachers have vocations as my mother taught me. When I read of the doctors and nurses found in mass graves in hospitals in Gaza along with their patients, zip-tied and executed, then I have to ask. . . what is the price of silence?

Let me repeat, I am proud of our students here at Stanford and students across the US who refuse to let their conscience be quiescent, to numb it to the deaths and destruction, who call out Israel for not only its spectacular violence of now, but the violence of an apartheid structure over decades that has instilled basic cruelty and inhumanity to others as the price of a good life for those it calls its own. I was once one of those bombarded by a state to pay the price of vengeance. I survived, but so many in Palestine will not, and are not. My scholarship cannot stop this war, but staying silent I fear, damages our capacity to protest against death and destruction. To not stand in solidarity with Palestinians is not only to deny their humanity, it is also to deny your own.

References

https://uthr.org/

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc7_K7qybzbeiBAg7sYTxbp1VOyYBrYPaxRf8jvHuBa0kQHlg/viewform?pli=1

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza

https://apnews.com/article/gaza-education-schools-closed-israel-hamas-war-9f8aecc7f91db017e69b4c4a4c0d299d

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/04/1148716

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/24/middleeast/un-calls-for-investigation-gaza-mass-graves-mime-intl/index.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/mass-graves-found-gaza-hospitals-raided-israel-prompt-demands-independ-rcna149110

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/mass-graves-gaza-what-do-we-know-2024-04-25/, https://apnews.com/article/un-israel-palestinians-hospital-graves-investigation-dbaf873d023a7ba66dda05fb49074434

“Black Scholars in Anthropology: Centering Liberation in Anthropological Scholarship”

Ayana Flewellen Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology

“Had I not been black, I would have been a very different type of anthropologist. Interest in theory (at least, in theory for theory’s sake) has always been subordinated to my preoccupation with black liberation in the United States, the Caribbean, and the British Isles” - St. Clair Drake (Bond, 1988)

It is a privilege within anthropological research for scholars not to consider our work’s political implications. Since the inception of Black scholars’ engagement with the discipline of anthropology, from W.E.B. DuBois in the late 19th century to Zora Neale Hurston in the 1920s and St. Clair Drake in the 1970s, scholars of African descent within the field have woven their research tightly to calls for social justice (Jordan 1990; Baber 1999; Harrison and Harrison 1999; Harrison 1987). Foundational research in fields like anthropology, sociology, and psychology was used to codify human differences into racialized hierarchies that continuously perpetuated the idea of African inferiority (Drake 1980; Bernard 1971; Remy 1976; Bond et. al. 2018; McClaurin 2001; Moses 2002; Bolles 2013). Several scholars have written on how the earliest scholarship of W.E.B. DuBois, along with his contemporaries Charles S. Johnson and Carter G. Woodson, were writing against these fields as Black scholars who took on the role of “defenders of the race” laying the foundation for vindicationist scholarship at the turn of the 20th century (Drake 1980; DuBois 2013; Harrison and Harrison 1999; Bond et. al. 2018).

In the late 19th century, W.E.B. DuBois knew that the research on Black people in the United States and abroad did not stay within the ivory tower. Rather, these studies and their racist-laden results laid the foundation for ideologies that circulated in society and had material consequences for Black people, like segregation, educational access, health disparities, housing inequities, and death (Du Bois, 1889, 1903, 1935; Harrison 2008, 2011). As St. Clair Drake pointed out in 1988, as within the scholarship of his predecessors and those who stood atop his shoulders, to be Black in this field not only articulates a particular worldview that provides a lens into critically seeing the foundations of this discipline as a handmaiden to colonialism and the inherences that the early scholarship in this discipline that continues to ripple into the present, it also means situating yourself within a particular standpoint that foregrounds the necessity for social justice in a world oversaturated in anti-blackness.

Scholarship & Activism

As a historical archaeologist whose research focuses on the era of African enslavement in the circum-Caribbean (16th through 19th century) I do not have the privilege to conduct my research detached from its political implications. With states around the US legislating the removal of African American histories from k-12 curriculum, as we see in Florida, or with the systematic banning of books about the history and everyday life of Black people around the country, the unearthing of material culture that illuminates the depth of violence enacted on enslaved African people as well as how these very same people built thriving lives for themselves during and after slavery makes ignoring the political implications of my work unethical and untenable. My scholarship has a hand in making African Diaspora history tangible in a country where there is a thriving movement for revisionist histories that erase Indigenous, Black, and Brown people from the history of this country. The erasure of the impact of slavery, as foundational to the nation-building project that is the United States and as the scaffolding of the modern world as we know it, is tantamount to attempts to reduce the material reverberances of slavery’s legacy in the present that make itself known in “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” –what Hartman has articulated as the “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman, 2008).

Archaeology, which has made its primary mode of inquiry the materiality of past people’s lives, must center on how the knowledge we produce impacts people’s present-day lives. We make history tangible in a world that consistently is threatening to erase the atrocities of our collective past. From the survey and documentation to vessels that carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage to the mass graves unearthed related to the 1960s massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the remnants of homes that housed enslaved people on plantation sites throughout the US South, to the slate and graphite pencils enslaved Africans hid in their home as they taught themselves how to read and write. These objects bring this history to life and pull us in the present closer to the past so that the threads of the afterlife of slavery make themselves legible and demand redress (Dunnavant and Flewellen 2024).

References

Baber, Willie L. “St. Clair Drake: Scholar and Activist.” African-American pioneers in anthropology (1999): 191-212. Magubane, Bernard. “A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa.” Current Anthropology 12, no. 4/5 (1971): 419-445. Bolles, Lynn. “Telling the Story Straight: Black Feminist Intellectual Thought in Anthropology.” Transforming Anthropology 21, no. 1 (2013): 57-71. Bond, George Clement, and John Gibbs St Clair Drake. “A Social Portrait of John Gibbs St. Clair Drake: an American Anthropologist.” American Ethnologist (1988): 762-781.

Bond, George Clement, Johnnetta B. Cole, James Lowell Gibbs Jr, Vera Mae Green, John Langston Gwaltney, Delmos Jones, Diane K. Lewis et al. The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology. University of Illinois Press, 2018. Drake, St Clair. “Anthropology and the Black Experience.” The Black Scholar 11, no. 7 (1980): 2-31.

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The Philadelphia Negro. Cosimo, Inc., 2007 (originally published in 1889).

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. Routledge, 2017. (originally published in 1903).

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The Autobiography of WEB DuBois. Diasporic Africa Press, 2013 (originally published 1935).

Dunnavant and Flewellen “Towards a Archaeology of Redress,” Forthcoming in Current Anthropology Fall 2024.

Harrison, Faye V. Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology for Liberation. American Anthropological Association, 2011. Harrison, Faye Venetia. Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age. University of Illinois Press, 2008. Harrison, Ira E. “The Association of Black Anthropologists: A Brief History.” Anthropology Today 3, no. 1 (1987): 17-21.

Harrison, Ira E., Faye V. Harrison, and Faye Venetia Harrison, eds. African-American Pioneers in Anthropology. University of Illinois Press, 1999. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Macmillan, 2008.

Jordan, Glenn. “On Being a Committed Intellectual: St Clair Drake and the Politics of Anthropology.” Transforming Anthropology 1, no. 2 (1990): 15-18. McClaurin, Irma, ed. Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics. Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Moses, Yolanda T. “Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics.” Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002): 427-431.

Remy, Anselme. “Anthropology: For Whom and What?.” The Black Scholar 7, no. 7 (1976): 12-16.

A Conversation With Robert Samet

Robert Samet is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Union College in New York. His articles have appeared in American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Journal of Latin American Studies, and Social Research. His first book Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (2019) was published by University of Chicago Press.

Please tell us about your current research projects and how they engage with questions of activism and scholarship?

I’ve been following the international spread of a phenomenon that courts refer to as “pseudolaw,” which is closely associated with anti-government activists like sovereign citizens and freemen-on-the-land. Pseudolaw practitioners are a diverse bunch. Most reject the authority of the police, the courts, and elected officials based on conspiratorial readings of legal texts. They often refuse to pay taxes and attempt to sever ties with the state by destroying personal documents like birth certificates or driver’s licenses. The roots of pseudolaw go back half a century. It originated in the United States during the 1970s as a tactic among avowed Christian nationalists, white supremacists, and tax protesters. With the rise of the internet, a wide spectrum of anti-government groups in Canada, Europe, and much of the English-speaking world adapted the tools of pseudolaw to various political projects. As pseudolaw was taken up by new actors both inside and outside the United States, its overtly white supremacist roots were sublimated, but not severed. I’m interested in pseudolaw because I see it as an index of a larger reactionary zeitgeist that has been years in the making. In that sense, this project is an evolution of my earlier work on media and rightwing populism, but it is moving in a new direction.

Your new work engages how conservatism, and conservative activism, influences academic work. What do you see as the main difference between left-leaning activism and scholarship, and the more conservative-leaning forms?

That question gets at the heart of my project. It’s tricky because there are several ways to answer it, all of which depend on how we draw distinctions between political tendencies. Such distinctions are inescapable, I suspect, but we find ourselves in a moment in which familiar categories are being blurred. For that reason, I’d slightly tweak the question because I’m not certain that “conservative” adequately describes what is arguably the most radical political current of the last half-century. Neoliberalism was anything but conservative. The same is true of the spectrum of far-right authoritarian, ethno-nationalist, and theocratic movements that are on the rise. I think that the more fitting term is “reactionary.” By reactionary I mean an antidemocratic politics of hierarchy and domination that often glorifies brute force. Rather than thinking of reactionary politics as a singular identity, it helps to think of it as an antidemocratic tendency or what you’ve called “a leaning,” which can be contrasted with what you have called “left-leaning activism.” By “left-leaning,” I have in mind Fernando Coronil’s gloss on Norbert Bobbio for whom “the Left is basically defined by a movement from inequality to equality.” What I like about the term reactionary is that it allows us to carve out an oppositional space of democratic solidarity, one that can unite a broad spectrum of left-leaning activists (e.g., socialist, anarchist, liberal, progressive, etc.) in a spirit of friendship rather than factionalism. That being said, I’m convinced that a democratic coalition that fails to foreground material conditions is doomed to failure. Class matters. The reactionary wave we are witnessing is due, at least in part, to the fact that liberals refused to acknowledge as much.

How do you negotiate the relationship between the scholarly search for ‘inconvenient’ facts and perspectives, and your own convictions and moral/political views?

I am not sure most of us search out inconvenient facts, but they seem to find us nonetheless. In my first project, which was about the politics of security in Venezuela, violent crime was the inconvenient fact that I could not escape. It was too extreme. It impacted too many people. Looking back, I desperately wanted a story with a simple good/bad binary, like the one that frames Policing the Crisis by Stuart Hall and his colleagues. It would have been convenient to tell non-Venezuelan audiences that fear of crime in Caracas was a moral panic ginned up by the media and weaponized by reactionary politicians like it is here in the United States, but that story would not hold water with anyone who lived in Venezuela. I had to confront the fact that the Chávez government failed to adequately address the problem of violent crime. I agonized over how to frame that failing, but I could not turn away from it because you cannot build anything worthwhile on a foundation of half-truths. I think that is a belief broadly shared by people who are committed to democracy and to equality. Facts may be slippery, but the belief in shared truths is the bedrock on which democratic politics is founded.

How do you think anthropologists, and anthropological perspectives, can help understand the ongoing pro-Palestine activism across US campuses?

There is so much to say on this subject. For decades, anthropologists have fought to raise awareness about oppression in all of its forms, including the ongoing history of colonial domination in Israel-Palestine and the Middle East. That struggle has created a framework for broader critiques of power, critiques that have inspired a new generation of activists, many of whom have shown up at encampments across the country. When I look at these encampments, I see students and scholars trying to move the needle of history by appealing to basic human rights and a global anticolonial conscience. The ways in which these activists have been targeted alarms me because these attacks are tied to the reactionary zeitgeist mentioned above. The last time we saw a reactionary wave of this magnitude was in Europe during the interwar period (1918-1939). It washed up here in the United States, too, but not to the extent that we are witnessing today. During the 1930s and 1940s, U.S. anthropology cut its teeth in the fight against fascism. Anthropologists leaned into the growing prestige of the social sciences to forge a broad political coalition that helped preserve democratic ideals. In retrospect, it is easy for those of us committed to social and economic justice at home and abroad to find fault with this coalition, especially in light of the so-called liberal settlement that followed on its heels. Today, that settlement is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. What is poised to replace it? When I look at the political landscape, I see something ominously familiar, but I also detect seeds of hope. Pro-Palestine activism, to me, is part of a much larger attempt to expand the democratic envelope, and it is consistent with critical and self-reflexive approaches to power that anthropologists have fostered. That said, and as activists are well aware, critique is not enough, not when reactionary movements are poised to undo the political, social, and economic rights on which those critiques are predicated. In that regard, I think we stand to learn something about coalition building from interwar anthropology in the United States.

A Conversation With Maura Finkelstein

Maura Finkelstein is a writer, ethnographer, and Associate Professor of Anthropology. She is the author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, published by Duke University Press in 2019. Her academic writing has also been published in Anthological Quarterly, City and Society, Cultural Anthropology, and Anthropology Now and her essays and op-eds have appeared in Post45, Electric Literature, Allegra Lab, Red Pepper Magazine, The Scottish Left Review, The Markaz Review, and Mondoweiss. She received her PhD in anthropology from Stanford University in 2012.

Please tell us a bit about your academic journey since you received your PhD from Stanford. What has been your experience teaching anthropology at different liberal arts colleges?

After I graduated from Stanford in 2012, I taught for three years, first as an adjunct and then as a Visiting Assistant Professor, at Mills College (now closed) in Oakland. Because I was a contingent faculty member, I had to teach anything and everything I was given, regardless of my own expertise. In this way, I taught Medical Anthropology, Magic, Witchcraft and Religion, Human Evolution, and Public Interest Anthropology, in addition to intro and theory classes and special topics of my choosing (Queer Anthropology and classes on South Asia). This was a brutal way to learn how to teach, but what I drew from this experience was that, topically, I didn’t need to be an “expert” in the classes I taught, in terms of long-term ethnographic research and fieldwork. Instead, I brought my sensibility and training as an anthropologist to a wide range of topics, and used my classroom as a space where my students (and myself) learned how to ask questions, think critically, and apply the frameworks of ethnographic inquiry to whatever material we were reading. This would become critical when I started teaching about Palestine–the region has been central to my activism for decades now, but hasn’t been a place I’ve conducted ethnographic fieldwork. However, at Mills I began including readings about the region in all of my classes, regardless of topic.

When I was hired as a tenure track Assistant Professor by Muhlenberg College in 2015, this work became even more important. Unlike Mills, the general feel of Muhlenberg is conservative and Zionist, even though this doesn’t necessarily reflect the student body as a whole. But unlike Mills, where students were actively hungry for material that helped them think about the world in ways they never had before, at Muhlenberg, I often had to spend weeks building a foundation to help my students think beyond the limits of their own imagination. However, what I have found as a teacher at these two very different liberal arts schools is that the material itself–while critical–is often secondary to the heart of what I teach my students in my classroom–how to be brave, how to ask good questions, and how to envision a world beyond their own, immediate experiences. This is vulnerable work, for both me and my students, but it has been–by far–the most rewarding part of my job.

This orientation to teaching and learning is absolutely essential for our students and we are seeing the results of this work (carried out tirelessly by so many of us) being utilized beyond the classroom right now. I haven’t been allowed to teach since mid-January, but it’s been exhilarating (and terrifying) to watch our students do this work through Gaza solidarity encampments and protests. This is precisely what our students are doing–resisting the normative, settler colonial and white supremacist logics of our institutions and envisioning a world otherwise. I think there’s something very anthropological about that.

Alongside your academic work on India, and more recently on human-animal relationships, you have also been deeply engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy for many years, including engaging with colleagues from Palestine. What has been your experience combining teaching anthropology and doing activism on your campus, and beyond?

I started teaching about Palestine while at Mills. I continued that work at Muhlenberg, but it required a lot more care. While I learned quickly that Muhlenberg was a staunchly Zionist institution, it was not until I hosted a Palestinian speaker in my third year as an Assistant Professor, that I understood just how powerful the Zionist base of the college was. I invited the anthropologist Sa’ed Atshan to campus as part of a year-long lecture series I had the good fortune to organize. The backlash from administrators, faculty, and students (as well as alumni and donors) was intense. First, the college tried to cancel the event using “security concerns” as a justification. Then they tried to make me guarantee Atshan would not mention BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction). I refused to sanction his speech in any way. When these tactics from the administration failed, students affiliated with Hillel, who were also trained in Israeli propaganda through Hasbara Fellowships, attended the event in order to ask questions designed to undermine Atshan’s experience and expertise. This made it so that students with genuine questions, interested in actual engagement, were unable to ask questions. Since then, my goal on campus has been to carve out spaces where stories about Palestine, by Palestinians, can be learned from, heard, and engaged. This kind of situated-

ness emerges directly out of my anthropological education and training.

Despite the conservative atmosphere at Muhlenberg, I have had the great luck of teaching and learning from an incredible group of curious, engaged, and brave students over the past nine years. After I spent time in Palestine in 2018, I developed a class dedicated to studying the region and was able to teach it twice. The students who enrolled in this course helped me learn how to teach a class that is both taboo to teach and taboo to enroll in. These were life-changing experiences and for a while I was able to fly under the radar with a majority of my work. However, October 7th changed all that. In January 2024 I was placed on administrative leave and barred from the classroom. While I cannot yet speak directly about this ongoing investigation, the administration at my college has shown that they can and will bar faculty from campus if they do not like the material they are teaching. This sets a dangerous precedent. No educator should work under those conditions but I’m proud of the work I was able to do during the time I was there.

How do you think anthropologists, and anthropological perspectives, can help understand and explain the very strong resistance among political leaders and academic institutions in the US to allow critical debate informed by facts and scholarship on the Israel/Palestine question?

We anthropologists know a lot about power. We study it in the field, we read about it in our theory books, we encounter it in the institutions we are hired by. What we are seeing in Palestine is a decolonial movement and that decolonial movement is being met with the most brutal genocidal violence one can imagine from a settler colonial state, supported and funded by the United States, another settler state. It makes sense to me that the US is throwing all its weight behind Israel because unlike the war in Ukraine, supporting Palestine would be a very dangerous move, in terms of US interests. Palestinian liberation would be just the beginning. If Palestine were to be free, when Palestine IS free, the US, Canada and Australia will be forced to truly reckon with their own ongoing genocidal settler colonial project. The interests of those in positions of institutional power (government, universities, etc.) cannot afford to allow such a thing to come to be. In terms of higher ed, if we ever took “Land Back” seriously here on Turtle Island, we would have to account for the way colleges and universities have always been sites of extraction and land theft. I attended a land-grab university as an undergraduate, meaning it was created through the Morrill Act of 1862. Wealth here, whether through land, property, or money, has only been possible because of extraction, whether through settler colonial land theft or enslaved labor. No institution in this country is innocent. A liberated Palestine threatens to shine a light on this reality.

I believe my job as an anthropologist involves–very seriously–acknowledging the “power in the story” (to draw on Michel-Rolph Trouillot). What stories are we centering? Whose voices are we privileging? We have an obligation, through our training, to challenge and reject the Islamophobic, Orientalist, racist framings and tropes that strip Palestinians of the right to tell their own stories. As Israel very intentionally targets and murders Palestinian journalists

and carries out scholasticide in Gaza, the US aids in this project of silencing Palestinians and privileging Zionist narratives across our government, by our media, and in our academic institutions. As an anthropologist, I reject this by instead centering Palestinian perspectives and narratives and insisting that Palestinians be recognized as experts of their own experience. And then listening.

The joke in our discipline is that we have a reckoning every other decade (at least). Anthropologists are so anxious about the work we do, and a lot of the time this anxiety is well earned. We were once the “handmaidens of colonialism,” although many anthropologists have worked hard over the past fifty or so years to transform a discipline built on extraction into something new. As an example of this ongoing reckoning, over the past few years I’ve been quite disgruntled by the call to “decolonize anthropology,” as I don’t actually believe you can decolonize a colonial institution. What does it mean to decolonize a discipline? As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have taught us, “decolonization is not a metaphor.” Right now, we are seeing a very real and material movement of decolonization. I hope that every anthropologist who called for “decolonizing anthropology” (as well as everyone else) is actively invested in using their platform, as teachers and as scholars, to call for a free Palestine. What is our voice good for, if not for this? I have been so heartened to see faculty taking risks, speaking out, placing their bodies and their careers on the line because a genocide in Palestine is being carried out, in our name and with our tax dollars. But there’s still a lot of silence. Unfortunately, a lot of scholars who have built their careers through scholarship involving postcoloniality, decolonial movements, war and violence, medical anthropology, and gun violence (to name just a few subdisciplines) have been completely silent, or are only now speaking out in support of their students. These will be the same people who, in a few years time, organize special issues and AAA panels about this genocide. Right now, we are seeing the absolute best and absolute worst of what anthropology can be.

How does one in your view as a scholar and a teacher best negotiate the relationship between the critical scholarly search for what Weber called ‘inconvenient’ facts and perspectives, and one’s own moral/political commitments?

I guess I’m interested in asking, inconvenient for whom? If we are talking about inconvenient facts and perspectives for those in power, I’m all for using my research and publications as a space for challenging and undermining narratives of power. But as an anthropologist, I’m also invested in protecting the people and communities I work with. Following Audra Simpson, I do not believe everyone is entitled to every story. There is much power in silence, much power in refusal. Perhaps this is because my investment has never been in being an academic or a professor, my investment has never been in the institution that employs me. I have loved being a college professor but, regardless of what happens with my situation (and it does seem my days as a college professor are numbered), I will continue to teach and I will continue to write. The job of college professor was one way of doing that but it’s not the only way to do this work. My moral/political commitments have always been to those fighting for freedom, liberation, and justice. Institutions can sometimes be platforms from which to do this work, but they are not necessarily the best places and they will never help us get free.

“The Crisis of the Applied: Anthropology, Policy & Activism”

Shantanu Nevrekar

Doctoral

Candidate, Department of Anthropology

I came to anthropology from an undergraduate degree in economics and a master’s degree in development studies. My first impression of what made anthropology different was its healthy skepticism to the distinction between the ‘theoretical’ and the ‘applied.’ This division has been common to STEM disciplines and has become a part of economics as well. While the theoretical parts of these disciplines engage with concepts and questions that are deemed ‘universal’ or ‘abstract,’ the applied ones focus on ‘real-world’ questions. These approaches mainly differ in their purpose. Unlike theoretical research, applied areas of research in these disciplines are premised on their ability to prescribe solutions to real-world problems.

A majority of disciplines categorized under humanities and social sciences have rightly been skeptical of any easy distinction between ‘theoretical’ and ‘applied’ forms of research. This distinction is premised on an assumption that theory and knowledge can be easily ‘applied’ to social reality to present solutions. The long and troubled history of the attempts to do so is well-recorded, particularly by anthropologists. Many such ‘solutions’ might further exacerbate the problems they seek to tackle (Ferguson 1994; Li 2007). Anthropology is premised on a much more dialogic relationship between theory and empirical reality. To some extent, this is a reason why humanities and social sciences, particularly anthropology, yield themselves less strongly to prescriptions.

However, while often done with a healthy skepticism of power structures and their effects on people’s lives, the aversion of anthropologists towards prescribing solutions or engaging with public policy or mainstream politics can be counterproductive. The distancing from policy or mainstream politics has largely left this field open to disciplines like economics. It is true that economics has developed tools and methods that allow for aggregation of data at a scale that is attractive to policymakers and state actors. As many scholars have shown, the rise of economics has been premised on methods and concepts like national income accounting that make societies legible in languages suiting state and capitalist projects, particularly for colonial extraction (Mitchell 2002; Jakes 2020). Not falling into these schemes would not be a problem for anthropology if it just ended here.

An issue bigger than an inability to contribute to policy, however, is the outsourcing of activist commitments. Here, we encounter disciplines like social work, development studies, alongside an array of interdisciplinary and ‘professional’ social sciences programs that train their students in the nuts and bolts of professional activism. For instance, in India, the distinction between sociology and anthropology is much more blurred than in the United States, but the distinction of more ‘theoretical’ social sciences with professional programs like social work is long-standing and quite significant. The devaluation of applied research is parallel to the valorization of theory across social sciences. Gopal Guru (2002) describes the inequalities emerging from this in Indian social sciences as a pernicious divide between theoretical brahmins and empirical shudras. However, this is not just an Indian problem but a global one. By distancing themselves from more ‘applied’ concerns, which are primarily focused on improving social reality rather than just understanding it, social sciences like anthropology have methodologically impoverished themselves. When seen

Scholarship & Activism

in light of its emphasis on theory that emerges from a detailed empirical grounding, the devaluation and near-absence of an applied focus becomes jarring in anthropology. Even when the discipline has much to contribute to the world, anthropologists shy away from actually prescribing the path forward to both activists as well as policymakers.

All of this, however, does not mean that anthropologists are not politically savvy, or not activist enough. In fact, in engaging most centrally with ethnography, anthropologists have analyzed and articulated global power dynamics and histories with a detail that is unparalleled in other disciplines. However, activism and policymaking are fields and cultural repertoires with their own norms and languages, and anthropologists cannot pretend to be activists merely based on their commitments. The push to combine the theoretical and applied has often been simultaneous with collaborative knowledge practices. However, collaboration itself can’t be the only way anthropology visualizes its ability to contribute to policy, politics, and activism. The fact that collaboration is impracticable in many research projects is only one part of the problem. No one methodological tool can be a singular solution to make space for more ‘applied’ concerns in a discipline as vast as anthropology. What is needed is an institutionalized process that organically pushes our knowledge about the world into policy or activism in a way that also does justice to the global diversity of anthropological research.

The fact that anthropologists are aware of the political stakes in the world should not be a reason to stay away from the work of prescribing directions for policy and activist work, however murky and complex they be. Anthropologists might take temporary solace in the fact that, unlike the economists or political scientists, at least we are not contributing to active harm. However, this should not be a reason to be comfortable with being outside spaces like policy and activism that allow anthropologists to work towards undoing that harm. For many anthropologists who work in these spaces, it often comes at great costs to other professional and personal commitments. That should never have been the case. We don’t need to fall back into the simplistic divide between the theoretical and applied that STEM disciplines and economics make. Anthropology and other social sciences should work to make the ‘applied’ a more central part of their current pedagogy and training as it exists. Being taught within the same disciplinary space will also enable synergies and feedback between the theoretical and the applied which will benefit both of these approaches of working with society and culture.

It is not that anthropology has been obtuse or unresponsive to its ‘applied’ focus. In its long history, anthropologists were considered ‘experts’ in the study of culture, and this ‘expertise’ was as much bestowed by power as it was self-professed. This expertise was particularly valuable for colonial and postcolonial state formations in relation to their encounters with communities deemed ‘culturally different,’ both in Western and non-Western contexts. For instance, in North America, anthropology’s predominant focus (and gaze) was towards indigenous peoples, while in India this was on Adivasi and other tribal communities. In many ways, this focus on cultural difference continues to be strong today, even if its methods and assumptions have come under critique and reflection from the people who have been ‘studied’ as well as from anthropologists themselves. However, what follows after this critique of the anthropological writing about culture? The need to develop newer ways of more ‘applied’ research, particularly in activism and policy, is a need for this historical moment in the discipline.

References

Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Guru, Gopal. 2002. ‘How Egalitarian Are the Social Sciences in India?’ Economic and Political Weekly 37 (50): 5003–9. Jakes, Aaron G. 2020. Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The Will to Improve. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

“Reflections on Scholarship & Activism”

Adela Zhang

Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology

New to the discipline of anthropology, I once expressed to a professor some embarrassment at not being able to match my peers’ openness about their political commitments in class. In his awkward and aloof way, he replied that not everyone has to do politics in the same way. For some, it might be participating in marches, as many students did around Trump’s election, when this conversation took place. But for others, he said, politics might take the more discreet, indirect form of written scholarship. Not everyone had to have an activist disposition. Ethnographic scholarship is its own kind of political engagement, he assured me. I understood this explanation as both meant to assuage me and to rationalize his own politics-through-scholarship.

The claim that critique itself constitutes a political intervention responds to the accusation that critique isn’t political to begin with or, at least, isn’t sufficiently political. It resonates with an enduring tension between the relative safety of scholarship and the forms of exposure and risk taken on by scholars who “lay [their] body on the line” for their commitments (Goldstein 2014, Hale 2006, Osterweil 2013, Low and Merry 2010). Articulated through a separation of workings of the mind from the vulnerabilities of the body, this distinction is imbued with moral judgement. Take, for instance, my sense of shame at the possibility that my peers might perceive me as insufficiently political or, god forbid, conservative. Or the fact that scholars who are arrested while participating in political activity often command certain respect for having been exposed or in harm’s way. In this view, relative disdain is reserved for those who “write, but don’t act” while those who place their fleshy body “on the line” garner special awe. In this folk sense, academic scholarship as political practice is not just insufficient, but actively hypocritical or even complicit with the very systems of domination that anthropological scholarship critiques.

When the political issue at stake is directly connected to the object of study, this accusation gains further traction. Properly-done and morally sound research is meant to transform the researcher, involve them in their interlocutors’ political projects, and otherwise obligate them to participate in the problem-space they study. This reasoning presumes, of course, that the scholar does not already share the same political agenda as their interlocutors (Cook 2008).

How has the assumption that “theory” and “practice” are distinct (Hale 2006, 2008) shaped anthropology more broadly? Here I focus on one small expression of this structuring assumption: the existence of sub-fields or specialties like “applied anthropology,” “engaged anthropology,” “public anthropology,” and “activist anthropology” in the US. By turning a certain orientation towards anthropological work into a specialized and distinct field of scholarship, we have seemingly cordoned off these bodies of work, relegating them to different journals, departments, and professional organizations.

As a result of this separation, I only recently found that entire departments had been dedicated to training students in a more action-oriented anthropology, called “applied anthropology.” Had I not gone to visit one such program, I might have been inclined to dismiss them entirely, as a vulgar and excessively material expression of how logics of utility and marketability infiltrate intellectual endeavors.

Instead, I encountered what seemed to me to be a radical premise: that one’s research starts with a constituency to which it is accountable. As the “client,” the anthropologist’s interlocutors actively shape the scope of the research agenda and the questions asked. Their projects and intentions inform the project from its inception and they are the judge of its outcome. I cannot recall ever being instructed to intentionally account for the needs and aims of my interlocutors in my own training, in part because such research is often exploratory; I first had to conduct my research to know what political commitments would be expected of me. And calls to enumerate my research’s “broader impacts” treated such impacts as a fringe benefit, an afterthought rather than an organizing principle.

My intervention in the tension between scholarship as politics versus action as (better) politics is this: what might anthropology look like if it started with (rather than ended or grew into) the questions: For whom is research and to whom is it accountable? Although this move might not apply to all kinds of investigation, I invite us to be more explicit about how scholarship might constitute politics. Doing so will surely guide us to different kinds of projects, different kinds of findings, and a different kind of politics.

References

Goldstein, Daniel M. 2014. “Laying the Body on the Line: Activist Anthropology and the Deportation of the Undocumented.” American Anthropologist 116 (4): 839–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12155.

Hale, Charles R. 2006. “Activist Research v. Cultural Critique: Indigenous Land Rights and the Contradictions of Politically Engaged Anthropology.” Cultural Anthropology 21 (1): 96–120. https://doi.org/10.1525/ can.2006.21.1.96.

Low, Setha M., and Sally Engle Merry. 2010. “Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas: An Introduction to Supplement 2.” Current Anthropology 51 (S2): S203–26. https://doi.org/10.1086/653837.

McDonald, Charles A. 2013. “Rethinking Public Anthropology Through Epistemic Politics and Theoretical Practice: Supplemental Material.” Society for Cultural Anthropology, November. https://culanth.org/ fieldsights/rethinking-public-anthropology-through-epistemic-politics-and-theoretical-practice-supplemental-material.

“Reflections on Scholarship & Activism”

Ronald Chen Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology

A few years ago, when I was doing my PhD interview with an institution not named Stanford, a faculty interviewer asked me, “How will your research change the world?” I instinctively chuckled (protip: don’t laugh at your interviewer’s questions) and protested in my own head (but Weber’s lectures!—you choose between politics and science as a vocation). Like many liberal arts students, I too had earlier dreamed of changing the world. I had worked in nonprofits in India and done advocacy work for migrant workers. But my nerdy (purist?) training in anthropology and social theory taught me to separate “thinking” from “doing”—you pick one or the other, not both, and my applying to PhD programs signaled, at least to myself, that I had chosen.

Then there’s the more nuanced/complicated option of separating one’s research from one’s activism, or the question of activism directly related to one’s research versus activism elsewhere. For example, I teach/ volunteer in a local Bay Area prison, and am involved in criminal justice reform, but my research is several thousand miles away in Jordan. (But to muddy the waters further: I sometimes am tempted to write about the incarcerated individuals I’ve come to know, because they too have stories worth telling, and about whom research is worth doing.)

Some of my research today is about human rights, a field bustling with anthropologists but dominated by lawyers. And I often find myself comparing between the two disciplines. Anthropologists, usually at least somewhat proficient in local languages, and with a decent wealth of time spent in-country, revel in nuance, traffic in exception, and tend to be (overly?) cautious. Critiques of human rights are aplenty, what with relativism and anti-relativism and anti-anti-relativism. Lawyers, meanwhile, with their eyes on the prize, turn complicated situations into seamless “cases”—into “causes of action” and legal claims. No language proficiency? No problem. What matters is knowing the right laws, the right fora, the right legal theories.

Jokes/critiques of international law—whether it is “real” or enforceable—aside, national law, as in the “law of the land” in respective countries, works in vindicating victims and granting remedies. There’s a separate question here, about whether the “master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house,” but for garden-variety crimes and human rights violations, the law can work. Boutique law firms in this country have participated in habeas corpus litigation on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainees, pro bono, because it can boost their street cred. To be sure, this can create unintended (harmful) consequences, but from some vantage points, the presence of human rights lawyers is almost self-evident, whereas the presence of anthropologists can somewhat be a question mark.

My research in Jordan touches on administrative/preventative detention, women’s rights, and “honor” crimes. If there’s a (credible?) threat of someone being a victim of an honor crime, a governor can exercise his (almost invariably a he) power to imprison her (almost invariably a she), ostensibly in the name of her protection but in effect punishing the victim. Honor crimes do happen, in the double digits yearly, so the threat is real if stochastic. Talk about a catch-22 situation. I work with remarkable people, and I hear all sorts of heartbreaking stories about injustice but also the remarkable resilience and strength people have in the face of oppression. My Jordanian friends always ask: What do I want to do with all this knowledge/ language proficiency/ stories? I certainly want to do scholarship that matters, and not “just” gather empirical “data” in service of (generating) theory. I’m also aware of the myth of “neutrality”—that some scholarship is irreducibly political, and choosing what to study is itself an ethical decision. But what sort of material change is possible? Am I trying to vindicate the truth? Speak truth to power? Give voice to the voiceless?

I don’t know. But I’ll read more books, study more Arabic, talk to more people. Maybe the next theory I read or person I talk with will give me some clues…

“The Treason of Intellect”

Srihari Nageswaran

Undergraduate Major, Department of Anthropology

Perhaps the most harrowing lesson one could learn as an undergraduate is that there is no amount of knowledge that can protect anyone from the violence and disorder of the real world. Foresight is the domain of false prophets, the best of which arc toward refined but ultimately incomplete approximations of reality. Optimism and pessimism mimic the other’s selective attention and naivety, distinguished only by clashing attitudes in the face of rejection. Intuition appears as the physical expression of prematurely discarded memories and their attendant anxieties, rational or otherwise. It is true that our inability to avert what we cannot anticipate alone justifies our predilection for prediction, but I doubt that it can excuse a self-congratulatory attitude in the face of persistent suffering. So I suppose my first mistake was believing that I would rather be correct about horrible things than free from them. I had implicitly decided freedom to be either deceptive or impalpable, an idea to be realized in fantasy or utopia or perhaps the upward mobility that a Stanford education would provide me, but one that was ultimately extraneous to the life I expected to live.

It is a terrible relief to read defeat in the endeavor to actualize freedom as merely a failure of preparation or competence. We grasp the fiction of human agency like a fistful of sand, routinely baffling ourselves as we witness it escape the more firmly we hold onto it. Or perhaps the opposite is true: that upon recognizing it will escape, we snatch at whatever is left so that we can name ourselves as victors acting in full command. So we pretend that an awareness of God will save us from hellfire; that knowledge of and acquiescence to the law will protect us from arrest and imprisonment; that the study of history prevents its reprise in greater volume and vituperation. We self-critique and navel gaze, individuate as pathology evidence of societal decline, seek in therapy what we lack in friendship, and prostrate ourselves before the moral arbiters we assume in the dictatorship of a solitary voice. Because anybody could be the hero of an autobiography, the uncontested virtue of idly contemplating suffering and the moral rewards we bestow upon ourselves and others like us for the performance of such contemplation will always accrue more praise and more glamor than the pursuit of something greater than ourselves without fear. In this Gnostic scheme, we privilege the self-isolated bystander who lives to tell the tale of his self-sacrificial, peaceable and so-innocently out-of-touch martyr and find in his monastic rumination upon the latter some ineffable enlightenment and not cowardice. It is far too bad that the perfect victim upon whom we base our politics will never be able to escape the parable that culminates in her annihilation; doing so would rupture the fourth wall of text, misleading language and recursive discourse that seals her fate from ours just as much as it bars us from appreciating her beyond moral instruction. I suppose this is why we find our heroes in malnourished children, impoverished refugees, and tortured or murdered writers, all of whom perhaps deserve our collective grief just as much as those for whom a recourse to self-defense is less an error of political tact than the foreseeable consequence of their relentless killing being subject to the political whim of a disaffected majority. If we so eagerly equate heroism to martyrdom and moral virtue to powerlessness, we would be disingenuous to not see in every witness an accomplice to murder.

This is not at all to argue we abnegate didacticism and the political necessity of honoring the memories and stories of our forebears. By now we are surely disinterested in the hoax of impartial knowledge. I certainly also don’t want to suggest a politics of moral guilt as more desirable than one of actionable mourning—it is quite possible to grieve strangers in a healthy society, and it is equally solipsistic to blame yourself for all the problems of the world as it is to believe you are just so insignificant that no action you take can carry any value, which leaves egoistic hedonism without moral qualms. We cannot honestly say we are moved if we stand still. While the technologists, politicians, and financiers make a canvas of the world, the artists and the intellectuals remake the world on a canvas and govern only the society they write of in theory. Real life continues unmoored, unabated by stillborn ideals of an immaculate revolution. They both

share an equal distance from reality—one in practice, the other in thought—but only the second moralizes this luxury. As graduate students and service workers organize for fair wages and stronger protections, as students on federal financial aid receive felonies (and thus tacit expulsion) for nonviolent civic engagement, as universities uphold military investments and academic partnerships in apartheid regimes both then and now, it is questionable how much the metaphor of the ivory tower removed from the problems of the world has exhausted its utility.

And for all the risks that demonstrations of any kind seem to implicate at the hands of trigger-happy law enforcement and unrestrained counterprotestors, it is worthwhile to champion the salvation we find only in the camaraderie of other people, in being one among a crowd, among those tangles of foot traffic and strained voices collapsed into the collective, the sweet cacophony of its impromptu call-and-response and its makeshift rhythm, the warmth of students providing sustenance to one another and learning together, those secular rituals of a bruised but somehow unbroken public sphere. The absolute freedom of the protest chant is that you are perfectly unnecessary and thus entirely free to participate or not participate, but you choose to do so anyways, because it is perhaps only by the dissolution of our egos that we can be in fellowship with one another, that we can approach the universal aspirations implicit to the etymology of that once hallowed word for an institution of higher education. We deceive ourselves in conflating mob mentality with the wisdom of the masses and believing we could learn anything of substance in isolation. So I ask not that we shun a retreat to intellect but that we do not delimit ours so haphazardly. Productive intellectual activity culminates not in publication and insular recognition but in service of humankind, originating from and reproduced among a popular audience to guide political action. The toil involved in the realization of freedom is less an excuse to dispose of it altogether than to reach as closely for it as possible and find fulfillment in the process.

I sometimes worry that I spent my college days more concerned with how to cite the right scholars and use the right words to market my ideas than how to confidently think for myself and argue before deaf ears and lapsed attention; that I learned to articulate with greater dexterity if not verbosity all the varied colors and shades of nothing in particular. For better or for worse, the comical waste my life and its constituent privileges may comprise was a series of improvised decisions I made in anticipation of fate’s rescue. When that train never came, I was left to stare blankly at my own two feet. I am lucky to have only myself to blame. No blueprint can map a life unlived; I am hopeful that my learning has just begun.

“Religious Activism as Collective Memory: The Indonesian Diaspora in ‘the Dreamland’ of the United States”

Amanah Nurish

Visiting Scholar Department of Anthropology

While working on a Fulbright research project at Stanford’s Anthropology Department, I took several field trips across the United States, particularly to see how the Indonesian diaspora lives. I’d like to begin this framework with Peter Berger’s “Sacred Canopy” theory, which states that every group of people create their world in order to understand themselves and their identity, as well as to develop their knowledge through religious communities.

Religious communities have recently emerged as a unique and intriguing phenomenon in a secular country such as America, which has a long history of democracy, freedom of thought, and expression. Despite being a secular country, America is “home” to all religious communities of diaspora from different nations who migrate to this melting pot country. The Indonesian diaspora shapes how religious activism contributes to the “imagination” of a community in a “foreign” country where they migrate, live, and transmit from generation to generation.

As I am concerned about the continuous settlement of the Indonesian diaspora in America, I visited several areas across the West and East Coast regions. Two distinct geographies reflect social, cultural, economic, and religious perspectives within the Indonesian diaspora communities.

Social Landscape of the Indonesian Diaspora

The Indonesian diaspora population in the United States is estimated to be between 150 and 200 thousand people, which is small compared to other Asian countries. Like the history of immigrants from other countries, the Indonesian diaspora came to America with the imagination of “the dreamland” to change fortune and build the romance of a better life. A lucrative job that comes with a nice house, a luxury car, getting pensions in dollars, or social and economic security is also one of the dreams. This is an ideal life amidst the alluring temptations of capitalism. They traveled thousands of miles to America, bringing with them a wealth of memories from their hometown of Indonesian land, as well as social and religious spirits.

Among the Indonesian diaspora living in America, social groups are classified into several categories. The first is a social group from upper-middle-class individuals who have economic capital and have moved to America to work. Second, the middle-class Indonesian diaspora social group, which has knowledge capital and comes to America to study and then work and live permanently. Third, there are Indonesian diaspora social groups that travel to work as laborers, and they are not well-educated people or professional workers. Fourth, there is a social group of the Indonesian diaspora, which has moved to America as a result of the political situation and security concerns, and they are asylum seekers. Political reform and the fall of Suharto’s regime in 1998 contributed to a wave of Indonesian migrants seeking asylum in America, particularly Indonesian Chinese ethnic groups.

Religious Communities, Cultural Expressions, and Economic Networks

Even though Indonesia is a Muslim-majority country, there are more Indonesian diaspora churches in America than mosques. In America, there are at least 47 churches serving the Indonesian diaspora. Statistically, the Indonesian Muslim diaspora is more concentrated in Pennsylvania, particularly in Philadelphia. It is well known that although Islam is a minority religion in America, a survey conducted by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) in Dearborn, Michigan, found that the number of mosques in the United States rose to 2,769 in 2023, up from 2,106 in 2010. Among them are the Indonesian diaspora’s mosques in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Virginia, Los Angeles, etc. One of the most visible examples of Indonesian diaspora Islamic and Christian com -

munities is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a historic city, Philadelphia is a popular destination for the Indonesian diaspora. In addition to its geographical proximity to New York, the access to social and cultural capital built by the Indonesian diaspora religious communities entices travelers to settle in this historical city, especially after the 1998 Indonesian reform movements. Furthermore, during the 1998 reform occurrences, the Indonesian diaspora who sought asylum in America and settled in this city were also victims of the Poso, Aceh, and Maluku’s armed conflicts. At least two generations of Indonesians have settled in this city.

For the Indonesian diaspora culture, religious communities are formed not only for worship but also to foster social relations and cultural expressions, as well as to establish economic network among fellows of this religious community members. They support each other in many different types of businesses that provide food and daily necessities to the Indonesian diaspora communities. Food and spices that are difficult to obtain in America will be imported and distributed for the business among the Indonesian diaspora communities. In this setting, religious and economic action are intricately intertwined, motivating the Indonesian diaspora to participate in religious and social organizations and activities that promote economic networks.

Religious Activism and Collective Memory

In addition to Philadelphia, the Indonesian diaspora community in California, particularly San Francisco and San Jose, has a distinctive story. Some of the Indonesian diaspora that I met in California were middle-class Muslims who participated in Sufi religious communities. In contrast to the Indonesian Muslim diaspora in Philadelphia, which already has mosques with Indonesian culture, the Indonesian Muslim diaspora in San Francisco and San Jose is partially linked with the Sufi community, which is influenced by Islam with Turkish and South Asian characteristics. The Indonesian Muslim diaspora in this area is largely middle class, with good employment opportunities and higher education. Although their numbers are not as large as those in Philadelphia, they frequently have American partners and convert to Islam. Among Muslim communities that are intellectual, like the ones I met in San Francisco and San Jose, Sufi Islam is more common.

Religion, on the other hand, continues to be a significant aspect for the Indonesian diaspora living and working in America. They are distant from their hometown where they were born and grew up with complex memories of their social environment and extended family. Religious activism is a feature of the Indonesian diaspora in America because it helps members of this group to their memories of their hometown through the social connections that they shape. During field trips within the Indonesian Muslim diaspora community, mosques, and religious groups were described as efforts to foster social connection rather than religious expansion.

A feature of their religious activist group, in addition to social and religious pursuits, is aiding fellow diaspora members going through financial difficulties or emergencies. Furthermore, religious ceremony through food is the most appealing factor for the Indonesian diaspora communities. As an agricultural country colonized by the Dutch via the spice route, the Indonesian diaspora in America incorporates Indonesian culinary traditions into their community and religious activities. Local foods, arts, and cultural activities are some of the reasons why the Indonesian diaspora engages in religious communities. The Indonesian diaspora in America remains connected to share memories of their homeland through various feasts, prayers, rituals, and social gatherings. My conclusion is that they need to use religious activism to preserve the dreamland fantasy and to, at least, continue to thrive after acknowledging that American society is dealing with several social, cultural, political, and economic issues in the daily life.

Interviews

A Conversation With Marie E lizabeth Grávalos

Postdoctural Scholar, Department of Anthropology

Dr. Grávalos is an anthropological archaeologist with over a decade of fieldwork and lab experience. Located at the intersection of materiality, landscape, and craft production, her research centers on the politics and sociality of making and using ceramic and textile objects. Dr. Grávalos is interested in how artisans embody, share, and contest technological and landscape knowledge across generations and between communities. Most recently, her work has focused on Casma potters on Peru’s north coast (ca. 700-1440 CE) and Recuay artisans (100-700 CE) in Peru’s north highlands.

Please tell me about the projects you are currently working on.

My research examines the intersections of landscape, politics, and craft production in the Andean pre-Hispanic past. My work looks at the ways in which technological and landscape knowledge is shared among artisans (weavers and potters) as a lens on community formation, political economy, and human-environment relationships. This focus bridges humanities and science-based approaches to consider how materiality—the feel, material qualities, and affective character of objects and landscapes—actively co-constitutes and transforms the human experience, impacting sociopolitical organization, economies, and social identities. My work asks, what are the political affordances of specific materials and landscapes? And what frameworks can we apply in our analysis and interpretation of static archaeological remains to better convey the relational dynamics of humans and landscapes? For the study of pottery, I apply archaeological science techniques (elemental analyses, thin section petrography) to understand the materials (e.g., clay, temper) that people used to create ceramic vessels, and where in the landscape they may have obtained these materials.

The archaeological narratives that I write are informed by decolonial feminist scholarship, and I attempt to integrate Indigenous epistemologies into Western archaeological ways of knowing through community collaborative work. I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with Indigenous communities in Peru since 2009, mostly in the north highlands (Ancash Department). Much of what I do is animated by this community-collaborative work. In the Andes, making pottery or weaving is very much knowing the landscape, and this has often led me to participate in digging up clay or herding animals with my collaborators. Inspired by Sonya Atalay’s concept of “braiding knowledge,” this summer, a colleague and I are taking a microscope to the comunidad campesina of Hualcayán, where we have worked for more than a decade. This will enable archaeological science to occur in situ. Rather than exporting samples to be studied in isolation in a faraway lab, having a microscope on site will enable me to work more closely with stakeholders. It will also facilitate capacity building for community members and mentorship of local university students. I’m very much looking forward to what I will learn this summer with my collaborators.

What inspired you to work on these projects?

I am Mexican-American but grew up in the rural Midwest far away from the rest of my extended family on the US-Mexico border. I think because of this distance, I always knew that I wanted to work in a field that would enable me to speak Spanish and be immersed in Latin American culture. I also had many artistic endeavors growing up, such as painting and drawing, and for a while, wanted to be an art historian focused on pre-Hispanic Mexican art. However, as an undergraduate I took a class on Andean archaeology, which led me to conduct archaeological fieldwork in Peru, and I haven’t looked back since! It is easy to love working in Peru because the mountainous landscape and the food are incredible; most importantly, however, I love working with local folks and am grateful to be welcomed into the rural communities with whom I collaborate. I also just love art and making art (these days I am mostly a sewist and a quilter!), so it feels right that I continue to be engaged in the arts and focus my research on studying making practices and their entanglement with politics in the deep past.

What are some of the challenges you face with the research you do?

Archaeological research in Peru is complex for various reasons, but I think the biggest challenge I encounter is ensuring that contemporary communities have access to, and are empowered to care for their own cultural heritage. Unfortunately, because of a permitting process required by Peru’s Ministry of Culture, foreign archaeologists have more say over the treatment of tangible cultural heritage than descendant communities. All archaeological remains are legal patrimony of the Peruvian state. Very often, archaeological sites are excavated, their remains cleaned and studied, and then packed up for long-term curation in a storage facility run by the Ministry of Culture without involvement from local Indigenous groups. This Indigenous disenfranchisement is continued when archaeologists do not proactively and continuously collaborate with descendant communities. Because of the legal parameters of how archaeological sites and artifacts are handled in Peru, this means that archaeologists must be creative when it comes to making research truly collaborative, and we must ensure that any archaeological intervention actually meets the needs and wants of contemporary groups.

Beth with team members from the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica de Jecosh (Jecosh Archaeological Research Project) in Ancash, Peru

What are some things you hope to do at Stanford University?

I am very much looking forward to hosting a Wenner-Gren funded workshop in October 2024 at the Archaeology Center, titled, “Political Geologies Past and Present: Knowledge, Ontology, and Affect.” For this workshop, I am convening 11 archaeologists from around the world to discuss how archaeologists grapple with landscape, earthly materials, and politics. Our goal is to consider how this relatively recent body of literature coming out of Geography, Philosophy, and Cultural Anthropology, coined “political geology,” can be of use to archaeologists, and what archaeologists might have to offer this theoretical conversation.

I’m also excited to continue learning from and collaborating with my colleagues and students in the Anthropology Department and the Archaeology Center, all of whom are incredibly supportive and engaging!

Beth collecting clay samples from the Callejón de Huaylas valley (Ancash, Peru)

I understand you taught a course this year. What do you find most exciting about your experience teaching at Stanford?

I was fortunate to teach Archaeological Methods during Winter Quarter 2024, which is a required course for the undergraduate major in archaeology. I loved teaching this class because it gave me the opportunity to work hands-on with students. We visited the Stanford University Archaeology Collections (SUAC) twice—first to work with historic glass bottles and buttons excavated on Stanford lands, and a second time to learn about ceramic attribute analysis using a teaching collection from Greece. We also utilized microscopes in the Archaeology Center, and even spent a class session outside one day to practice setting up excavation units.

I have found that many archaeology and anthropology students are very social justice-oriented they care deeply about the ethics of archaeological research and how we can decolonize the field of archaeology. This makes teaching so much fun! In Archaeological Methods, we constantly talked about the intersection of theory and method, and how all methods carry ethical and theoretical frames that must be contended with. Having these conversations with students was such a joy!

Can you tell us what else you are excited to teach while at Stanford?

I’m looking forward to teaching more classes on the intersections of theory and method, as well as area studies courses focused on the Andes. For instance, I am currently developing two courses, one of which I will teach next year. The first will consider the toolkit and theoretical framing of ceramic analysis in archaeology, titled “Theory and Method in Ceramic Analysis”. The second course is titled, “Making and Knowing in the Andes”, which would be a hands-on course in which we study the craft and art-making practices of Andean peoples past and present. In this latter course, I envision us spending time practicing Andean art-making techniques, such as how to spin fiber into yarn or maybe even trying our hand at creating natural dyes!

Interviews

A Conversation With Ioanida Coustache

Assistant Professor, Department of Music

Dr. Ioanida Costache is a Romani violinist, video/audio artist, and scholar. She is an assistant professor of Ethnomusicology at Stanford University. Her research traces the legacies of Romani historical trauma—as well as the feminist and de-colonial critiques of the present— inscribed in Romani music, sound, and art.

Could you tell us a bit about your latest book project, Hearing Romani-ness?

The central question animating my current book project Hearing Romani-ness is this: If listening is a primary way of acknowledging subject formations, can we hear the Roma? The book traces the role sound plays in shaping what I am calling a markedly Romani “sonic-subjectivity.” I look at how Romani sonic expression archives the “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down”-ness of Romani subjectivity (to use José Esteban Muñoz’s phrase) through the transcription of suffering into sound. The work centers Romani intracommunity performance practices, such as funeral music, prison songs, and cântece de jale (songs of sorrow) detailing how Romani musicians carve out spaces to process Romani abjection through the performance of private repertoires that were not recorded in official archives or enveloped into mainstream culture industries.

I use my work with Romanian-Roma to explore both what sound can teach us about how bodies are racialized, and how sound can stand in for and push back against exclusionary historiographies. I trace how the legacy of Romani abjection—enslavement, genocide, and ongoing discrimination—inflects a broad range of sonic practices, including vernacular music of the 20th century, contemporary Romani feminist performance, and non-musical Romani soundings. My scholarship contends with how Romani subjects have dealt with their interpellation as racialized subjects within the European space, and particularly how they have used music and performance to do so.

In the book, I’m interested in theorizing the possibilities that open up in the moment of performance itself as a temporary suspension of normative and prescribed experiences subjectification. Performance acts as a kind of time and space in which “being Otherwise” is possible—a third space of subject formation that exists beyond the subjectification of post-Enlightenment modernity, and various matrices of power. It is a space that allows racialized people to exist in ways other than their persecution, negative interpellations, and the after-effects of trauma—a space antithetical to “scenes of subjection” (Saidiya Hartman 1997). By listening

beyond the silences of the archive and unravelling the affective song-story tightly bound to this music, my hope is that Hearing Romani-ness constructs an alternate story about Romani life, in which a history of Romani feeling and the subjectivity there ensconced becomes audible.

How does your work in ethnomusicology intersect with anthropology?

In terms of disciplinary genealogies ethnomusicology has, since its inception, been closely linked to anthropology. Ethnomusicology has both run parallel to and diverged from discourses in cultural anthropology from the early days of comparative musicology, in the 1950s when the Jaap Kunst affixed the “ethno-”prefix in the mid-20th century through today when interdisciplinarity reigns. Personally, I have always found a sense of kinship in the discipline of anthropology, not only in light of the most obvious shared features of ethnographic methods but also because of the kinds of questions we ask and the theoretical apparatuses we use. My own project utilizes a plural methodological framework. It is rooted in twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival work in Romania, which amounts to: dozens of interviews with people from heterogeneous backgrounds, as well as personal archives of newspaper clippings, photographs, programs, liner notes, advertisements, archived television and radio transmissions, and national and folkloric archival materials. It relies on participant-observation, through which I have made audio-visual recordings and analyses of live musical performances—rituals, weddings, concerts, and baptisms. And it is informed by my own lessons and music-making with the celebrated Romani violinist Nicolae Ciotoi (‘Nicu’), with whom I have been working since 2013. Now that my colleague and fellow ethnomusicologist Dr. Denise Gill (see Volume 16 of this newsletter for an interview with Dr. Gill) and I are both official affiliates of the Stanford Department of Anthropology, I look forward to exploring the intersections of our disciplines through deep engagement with the Stanford Anthropology community.

What are some of the challenges you face with

the research

you do?

One of the greatest challenges I have confronted is silence. The silencing of histories and of soundings, the historiographic silences and the archival dispossession of Romani people, all of which are the results of marginalization, genocide, erasure, censorship, forced assimilation and other acts of State violence that served to homogenously define the imagined borders of the body politic within nation-building projects across Europe. These processes leave Roma untethered to the machinations of history-writing and “modernity.” My main question tracing the intersections of racialization and sound requires tools and strategies of inference as a heuristic to overcome a vast lack of historical and even ethnographic material in light of this kind of silencing and dispossession. Given the loss, lack, mutedness, and distortion, in some ways the project is as much about silence as it is about sounding. In order to carry out what I propose to do in the book—which is to lay out an interpretive and analytic vocabulary for learning to listen for the Roma—I had to search for Romani subjectivities. During 18 months of fieldwork in Romania I did just that in State archives, in the body, in improvised song, in poetry anthologies, and on vinyl records. In places where I would expect to see, hear, sense, and apprehend Romani-ness, I sometimes found noth -

ing. Silence bled into my ethnographic encounters, too. Romani embodied memory mirrored the silences of the archive as musicians would recall the existence of songs sung by earlier generations on topics of enslavement and genocide but couldn’t recall the songs themselves. These silences have been as instructive for understanding the interpellation of Romani life into Romanian society as the songs, documents, and records.

The other blockage I run up against in conducting this work is somewhat more farflung. As a Romani woman “working on/with/in” Romani communities during fieldwork, I found myself asking questions about the colonialist legacies of knowledge production, political and social hierarchies, power relations, and epistemic extractionism all of which play a role in ethnographic endeavors. I hope that as a discipline we’ve moved beyond the practice of “‘mining’ communities for cultural [or musical] gems,” (in Beverley Diamond’s words) but I’m interested still in interrogating the infrastructures of knowledge production more broadly. Questions I’ve been turning over in my head for some years now include: How can I eschew a parasitic relationship between myself and research collaborators who in some cases are my family? What is the relationship between the liberatory practices and artistry I study and the output of my academic endeavors? Is it one of translation? Is there a way to deconstruct, re-make, and re-imagine the process of knowledge production and de-hierarchize it? I’m grateful to be able to think through these sticky questions across ethnomusicology and anthropology— most imminently in a roundtable for the Society of Ethnomusicology on ethnographic writing and knowledge production in which we’ll examine how the figure of the liberal subject–an autonomous, rational, and coherent individual (Povinelli 2016, Mahmood 2005)–and the logics of argumentation accompanying it uphold extractivist, colonialist relations foundational to our disciplinary histories.

What do you find most exciting about what your students in ethnomusicology are doing right now?

The intellectual community forged by the graduate students at Stanford has been, hands down, the greatest gift of my scholarly career to date. Learning from and together with them in dialogic, collaborative, and dynamic mode has served my own work and research in unquantifiable ways. I won’t rehearse the fascinating research projects of each of the PhD students in ethnomusicology, as my colleague Dr. Denise Gill gave a comprehensive overview of their persons and their projects in the previous edition of the Newsletter, but I will simply say that they are wonderful thinkers and people with whom I am lucky to learn.

A Conversation With Amanah Nurish

Visiting Scholar

Department of Anthropology

Dr. Amanah Nurish is the first Indonesian anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology–Stanford University as a Fulbright visiting scholar. Her Educational background in philosophy of religion, master’s and doctoral degrees focus on religious anthropology, particularly on the Baha’i religious movement in Southeast Asia. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Indonesia. She teaches anthropological issues at strategic and global studies schools for graduate students working in Indonesian ministries, professional workers, journalists, activists, practitioners, and academics. She is referred to as “the generation after a half-century of Clifford Geertz.” She revisited and published Geertz’s “Religion of Java” study. She was selected as an Indonesia Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology. She is working on a project to develop academic discourse on religious populism and transnational movements that have led to identity politics as a new landscape in Indonesia. Currently, Indonesian scholars are still extremely rare, particularly in the social humanities program. When she first arrived on this campus, she realized she was, and still is, the only and first Indonesian anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She received a great chance to introduce Indonesian studies at Stanford University.

Please tell me about your current research projects and what inspired these projects?

I am currently conducting research on Islamic movements and political trajectory in Indonesia. As the world’s largest Muslim population, Indonesia’s Islamic movement has played an important role in the history of democracy and politics. The purpose of this research is to examine how the Islamic movement in Indonesia is shifting or changing, particularly prior to and following the 2024 election. Indonesia has recently elected a new model of government leadership. However, political democracy in Indonesia is quite dynamic in the last decades. This demonstrates a significant increase throughout political awareness and participation from Islamic organizations in their political movement. Islamic movements have become more popular particularly among urban and middle-class Muslims since post-reformation in 1998. They participate actively in a number of political, social, educational, and economic movements. The Islamic movement today is no longer only a political issue; it has also evolved into a popular cultural trend in Indonesia. This can be linked to the rise of music, fashion, and even the hijrah movement in middle-class urban communities. However, the Islamic movement is also closely associated with the images of popular political figures among Indonesia’s young generation.

What

are some of the challenges you face with the research you do?

Some of the technical challenges I faced were related to the limited number of literature sources on Indonesian studies at Stanford University. Even though Indonesian studies are still limited, this is a good opportunity for me to continue exchanging ideas about different studies, both with colleagues in the Department of Anthropology and colleagues from other departments. Because of the difficulty that there are still very few literary sources about Indonesian studies at Stanford, I frequently visit communities of Indonesian diaspora members in different states and cities from the West to the East Coast of America. From here, I was able to obtain information and data that were previously unexpected from field research. Because of the challenge of the lack of manuscripts in the Stanford library, I was able to meet many different kinds of communities and travel extensively while working on my Fulbright project at Stanford, which is why anthropological research requires going to the field and meeting with communities.

Even though I had to continue managing work in America and teaching students in Indonesia virtually, I felt productive while working on research projects and academic work at Stanford. On the other hand, I felt like time was passing by very quickly. Time management is extremely important in my schedule; in fact, I frequently have to wake up early in the morning, around 2 or 4 a.m., to teach Indonesian students online. Fortunately, I remained healthy and survived, allowing me to focus on my Stanford research project. I have completed two to three draft articles while working on research projects here, and one of them was accepted by a respectable Indonesian journal in March 2024.

Can you please tell us what are some things you have done during your time here and what are some things you hope to accomplish with the time you have remaining?

In addition to teaching and researching, I managed conferences and seminars for public academic events. I was invited and chosen to be one of six Fulbright scholars from various scientific fields who spoke at a climate change conference held from April 24–27 at Colorado State University. The Fulbright NYC team organized this event, which reached scholars from all over the world. It is an honor for me to be the only anthropologist in this forum who presented environmental issues, belief systems, and indigenous peoples’ resilience in Southeast Asian communities, particularly Indonesia.

In addition to the Fulbright forum, I delivered an academic lecture on “Democracy and Populism in Indonesia” at Stanford’s Abbasi Program on May 20. I also had the opportunity to go on field trips to several cities on the East Coast with Indonesian diaspora communities, particularly New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., which were important for my research project. In the future, I hope to expand the academic networks and communities for collaborative research projects and continue to publish more academic manuscripts. It appears that there are only three things to consider: expanding academic networks, conducting research innovations, and publishing books or articles for academic contribution to anthropological studies.

A Conversation With Emma Shaw Crane

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology

I research and teach about race, sub/urban environment, and U.S. empire, and am currently Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at Loyola Marymount University. My writing has appeared in Environment and Planning D, Public Culture, and Antipode. I received a PhD in American Studies from New York University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University. My current book project asks how imperial violence is reproduced in the U.S. suburb. The book moves across three linked sites in Homestead, Florida: a military base, a detention camp for migrant children, and the political organizations of Indigenous Maya migrant workers. In 2023, my manuscript was selected for the Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century Series at the University of California Press. My next project turns to post-conflict urbanization and environmental repair in peripheral neighborhoods of Bogotá, and draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with former guerrilla combatants in Colombia’s civil war.

Tell us about your educational background and academic journey so far?

I did my undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley, and designed my own major across urban studies, geography, and ethnic and African American studies. I grew up in an agricultural suburb of the North Bay Area, a place sustained by Indigenous migrant workers primarily from southern Mexico, and in San Cristóbal de las Casas, a colonial city in Chiapas, Mexico. My interdisciplinary undergraduate degree at Berkeley, which I named “Race, Gender, and Political Economy,” was an attempt to make sense of the racialized violence that structures these places I grew up in.

My introduction to anthropology came after college, as a Fulbright scholar to the National University of Colombia in Bogotá. In Bogotá, I studied with the anthropologist César Abadía Barrero and joined the Critical Medical Anthropology Group, which introduced me to a militantly engaged anthropology, part of a long tradition of Marxian social science at the National University. I was thinking about trying to go to medical school, and in Bogotá, I joined a big citywide study (led by César) of Colombia’s newly privatized healthcare system. As part of that project, I worked with the anthropologist Camilo Ruiz conducting interviews with people living with HIV and struggling to access antiretroviral medication in the restructured healthcare system. Many of the people we interviewed were former combatants (guerrillas, paramilitaries, or soldiers) in Colombia’s civil war and their stories of illness were also war stories. Our questions about health and chronicity became questions about U.S.-backed counterinsurgency and forced displacement to Bogotá’s urban peripheries, and these questions have shaped my work since.

When I returned from Bogotá, I went back to UC Berkeley to work with Ananya Roy, who was my undergraduate mentor and introduced me to postcolonial and feminist urban studies. Ananya invited me to work with her to organize a conference and edited volume titled Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South. The conference and then book brought together anthropologists and geographers of development and militarism in what is glossed as the “Global South” and historians and sociologists of poverty and policing in the North Atlantic. With Ananya and Stuart Schrader, a historian of policing, I worked on a project tracking the relationship between histories of policing and urban renewal in Oakland in the 1960s and U.S. counterinsurgency in Vietnam. This project introduced me to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, and I applied to graduate school and went to New York University’s American Studies PhD program to study with the scholar of U.S. empire and policing Nikhil Pal Singh.

I arrived at NYU the same year as Julie Livingston joined the faculty (one of the luckiest things that has ever happened to me!) and Julie became my advisor and dissertation committee chair. I chose American Studies because I wanted a program organized around the transnational study of race, colonialism, and indigeneity, and working with Julie, who is a medical and environmental anthropologist, allowed me to center racialization and U.S. empire while becoming an ethnographer and developing my interest in embodiment and environment.

Could you tell us about your current work and what you’re thinking and writing about right now? What inspires your current research?

I am working on my first book, an ethnography of a southern suburb of Miami called Homestead. The book moves across three linked sites: a military base, a detention camp for migrant children surrounded by toxic Superfund sites, and the political organizations of Indigenous Maya agricultural workers, who are migrants from Guatemala. Very broadly, the book asks how war produces and organizes the environment—sometimes in ways that we might expect (Superfund sites contaminated with toxic debris) and sometimes in ways that are not as obvious (municipal planning processes that leverage environmental hazard to protect the military base). I argue that through these processes, Maya migrants are exposed to environmental harm and the U.S. military project is reproduced and extended in this ostensibly peaceful suburb.

The article that I am currently working on is about sound as an environmental trace of war. The military base in Homestead flies F-16 fighter jets, and every few hours the detention camp and the suburbs that surround the base reverberate with the sound of the jets taking off or landing. During the almost two years that I spent doing fieldwork in Homestead, the jets were always in the background, interrupting interview audio, waking me up. The article asks how people live with this noise, and what might it tell us about how war is waged and sustained in a place like Homestead. The sound generated by the fighter jets is actually quite productive because it becomes a site of contentious politics, both for defenders of the military base and for the activists who wanted to shut down the camp and who argued the sound was harmful to detained kids. A lot of work on war and the environment focuses on toxicity, a kind of pollution that can be difficult to sense and feel. But sound (especially very loud sound) confounds the idea that people are not aware of war’s environments, and so thinking with the sounds that war machines like an F-16 make is an interesting way to ask how people live and work with the toxic and sonic debris of war.

This paper (and many parts of the book) emerged from collaboration with movements for migrant and environmental justice in South Florida, something I didn’t anticipate would be a part of my research and yet became central to it. With my colleague Guadalupe de la Cruz, who is a community organizer in Homestead, I direct a research project on environmental violence and detention. Our work together is grounded in research justice, a framework that draws from the work of Paolo Freire and Orlando Fals Borda (among many others) to produce knowledge with and for people often excluded from universities. Our first project together documented sound and toxicity at the detention camp for migrant children in Homestead, and we are currently working on a collaboration with Forensic Architecture that visualizes the movements of specific chemicals from the Superfund site into the detention camp.

We are currently finishing another project, on another Florida detention center, a hybrid county jail and migrant detention center in Glades County, the heart of sugarcane plantation country. This facility was infamous as site of anti-Black violence targeting African and Caribbean detained people. Our research documents the detention center as a site not just of police violence but of environmental violence. We focus on three ways that the air was made unbreathable: toxic chemical disinfectant sprays, carbon monoxide poisoning, and pepper spray. The report also critically evaluates the campaign that successfully shut down the detention center in 2022 and highlights organizers’ explicit engagement with abolitionist thinking. Our hope is that the report will both document this place as environmentally hazardous—making it impossible to reopen—and to show how detained people and community organizers together articulated a vision of freedom and futurity.

Somewhat unusually, you have done sustained ethnographic work on quite different contexts and problems in both Florida and in Colombia for a long time. What are some of the themes and more conceptual questions that cut across those two sites?

My work at these two sites investigates the environments of U.S. empire. At the very broadest, these projects ask how people inhabit, organize, and repair wounded and wounding environments in the aftermath of war (specifically, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror). I initially planned to do my dissertation research in Bogotá, but preliminary fieldwork in Colombia brought me to military headquarters in South Florida, and that led to my dissertation research on and around the military base in Homestead. My research and training in Bogotá prepared me to ask southern questions (as Gautham Bhan puts it) of Greater Miami, which I approach as a Latin American and Caribbean city. Both projects teach me about how war makes environments and how violence is reproduced in the aftermath of formal war-making through built and contaminated environments. The material connections between these two sites—the flow of military expertise, weapons, people, and capital between them—has forced me to think hemispherically about racialization, policing, and insurgency.

What are some exciting initiatives and conversations you hope to join or even establish at Stanford? Also, what classes do you plan to

teach?

I am so excited! I am really thrilled to join a department engaged in thinking expansively about anthropological methods and writing. I am also excited to be a faculty affiliate at the Center for Latin American Studies, and look forward to supporting their work, especially in environmental studies. Finally, I admire and hope to engage with the work of the Center for Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity.

I am really excited to start teaching, and plan to teach an undergraduate class on environmental justice when I arrive in Winter 2025. The course asks how projects of domination—colonialism, racism, and war— are always also environmental projects. Developing and teaching this course has helped me situate my first book and my collaborative work on carceral environments. There is a huge over-emphasis in the field of environmental justice (and environmental studies more broadly) on U.S. and Europe, so the course is organized as a modest corrective to that—it centers work from Egypt, Nicaragua, India, Botswana, Colombia, Palestine, and Vietnam. I also ask students to critically engage with questions of remediation and repair and research an existing project that seeks to address an environmental injustice. I just finished teaching this course at my current institution, and the creative final projects included a comic book, podcasts, a Minecraft world, a sculpture, and GIS maps. I hope to eventually remake this class as an engaged learning course so that students can learn from the organizing for environmental justice happening in the Bay. I am also excited to teach graduate seminars in environmental anthropology, Latin American anthropology and carceral and security studies.

Besides academic research, in conclusion, what do you enjoy doing in your own time?

All of Los Angeles is in bloom right now, so I have been spending a lot of time just walking around, in city parks and along the LA River, which is beautiful. I am a terrible but devoted surfer, and I am excited to be close to the Pacific again after spending most of the last ten years away. I also love reading novels and stories—Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail and Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament are my favorites so far this year.

2024 Staley Prize Presentation May 13, 2024

Tanya

Luhrmann awarded the 2024 J.I. Staley Prize for her book How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of

Invisible Others

Professor Tanya Luhrman is the recipient of the 2024 J.I. Staley Prize for her book How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton University Press, 2020). SAR President Michael F. Brown came to Stanford University to personally present the award to Tanya on May 13, 2024 at a ceremony held in the Department of Anthropology.

Statement by the 2024 Staley Prize Selection Committee

How do people of faith come to feel the presence of God in their everyday lives? With admirable clarity and a directness that belies the sophistication of her argument, T. M. Luhrmann explores the practices that enable people to experience the divine as embodied, tangible, and real. Based on decades of wide-ranging fieldwork with evangelical Christians in the U.S., India, and elsewhere, as well as other denominational communities, she argues that it is action, discipline, and repetition that drive faith, rather than the reverse. Looking at the many ways that devout individuals cultivate a talent for joining private-but-shared imaginative worlds, Luhrmann shows how faith is “kindled,” or intentionally brought into being. In vivid and concise prose accessible to a wide audience, Luhrmann reveals how living in the “faith frame” demands effort for people in all religions. This book will engage anyone interested in questions of faith in an imperfect world and offers anthropologists a model for entering into important public conversations.

About the J. I. Staley Prize

Since 1988, the School for Advanced Research has awarded the J. I. Staley Prize to a living author for an English-language book that exemplifies outstanding scholarship and writing in anthropology. The award recognizes innovative works that go beyond traditional frontiers and dominant schools of thought in anthropology and add new dimensions to our understanding of the human species. It honors books that cross subfield boundaries within anthropology and reach out in new and expanded interdisciplinary directions. Books awarded the Staley Prize are nominated by fellow anthropologists and chosen by an anonymous panel of scholars representing the diversity of anthropology’s subfields.

A Dear Farewell to Jim Ferguson and Liisa Malkki

By Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Professor and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto

Professors Liisa Malkki and James Ferguson have begun phased retirement so that they can live closer to their children. Liisa taught her last class at Stanford this past term, and James will end his service at Stanford next spring. Plans are currently underway for a celebration on campus in the spring of 2025. For those interested, please email me directly at kevin.oneill@utoronto.ca. As for programming, there will be some toasts and speeches, for sure, but the greater intention of the event will be to celebrate the worlds of insight and effervescence that James and Liisa conjured across their brilliant careers.

I have such a vivid memory of office hours with Liisa, which in 2004 she held in the Quad—in the late afternoons, under the archways, and within eyesight of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. The weather was perfect, and the sun had begun to set, lending the sky a little pink. Liisa had suggested a book for me to read and made an insight or two about my research project. She then grew a little quiet, eventually mentioning that “people don’t talk enough about how enjoyable this is.” By “this,” she meant reading, writing, and creating— the life of the mind—and her comment has stuck with me ever since. As a young doctoral student, I had always admired James and Liisa’s seriousness and clear sense of purpose, their piercing insights on some of the most pressing issues of our day-from international development to genocide-but it wasn’t until that office hour that I also began to appreciate the privilege and joy of thinking about the human condition as an anthropologist.

I thought about this privilege and joy when I first learned about James and Liisa’s retirement. Eager to honor their legacy, I reached out to them about the possibility of a celebration. Liisa was game, but I had to convince James. A caring and dedicated mentor, who has never seemed too terribly interested in the spotlight, James has always championed his students over himself. So I laid it on a little thick, appealing to his inner anthropologist. I mentioned things like rituals and rites of passage. I may have even mentioned Durkheim. Jim eventually saw my point, adding that a celebration would also give their students an opportunity to meet up and enjoy each other’s company. While true, James’ reasoning had stoically deflected from the real reason why we all want to celebrate their careers. There are so many of us who would want nothing more than the opportunity to travel clear across the world to say “thank you” for the kinds of insight, rigor, and empathy that they have made possible. We owe so much privilege and joy to them.

Pushing the Frontiers of Anthropology: Stanford Anthropology & the Legacy of Sylvia Yanagisako - May 1, 2024

By Sharika Thiranagama, Associate Professor of Anthropology

In Spring 2023, Sylvia Yanagisako retired from Stanford Anthropology. On March 1, 2024, the Department of Anthropology hosted a workshop to celebrate her legacy as well as reflect upon the impactful and unique histories and intellectual traditions of the Anthropology Department at Stanford. Sylvia Yanagisako, who came to Stanford, in 1975 epitomizes this history. Sylvia Yanagisako has also served as Chair of the Department several times and chaired the Feminist Studies Program as well as countless other committees across the university including most recently serving on the Race Task Force. Till her retirement in 2023, Sylvia has conitnued to mentor and advise graduate students, who in their turn have gone on to transform the discipline through teaching, research, community activism and writing.

The workshop brought eight speakers to Stanford to speak to different facets and decades of the department and Sylvia’s own work. The workshop began with a first panel featuring Anna. L. Tsing. Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz, and Karen Ho, Associate Professor of Anthropology to reflect upon their work with Sylvia Yanagisako in the larger project “Gens: A Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism.” They spoke together under the title “Among the Boys: The Constitutive Nature of Gender and Kinship in Capitalist Political Economies” on genealogies and networks comprised around masculine domains that underpin contemporary modern capitalist spaces and exchanges. In the second panel, Lisa Rofel, Professor Emerita, UC Santa Cruz and Tom Boellstorff, Professor, UC Irvine, brought their personal, political and intellectual journeys together. Lisa Rofel described how she brought together her left feminist commitments together in her intellectual formation at Stanford and her early work on female factory workers in China in her paper “Unsettling Theories of Power: How Sylvia Yanagisako taught me to be a Cultural Anthropologist.” Tom Boellstorff described his own activism within the queer movements that he brought into his doctoral work, and a longer trajectory of engagement in his career in his paper “They Think the Transnational Through the National.”

In Panel 3, Mei Zhan reflected explicitly on her doctoral work and experiences at Stanford, her engagements with others in her cohort and the challenges and inspirations of doing Anthropology at Stanford in her paper “A theory of no theory: generating feminist sentiments and commitments.” Aisha Beliso-De Jesús’s paper, “The Kinship Enterprise of Medicalizing Police Violence” reflected on her forthcoming book on how the medical diagnosis of “excited delirium” is used to cover up police violence and killings of black and brown communities. The final panel of the day was Professor Maron Greenleaf (Dartmouth) and Professor Robert Samet (Union College). Maron Greenleaf in “Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon” discussed her work on carbon offsetting, and the new kinds of regulatory and entrepreneurial regimes emerging in the Brazilian Amazon. Robert Samet discussed new research on how to think about doing more complex ethnographic work on the emergence of particular rightwing formations in the United States in his paper “A Modest Empiricism: Doing Theory Through Ethnography.” The workshop was also punctuated by two occasions when Sylvia’s children, Nathan and Emi Sullivan, who also attended the workshop, garlanded Sylvia with lei from friends in Hawai’ii. Sylvia ended the workshop with a few words reflecting on her career and relationships at Stanford Anthropology.

Each panel was chaired by current graduate students in Stanford Anthropology, Adela Zhang, Shantanu Nevrekar, Angela Leocata, and Alexa Russo, students that Sylvia has worked with. There were also other alumni who attended including Vivian Lu (Anthropology, Rice) and Bill Maurer (Dean of School of Social Sciences, UC Irvine), as well as friends and colleagues including Jane Collier (formerly Stanford), Donald Donham (UC Davis) and Donald Moore (Berkeley).

The workshop was packed with current faculty, students, colleagues from across the university and community visitors. It was a deeply thoughtful workshop with intense Q & As, and a lively lunch reception. At the same time, it was a meaningful and inspiring reflection on both Sylvia’s long career and talent at mentorship. Current students were able to hear from alumni and faculty how significant mentorship and cohort relations were within people’s careers and friendships. Significantly, each of our speakers and some of those asking questions described how Sylvia had not only been a profound intellectual influence in their lives, she had also practiced an art of mentorship which was to make space for her students to find their own voice, intellectual argument and formation rather than shape them towards her own.

George Collier Remembrance

By Bill Maurer, Dean of School of Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology; Law; and Criminology, Law and Society, University

of California, Irvine

Everyone who assembled to celebrate the life and work of George Collier on January 20, 2024, brought their individual memories and stories, sharing with each other how George shaped their personal and professional lives. Organized by Sylvia Yanagisako and Mei Zhan, this reunion in George’s honor brought together scholars, friends, and family members. The biggest surprise, I think, was the realization that George, and his beloved life partner, Jane, had shaped all of us together, even across the eras of his own career, as a cohort. So much of who we are, our core identities, were fostered by George and by the transgenerational collective he and Jane nurtured. At one point, when someone was sharing a story about George having made a paella for them, someone blurted out, “But I thought I was special!” And we all laughed. Because George not only made us all feel special, but made us aware of the specialness of ourselves that we all share and now carry on from our time with him. Never was it clearer that when we think of ourselves as unique individuals we appreciate how we are social beings, made with and by others. This was one of George’s lessons as well as his life’s practice.

Stefan Helmreich joined us to read George’s unpublished essay, “Aboriginal Sin and the Garden of Eden,” on Renaissance cosmology in its encounter with Mesoamerican civilizations, the encounters that reshaped Bourbon and Aztec alike, that left traces in what became modern Mexico. We realized how much our understanding of world history through encounters derived from George. Aida Hernandez marveled at how George, alone among US anthropologists studying Mexico at the time, meaningfully put his work in dialogue with that of Mexican anthropologists, what today we might call a move to decolonize anthropology.

George also forged his scholarship in a milieu of longstanding collaborations. Jane reminisced about the Harvard Chiapas Project, and Richard and Sally Price sent a letter about that time, as well, when Evan Vogt brought an amazing group of young scholars together–and did a bit of matchmaking, we learned from Jane: a tradition George, in his sly way, carried on (I love you, Tom!).

George also taught us to teach, with objects and artifacts, with opera, and in so doing taught us to let our imaginations soar, carrying our students with us to other worlds and other ways of appreciating the human experience not just mentally but tactilely, experientially. And, surprisingly to many of us, too, he taught us to be effective and ethical academic administrators, as Akhil Gupta and Purnima Mankekar reminded us through their experiences with George as department chair.

Indeed, George was a mentor extraordinaire. Lok Siu recalled receiving comments on her grant proposal in real time, emailing it to him and receiving redlining almost within the hour. We all remembered George as a mentor for living the good life: from his famous home-cooked meals to his beloved opera, which he introduced to many of us for the first time.

While remembering George, we couldn’t leave out his life partner and great love, Jane, whose support was crucial to the success of all of those present. Alejandro Lugo again and again returned to the partnership they forged and inspired all of us to build and sustain. The presence of so many at our gathering for George, and for each other, was evidence of that enduring sustenance, and our collective obligation to return the gift by supporting those whose lives we touch now, and in the future.

Sam Rosaldo concluded the day, fondly remembering how George would entertain him by drawing mazes during the sad period when he, his brother, his father, and Shelly Rosaldo’s mother lived with the Colliers after Shelly’s untimely death. And how fitting a metaphor for our lives with George, the intricate byways and journeys through the maze of anthropology, collegiality, friendship and love he sketched for us, with diversions and alternate destinations, and an appreciation of all of the delights to savor along our intertwined lives’ paths.

[Space constraints prevent me from mentioning everyone’s contributions to that remarkable day, but I want to express my appreciation to everyone for making it so memorable.]

News & Events Department

SPRING PICNIC

This year, the anthropology community gathered on May 21st to celebrate the Department Spring Picnic. Everyone enjoyed food, drinks, and good company.

STUDENT SOCIALS

Saturday, January 20th

Graduate students host a picnic and enjoy great food and company

Friday, November 3rd

Graduate students spend some time together and relax with a board game night

PHOTO CONTEST

The Department of Anthropology hosted its second annual photo contest. Submissions fell under three categories: Landscapes, People, and Here and Now.

The finalists were invited to attend the department coffee and bagel social on May 28th where they were announced as the winners and presented with their prizes.

“Here & Now” Winner (submitted by Alisha Cherian)

“Landscapes” Winner (submitted by Rachael Healy)

“People” Winner (submitted by Bella Raja)

New Staff

Dylan Cha Victoria Hunter

Dylan Cha joined the department as the new Marketing Support Specialist. As the head of marketing, Dylan hopes to drive more engagement and awareness to the department. Prior to his position at Stanford, Dylan has also interned as a Marketer at multiple startup businesses and held a role as a Marketing Coordinator.

Victoria Hunter joined the department as the new Administrative Associate. Victoria comes to us from San Jose State University with a B.A. in psychology. Prior to this role, she worked at La Petite Baleen Swim Schools for over eight years as a supervisor and training coordinator for new and continuing staff. She also assisted many families in their child’s development and education on promoting positive work influence.

Maria Kristina Guillen

Maria Guillen joined the department as our Student Services Manager. Maria is an experienced Program Director/Event Coordinator who has developed and managed programs that impact and serve the community by increasing availability and access to educational, cultural and social services. As a nonprofit professional, with experience working in museums and nonprofit institutions, her goal is to create environments in which people feel welcome and empowered to share their opinions to ultimately provide inspiration and information to their own communities.

Roya Aghavali

Roya Aghavali joined the department as the new Undergraduate & Co-Term Student Services Officer! Previous to this role, she has served as a program coordinator at the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley, a high school teacher and student services specialist at her alma mater community college. Roya’s career in education stemmed from her own negative and positive experiences as a student. Her main goal has always been to expand diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives with the goal of creating a more equitable and accessible education system.

“A Walk Around Leh Town” Utsavi Singh

The 17th-century Leh Jama Masjid located in the Leh market. The mosque has recently undergone a major restoration by the local Muslim collective, Anjuman-Moin-ul-Islam.

By June of 2022, we were in the middle of the tourist season in the Himalayan town of Leh in Ladakh, India. The sun was shining bright over this trans-Himalayan landscape by this time of the year, and on my walks around the old Himalayan town of Leh I had begun to see throngs of Indian tourists exploring the town. Most of them liked to stick to the main bazaar in the middle of the town, walking around and admiring the view of the mountains. A few tourists would notice the two beautiful and imposing mosques in the middle of the bazaar, while others walked right by them. Most tourists spent their time trying out apricot pastries, or cakes made of yak cheese in the dozens of new western-style cafes that have opened up in the main bazaar just over the last 5 years or so. In recent years, however, a handful of tourists have now also begun to venture into the narrow lanes of the old town.

At the eastern end of the market, stands one of the oldest and biggest mosques in Leh, almost serving as a visual and structural boundary for this side of the market. A narrow, unpaved lane to the right of the mosque leads into a whole other part of Leh town. It is easy to miss, but it serves almost like a magic portal into the old town. Nowadays this is one of only two remaining routes to enter the old town, as all the other pedestrian paths are either blocked off or lead into the other commercial areas of the town such as Nowshehr/Nowshera (“new city”). So now, this brilliantly gleaming, recently restored mosque feels at once like a final frontier for the market, and an entrance into an older, prior life of Leh town.

As soon as one steps into the lane, the topography of the town changes. The paved plaza abruptly gives way to broken and muddy remains of a labyrinth that lies neglected and in a terrible state of ruin. All that now remains of these lanes are decades-old dusty and broken cobblestones, or mud, upon which sewer water can be seen flooding onto. A variety of stray animals reside or gather on them, crowding these narrow streets even more and making access more difficult.

This old town is home to several traditional domestic and religious buildings. The homes belonged to important Ladakhi families who were associated with the old Namgyal dynasty and court in some form. At many intersections in the old town, there are also several Buddhist stupas, and in the depths of the town, one can see small Buddhist temples. This is where the Tibet Heritage Fund (THF) mainly operates; over many years, its work has transformed many of the old buildings here into sites of heritage interest. This is the reason I often came back here in 2019, and then in 2022, finding myself wandering and getting lost in these streets that seemed to meander endlessly—at times suddenly going uphill, or requiring one to briefly climb a rocky outcrop, and at other times opening up into flatter, more open areas, a few square feet wide.

In my memory, till about 2018, tourists would barely enter this area. I myself, had only entered this area first in 2014, with a few Ladakhi friends who wanted to show me a pedestrian shortcut to the Leh palace at the top of the hill on which the old town was set. Although it was a steep ascent to the palace and the high altitude at which Ladakh is located guaranteed breathlessness in the short 10-minute climb, at the time this route was less known, and more convenient. Now, however, thanks to an exponential increase in media attention, and young, independent documentary filmmakers and bloggers interested in travelling to “unexplored” and “hidden gems” areas in the Himalayas, the Leh old town has begun to receive relatively more attention.

One of the spots that has received considerable attention in the old town, and particularly among young 20-year-olds, is Lala Cafe. Located only a few meters into the old town, it is conveniently located for tourists who want to get away from the modernity and noise of the Leh bazaar, but not go too far into the labyrinth. For younger tourists exploring Leh, the allure of this cafe is in its rooftop seating and thus, the views it affords of the old town as well as of the imposing Leh palace. But for heritage and architecture enthusiasts, this cafe is interesting for other reasons. Lala cafe is one of the sites that THF has restored and repurposed

Lala cafe run by the Tibet Heritage Fund in the old town of Leh

completely. While originally, the building that houses the café was the residence of a monk that oversaw the administration of the Sankar monastery, the site is now a restored “heritage home” for the THF, and one of its commercial ventures. In front of the cafe, stands a big stele with a “Buddha carving” on it, with a board placed next to it stating that it was relocated by THF from the garden of a Muslim family’s house.

When I first saw the stele in front of the cafe in 2019, I was quite struck by it, as at the time I was looking for evidence of Buddhist–Muslim cooperation in Ladakh, and the stele seemed material proof of it. Clearly, for THF this is an important aspect of the story of this stele and Ladakh as well, as reflected in the board that highlighted the story. However, the stele also told me another story: that of heritage management and its many faces in Ladakh. In a way, the stele represents an intersection of small-scale, local community-led heritage management and the value of material culture (particularly religious material culture) and expert-led heritage management as embodied by the activities of THF. The stele is one among thousands of similar rock carvings that are scattered all over Ladakh, which otherwise go completely unnoticed by tourists. However, here was an agency that had not only “rehabilitated” the carving, but also displaced it from its original context as a means to save it, and brought it into the heart of the old town. From a shrine that is usually only of consequence to local Buddhist families, THF’s actions transformed it into a saved heritage object. The stele is now an object of consumption—an artifact that would not only be viewed more, but also valued more.

Buddhist stupas in Leh. These are maintained and whitewashed annually by the local community.

“Homecoming”

Tien-Dung Ha

Nestled away in an alley just wide enough for a car, off the bustling main street, Lý Thuòng Kiêt, Nhà Lao Hôi An (Hôi An Prison) is a historical war remnant, standing quietly and reclusively against the popular, charming beauty of Hôi An.

Located in Quàng Nam province, the Central region of Viêt Nam, Hôi An, recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was once a significant trading port and cultural melting hub, attracting merchants from China, Japan, and Europe. As a result, Hôi

An ancient town features well-preserved wooden Chinese shophouses, French colonial buildings, traditional Vietnamese tube houses, and Japanese covered bridges. Thu Bôn river weaves gently through the city, setting itself as the centerpiece of the town. In the daylight, Hôi An is tinted with yellow walls, blue windows, wooden gates, and red-tiled roofs, effortlessly transporting its visitors back in time. At night, the town is illuminated with colorful

lanterns crafted from bamboo, adorned with silk, and fashioned in many shapes, like bánh ú, a traditional Vietnamese glutinous rice cake. These lanterns serve as symbols of reverence for Gods and ancestors, while also representing wishes for luck, prosperity, and peace. And yet, nearby its serene ancient town lies a prison that bore witness to some of the most intense raids and battles in the region’s history.

A light wind flows gently through the window’s metal bars, offering a relief from the lingering heat of the July day. The bright moon illuminates the night sky as crickets chirp in a soothing rhythm, lulling the prisoners to sleep. The harmonic symphony of crickets dancing in the moonlight in the prisoners’ dream on the night of July 14, 1967 was, however, abruptly interrupted by a series of popping sounds of gunfire and explosives.

The locked gate of Hoi An Prison Relic

Comrades, we are advancing to the prison to liberate you. Everyone move to the back of the cells and lie down; we will blast the doors with explosives.

BANG! As the iron door flew open, the prisoners rushed out like bees from a hive and were directed to run toward nearby liberated areas in Điên Bàn district where their fellow comrades and local civilians were waiting to assist their escape with boats and baskets of sweet potatoes and cassava. A helicopter is circling overhead and raining down bullets aiming at escaping prisoners and liberating soldiers. The lucky ones got away. The less fortunate got shot and later buried in mass graves within the prison ground. How many remains lie beneath the grass and blooming wildflowers on the empty prison grounds where I now stand? Is my grandfather buried here?

Staggering numbers of 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers killed with missing remains, and 300,000 with unidentified remains, still plague many families searching for their loved ones—my family included. My dissertation examines the cultural and political process of identifying unidentified martyrs. I spent parts of my fieldwork at the Center of DNA Identification (CDI), a government-funded forensic laboratory, under the management of Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (VAST) in Hà Nôi, the capital of Viêt Nam. More particularly, I focus on the transnational cooperation and technology transfer between the International Commissions on Missing Persons (ICMP), with its headquarters in the Hague, the Netherlands, and CDI in Hanoi through a $7.4 million USD funding from USAID. I followed and observed CDI researchers as they worked with bone remains, from cleaning and grinding to extracting DNA and quantifying the results. From bone fragments of a tooth, tibia, and femur, the researchers cleaned, sanded the outer surface, and cut the fragments into smaller specimens weighing around 2 grams each. No one prepared me for the intense smell that emanated from the bones as the electric blade sliced through them. A scientist described it as burnt protein, similar to the smell of burnt hair. However, to me, the charred odor was secondary to a more dominant essence of dewiness or dampness, reminiscent of wet clothes left unwashed for days. After all, many of these fallen soldiers had been buried under the humid and wet soil of tropical forests for decades. The smell lingered in my nose and mouth for days afterward.

The next steps included cleaning with bleach, drying the bone specimens overnight, and grinding the bone specimens into powder under the smashing power of a stainless steel grinding ball. The researchers then transferred the bone powder to a wet lab section to carry out the total demineralization process. This process completely breaks down the cellular materials and mineral structures, releasing all the DNA from the bones into a clear solution, called lysate. After an overnight incubation at 56 degrees Celsius, some pellet or powder remnants were left at the bottom of the tube. This leftover powder sparked debates among the researchers about whether to keep or discard them. After the total demineralization process, some believed that no traces of DNA remained in the powder, and therefore, no remaining personhood of the fallen soldiers, which made it acceptable to discard. Some kept the leftover powder out of respect for the remains. Throughout the entire process, I observed the staff at CDI striking a balance between violent, destructive processes of cutting, grinding, and breaking bones into powder, then transforming them into DNA in a lysate solution, while also maintaining respect for the dead.

I returned to Hôi An as a partial tourist and a partial ethnographer searching for her ancestors, or more precisely, where my ancestor went missing. After finding out that Hôi An Prison has been converted into a prison relic museum, I made two attempts to visit. The first visit was with my partner who drove us there on a rented scooter. The Google Maps navigation was easy to follow. The prison sits at the end of an alley, ten-minute-drive from our hotel, and five-minute-drive to the ancient town. Residential houses surround the prison relic on all sides. Arriving at the end of the said alley at 17:15, the prison was already closed. As we began our exploration of the surrounding area, we were startled by the presence of a prison guard, clad in a green uniform, kneeling and aiming a gun at us with intense focus. Upon closer inspection, we realized that he was a statue, meticulously crafted to portray the ambiance of the prison in its historical context. While my partner marveled at the lifelike prison guard statue, I chatted with a nearby resident whose house bordered the prison. He immediately

Lifelike statue of a prison guard by the entrance

knew that my grandfather was killed during the 1967 prison raid, a night that claimed many lives as the helicopter was raining down bullets. Many remains are still buried in mass graves on the prison premise. When asked if he was ever scared to live near such a tragic site, he sternly answered,

“Everyone who lives in this alley is very brave.”

I came back the following afternoon at 15:15. By myself. The gate was open. I was immediately greeted by a local groundskeeper. After learning about my grandfather’s story, the groundskeeper took me to the main building at the heart of the prison ground where historical information, photographs, documents, maps, and artifacts are on display. Originally built by the French colonialists in 1947 and later expanded by the Republic of Vietnam government, often portrayed in Vietnam as a puppet regime of the U.S., Hôi An Prison detained, imprisoned, and tortured Communist political patriots and revolutionary soldiers until the end of the war in 1975. At the peak of the war, the prison housed over 1,000 prisoners, with ten cells for male inmates and six for females, not including the solitary confinement cells. As the sole visitor at the prison, the groundskeeper gave me a private tour of the cells where more than 100 prisoners were cramped into spaces no larger than 300 square feet with minimal food, water, or air ventilation. The unbearable dry heat of Quàng Nam summer is a form of torture itself, especially when crammed in a confined space with a hundred other bodies.

“Alright, now you head to the ‘xà lim’ (solitary confinement) on your own,”

the groundskeeper urged.

“Why don’t you come with me?” I asked, almost pleading.

“I’m scared!” the groundskeeper confessed.

“I’m scared too,” I admitted.

He burst into laughter. Only joking with me, he took me to the xà lim area where top political prisoners or soldiers were tortured and confined. He urged me to come inside the solitary cell to observe closely the restricted space and the two lifelike statues of a prison guard beating up a prisoner. I didn’t have the courage to walk too close to the statues. But even from afar, I could see that the lifelike statue of the guard beating up the prisoner and the other guard statues placed at the entrance as well as on the roof of some of the buildings were Vietnamese.

“So were these prison guards all Vietnamese back then?” I asked.

“Well, yes, they were all Vietnamese. Even the Americans couldn’t have fathomed the cruelty the Vietnamese inflicted on their own people,” the groundskeeper reflected.

As we strolled back to the main yard and looked out over the grassy green landscape of the prison lot where the female cells once stood, the groundskeeper revealed that many remains still rest beneath the prison grounds today in the aftermath of the prison raid in 1967. When asked if he ever comes to the prison in the evening, the groundskeeper had a slightly more relatable response.

“No, of course not. During a roof renovation, the workers heard cries and screams from the cells at night. Many spirits are still lingering here.”

Not long after the statement, while I was gazing into the horizon, I noticed a figure—a head, or rather, half of one, with dark black hair—floating along the roofline. I chose to ignore it; ignorance is bliss. However, the groundskeeper promptly drew my attention to it.

“Did you see the head floating by on the roof? It’s the neighbor from next door, climbing up to fix something. If I hadn’t spotted him, I would have dashed out of that gate so quickly.”

“Are you certain it was the neighbor? I only caught a glimpse of half a head,” I questioned.

“I’m positive. Otherwise, I would have bolted already,” the groundskeeper affirmed. We both burst into laughter.

Before leaving, I lit three incense sticks for the local deities and the fallen souls at the prison, one specially for my grandfather.

“A Bundle of Problems?”

Kristin McFadden

It is a quiet Saturday morning in December. I am attending a community meeting on Johns Island, SC, hosted by a local heirs property legal and community advocacy organization. I have attended their community meetings before, but this one is different. At this meeting, landowners will get short consultations with attorneys, other community advocates, and actual local county officials. As I approach a small church at the end of a winding road, I take note of the way the live oak trees frame the space, how the moss sweeps down over the road, painting a landscape that has cemented the Low Country in the American imagination of Southern life. This imagination has led many new people here, some captivated by the beauty of the place and intrigued at starting a new coastal life and others who feel they are answering a call to home. As I park my car and gather my notepad, cellphone, and pen, I notice people starting to file into the church, many holding loosely arranged stacks of paper while others have neat, tabulated file folders. I quickly gather my belongings and go inside. I am greeted by an attorney I have met before, who warmly welcomes me into the space and invites me to sit near her. She explains to me that this meeting will likely be long but should be really interesting because “all of the players are here.” In the moment, I do not think much about who all the players are, as my eyes are immediately drawn to a large folder sitting on the chair behind me. Papers overflow out of the folder and a woman hurriedly picks them up and looks around anxiously, as if she is waiting for someone to arrive. Shortly after, the meeting begins, and the attorney starts her presentation on heirs property. She talks about all of the legalities that heirs property landowners should look out for: the importance of clearing title to land, the process of identifying heirs, adverse possession, the dreaded property tax increases, and the tax sale. The list is extensive and seemingly never ending. Although I understand most of the legal jargon the attorney is using, I am overwhelmed by all of the information and wonder how the people around me are grasping it all. I glance around and no one seems surprised by what the attorney is saying, many people browse through their documents as the attorney speaks, almost appearing as if they are checking their work alongside the attorney’s advice.

As the attorney finishes her presentation and moves on to introduce the remaining speakers, she gives a disclaimer I have heard many times before. She says, “every heirs property case does not look the same, so please take a moment and speak with an attorney here so we can talk specifically to your situation.” There are around five speakers this day, a mix of community advocates and local county officials, even a former probate judge. It is an odd makeup of stakeholders in the room, each with different perspectives on heirs property land ownership and how to address the issues that have come to define it. One speaker stands out. She is from a local county tax office. As she introduces herself and begins to explain from the county’s perspective what heirs property landowners can do to protect their land, the atmosphere in the room no -

Letters from the Field

ticeably shifts and becomes uncomfortably tense. Whispers and murmurs begin across the room as the representative speaks, but no one interrupts her. At the end of her presentation, she asks if there are any questions and immediately hands go up. “Rich people who ain’t never lived here before are making the taxes go up!” “Is there anything we can do?” “Why won’t y’all help us?” “It just seems like nobody down there at the county really cares!” These are only a few of the questions thrown out. Most people are angry and others clearly frustrated. The juxtapositions are clear, and lines are clearly drawn. Many people express that this is the first time they have heard from a county official about the increases in their property taxes. Others point out how difficult it is to pay the higher tax amounts each year. The county official struggles to answer everyone’s questions and advises many people to talk with her in the consultation portion of the event. The whispers and murmurs from the crowd quickly resume.

I hear a voice behind me and notice it is the woman with the large folder from before. She tells a story of her great-grandfather who owned a plot of land that has since become heirs property. She explains that the home she lives in sits on this property and for the past few years she has watched large vacation houses being built all around her. She cannot afford her taxes any longer and is contemplating moving away from the only home she has ever known. She goes on to share that her stack of papers are genealogical and legal documents tracing back the chain of title to this property almost fifty years or so. She needs these documents to prove to the county that she is who she says she is and that she is a rightful heir to this property. She has built an archive of sorts, a collection of documents that grant her legal access to a piece of land that she has known her entire life. She explains she has been working with a realtor who is helping her decide if her family should sell their land, a decision that she notes is deeply painful because her great-grandfather worked to buy this land for the family. As she speaks, many people in the room affirm her, commenting on how similar her story is to theirs and how they feel like they are being forgotten. The woman asks the county official, “Does no one at the county care that we are being pushed out? It’s not right! This land is my legacy.”

The county official does not have any clear answers for this woman. She explains that she has no control over the property tax rate and is only here to help make sense of what is happening and help the landowners avoid major property tax pitfalls. Further, the landowners are from all over the South Carolina Low Country and many of their properties fall in neighboring counties where the rules and policies differ. The crowd’s whispers and murmurs continue as the next speaker, a conservationist group, takes the floor. The meeting goes on for around another hour or so. Landowners have consultations with the county tax official, attorneys, and representatives from the USDA. After the meeting is over, the woman with the large folder returns to her row and begins to pack up her papers. I ask her if she was able to get her questions answered today. She emphatically says, “No, all of these million-dollar homes keep going up and eventually I won’t be able to stay. It makes me want to give up.”

Her story is one of many I have heard since being in the field, stories that lay bare the frustrating reality many heirs property owners are contending with on a daily basis. Property ownership is often analogized as a bundle of sticks, but for this landowner and many like her, owning heirs property is presenting a bundle of problems. My fieldwork is exploring these problems, and the strategies heirs property landowners and legal advocates employ to resist them, working within a tension of legacy and landscape that suggests a fungibility of Black land dispossession that at once highlights the historical significance of Black-owned land, but obscures the precarity Black landowners actually face in retaining it.

“Basic Humanity: Ethnographic Observations of Care in Georgia”

Ayodele Foster-McCray

On the three-hour drive from Atlanta to Albany, the suburban sprawl quickly gives way to massive green fields, a bucolic backdrop peppered with decaying clapboard farmhouses and industrial irrigation equipment. On the left side of US-19, there is this huge white tarp covered in black tires arranged geometrically that makes my skin crawl. As I crane my neck to look at it while driving, the midwife, my passenger, remarks, “You lookin’ at that too? I always notice it and it gives me heebee geebees.” We are driving “all the way down here” to share knowledge and resources with Black birthworkers and mothers living in an “out of the way” place in the southwest corner of Georgia, centered on the town-city of Albany. Here, people are always going “all the way:” all the way up here from Valdosta, all the way down to Gainesville, Florida, all the way out towards Sylvester, Americus, Macon, and maybe Atlanta, sometimes in cases of a severe emergency or as a pipe dream of a better life. Even though the distances aren’t terribly far by car, geographies here predate and transcend what can be measured in highway miles per gallon. Driving from point to point as a Black person in these places requires crossing the creek named Negro Head Branch (what Negro? whose head?) and maybe past the Wynfield Plantation where one’s ancestors may have been

held hostage for generations, but is now a lovely place to go skeet shooting or have a wedding for some. When I ride to Albany for fieldwork, if I take I-75S, I feel these geographies intimately. Passing through a town called Smarr, I remember that this is where my father’s ancestors Anderson and Mariah were held as slaves and, after emancipation in 1865, from which they walked 20 odd miles South to Macon to look for paid work and freedom. A stone’s throw in my car, but an epic trek for those who for generations had not been allowed to leave the acreage of the massive farms on which they were held in bondage. Even now, each mile on the road can be a minefield. Often when I drive south from Atlanta, I see people, usually young Black men, being arrested by highway patrol by the roadside. Recalling all the ways these arrests have turned fatal during my lifetime, I puzzle over what I should do-bear witness, intervene, or just keep driving.

My fieldwork often involves combinations of these three actions as I observe care and infrastructure happening (or not) interaction by interaction. Every day looks different. Some days I am at clinics and birth centers observing the day-to-day rhythms of reproductive health care. Sitting at

the desk with the medical director at a free clinic just south of downtown in Atlanta, I have to come to terms with the fact that much of health care is paperwork, reviewing case files, recording vital signs, and dealing with backlogs.

However, even in the intricacies of such paperwork, actors make strategic decisions about how to care effectively and amidst vulnerability. At a postpartum visit after a homebirth, one of my midwife interlocutors was very carefully recording the infant’s vital signs to protect the new mother and her baby from what she perceived as the anti-Black surveillance that a trip to the hospital with a tachycardic neonate after a homebirth would produce. The midwife listened to the tiny and beautiful ten-day-old baby girl’s heart rate. It was very high. She frowned and sighed but kept calm. “I think she’s just a little stressed. I don’t want you to worry and I don’t want her to worry. So we’ll let her settle down and listen again in a few.” An appointment that in the clinic typically takes no more than 10 or 15 minutes with vital signs that are converted to paperwork in seconds stretched on in this little apartment in southwest Atlanta. The midwife warned us that the baby was privy to all our anxious energy so we’d better chill out too for the best recording. A half hour later, after I had washed some dishes and the midwife’s assistant and I put fresh sheets on the new mother’s bed, the midwife pulled out her stethoscope again. This time, the little girl’s heart rate was within a perfectly appropriate range. The midwife’s assistant double checked, and we all cheered. Careful, relational attention kept the baby and mother safe and comfortable. I saw the tiny girl (still tiny) strapped to her mother’s chest at a conference two weeks ago and they’re doing so well.

These small moments constitute the landscape here, which can be nourishing and abundant or hostile and deadly. In another instance of neonatal tachycardia, one of my interlocutors living in the town of Americus, Georgia recounted the birth of her son at the local hospital in the area. “His heart was racing, they was saying it was so high and they was blaming me, saying it was ‘cause I took drugs. I didn’t take no drugs. They wasting all this

time blaming me and they not helping my baby.” The baby was airlifted to a hospital in Atlanta, a four-hour drive away. She got a ride to the city to be with her baby, but had no place to stay. He died at the children’s hospital hundreds of miles from home. Her experience showed her that “[the medical system] getting away with murder. They ain’t no basic humanity in healthcare.” Witnessing the chasm between her experience of violence and abandonment and the postpartum home visit in Atlanta breaks my heart over and over again. Some days are like this, and it becomes difficult not to feel hopeless and unhelpful. Yet, when I attend meetings for reproductive justice in Southwest Georgia, the mother from Americus is always there, engaged and active, holding her newest baby, a little girl born at home. She wants to be a doula and an advocate for those living in these rural areas “miles off the main road.” Then, I can’t help but feel hope.

Alumni Updates

MARTHA MARCH BELL (MARTHA MARCH) [BA 1958]

Distribution of artifacts collected in 10 years of travels with Tim Bell, accompanying professor, to foreign countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South Pacific. Artifacts go into “Interest Boxes” labeled for specific countries with data on their cultures to local middle and elementary schools.

1950’s 1960’s Alumni Updates

JOANNE TAYLOR ALEXANDER (JO ANN JOHNSTON) [BA 1963]

I have written two books. Turning Points (fiction) and The Non-Cook’s Guide to Eating to Thrive. Plus several songs including “Passing Through Time.”

DAVID K. JORDAN [MA 1964]

Professor Emeritus of Anthropology.

MARGARET COVERT (MARGARET PEGGY BARTZ) [MA 1967]

January brought the third attempt at retirement from Executive Education and it worked. Life is now full of family, especially two wonderful grandchildren.

ROGER WOODBURY [BA 1967]

Post Stanford 1967, I served in the airfare in Vietnam and emigrated with my wife Mosha, (Stanford ‘68) to New Zealand. Ranched sheep and cattle; now own a 40-acre vineyard in Marlborough. We grow Sauvignon Blanc for Oyster Bay Winery. Living in New Zealand, with a different culture was kind of tough, but we survived. We currently have

2 sons and are dual US/NZ citizens.

EMILY VARGAS-BARÓN

[PhD 1968]

After resigning from USAID in 2001, I founded RISE Institute, a global NGO that is dedicated to participatory national policy planning and implementation, national monitoring and evaluation systems, research and training in the fields of early childhood development and early childhood intervention. Our Fellows and Senior Fellows come from many countries and cultures. I use anthropological methods in my work, and over the years I have published many books, articles and materials. If others are interested in these topics, I welcome your messages.

MICHAEL LADD BURTON (MIKE BURTON) [PhD 1968]

A paper on work groups in Kosrae and Yap, to be submitted to Human Organization; paper on constructs of race within the US Empire, soon to be completed; paper on the value of conversations with strangers.

JEFFREY ARON [MA 1968]

Global Action 4 Mental Health (GA4MH), www.globalaction4mentalhealth.org

Mission: To provide resources and expertise for the development of sustainable, replicable community centers for people with serious mental health issues in low- and middle-income countries.

Values: GA4MH believes in a community-based approach to mental health that inspires hope and renews lives. In the right environment, we know that people living with serious and persistent mental illness—including schizophrenia, bipolar

disorder, major depression, and trauma-can not only survive, but thrive.

In January 2024, with local, national and international support, we celebrated the launch of Bungoma Health Link Forum (BHLF), www.bhealthlinkforum.or.ke, in Bungoma, Kenya. Located in a beautiful center, BHLF has 3 staff and in the first four months has registered nearly 200 people. In conjunction with Masinde Muliro University, it has conducted a baseline survey of mental health conditions in Bungoma County. We welcome expressions of scholarly and philanthropic interest. For more information contact Jeff Aron, j.aron2020@gmail.com

SAVANNAH TENNESSEE ELAINE WALLING (ELAINE WALLING) [BA 1968]

50 years of creative collaborations with husband Terry Hunter: Terminal City Dance (1975-93), Vancouver Moving Theatre (1983-present), touring masked drum-dance productions (1983-1997); researching/co-writing theatrical scripts; co-producing community-engaged productions, public art, cultural ceremonies, festivals. I’ve collaborated with artists of many genres, traditions, ancestries to create productions and support projects that interweave localized content, accessible storytelling, spectacle, live music and/ or living cultural practice. Recent partnerships: Fishes of Saltwater City mural installation; co-producing the 20th Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival, including 9th Symposium on Reconciliation & Redress in the Arts; Once Upon a Time on a Chinatown Night (storytelling concert), Etuaptmumk: Two-Eyed Ways of Being and Seeing (climate change viewed through Indigenous eyes). My husband and I were appointed to the Order of Canada by Governor General Mary Simon for our visionary community-engaged arts practices with, for, about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, as Executive Director and Artistic Director of Vancouver Moving Theatre.

CAROL MOLONY PECHLER (CAROL MOLONY) [PhD 1969]

Just finished my third novel, Mission in Borneo. All are on Amazon, and all stories were stimulated by my years of fieldwork in the Philippines, and with shorter work in Indonesia and Malaysia.

1970’s

NANCY BRUCE (NANCY JONES) [BA 1970]

Survived another day! Owned and operated a bicycle touring company, for tours in Europe, for 25 years. Before that, I raised four children.

THOMAS J HAMPSON [BA 1970]

I continue to consult with Native American Tribal and not-for-profit organizations pro bono. I was recently asked to participate in an oral history project with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indan Reservation, Natural Resources Department to document our work in founding the Tribal Development Office in the early seventies.

STEPHEN F. JONES [BA 1970]

Learning jazz guitar in several combo groups.

PAM MAES (PAM BALCH) [BA 1970]

Worked as an RN and Family Practice NP for 44 years. Last 24 years I worked as an NP with my husband who was an excellent physician, teacher and consultant for 24 years working in a lovely rural setting.

KATHRYN L GRAHAM [BA 1971]

Went on to earn an MPH in Public Health Education with special interest in Medical Anthropology. Worked as health care communications executive at various medical centers; post-retirement, worked as a communications consultant to nonprofit health care organizations.

MARY KELSEY [BA 1971]

The Price of Gold, coauthored with photographer Steve Cagan, and published in Colombia in 2020, is being published in English (on Amazon). See Elchocomining.net for information. My updated website is marykelsey.com.

JANICE E. STOCKARD [BA 1971]

Co-authored with Evelyn Blackwood (PhD ‘93) first digital anthropology text “Cultural Anthropology: Mapping Cultures Across Space and Time” (Cengage 2018) with new pedagogy and GIS interactive maps, first-ever chapter on technology and culture change, best coverage of Native American

Alumni Updates

cultures — and now available on Kindle!

ZAHER WAHAB [MA & PhD 1972]

Senior adviser to the minister of higher education, Afghanistan; Visiting professor, Kabul University, Kabul Education University, American University of Afghanistan; Founder-director-instructor of two MA programs (MA/Ed in education and law; MAed for teacher trainers from all of Afghanistan).

THOMAS ERLING PETERSON (TOM PETERSON) [BA 1972]

Most recent book: Epistemology and the Predicates of Education. (Routledge).

GAIL SIMPSON (GAIL MILLER) [BA 1972]

Opera Frontier pivoted from stage to film during the pandemic, gaining recognition at film festivals and winning a Telly Award for “Rejoice Abyssinia” (filmed in Addis Ababa in 2019) and an Anthem Award for Human and Civil Rights Awareness for “Activist Aria” in 2020. My work in rural development in Ethiopia in the 1970’s paved the way for my collaboration with Circus Abyssinia 45 years later.

Our most recent production, Street Muse, will premiere at a film festival this year. One previewer wrote: “Unsettling in the best way. The dissonance caused by juxtaposing homelessness and opera is a jarring and moving wake-up to our common humanity. If you’re curious about how to keep holding pain and beauty together, this film will catch your heart and take it for a surprising ride.”

I’d love to hear what you think. See OperaFrontier. org or StreetMuseFilm.com to join the conversation about art and activism.

STEVAN HARRELL [PhD 1974]

I recently published An Ecological History of Modern China, with University of Washington Press. It’s not an anthropology book. https://uwapress. uw.edu/book/9780295751696/an-ecological-history-of-modern-china/

NAOMI SMITH BOAK (NAOMI SMITH) [AB 1974]

After a long career as a television producer, in 2019 I made a major pivot and followed my pas -

sion for Alaskan brown bears to become the media ranger at Katmai National Park in Alaska where I walk to work daily with 1000 lb. brown bears. Not afraid of a big challenge (or a big bear), I left my longtime home in NYC to become a park ranger who produces, writes and appears as a host on the explore.org bear cam live chats, I also produce the annual event Fat Bear Week. When not living with bears in Alaska, I winter in New Bedford, Massachusetts with my Corgi.

LISA LEMUS [BA 1974]

Retired teacher.

MURRY R. NELSON [MA 1975]

New book- Big Time: The History of Big Ten Basketball, 1972-1992 Indiana University Press

JANICE E. STOCKARD [MA 1975]

Co-authored with Evelyn Blackwood (PhD ‘93) first digital anthropology text “Cultural Anthropology: Mapping Cultures Across Space and Time” (Cengage 2018) with new pedagogy and GIS interactive maps, first-ever chapter on technology and culture change, best coverage of Native American cultures—and now available on Kindle!

KRISTINE HALVERSON [AB 1975]

Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, Center for Sports in S.F. Medicine, Pilates Rehabilitation Program for 31 years.

ANN R. THRYFT (ANN T. NELSON) [AB 1976]

Community organizing and advocacy with local, state and federal elected officials and regulatory bodies on behalf of customers of small local water company mostly destroyed in 2020 CZU Complex Fires. Our small volunteer customer group has helped publicize this continuing dire and critical situation and advocated for public funding to repair infrastructure. We formed an unincorporated association to give customers a more focused, effective voice when interacting with government agencies regarding the future of our water.

KATHERINE VERDERY [PhD 1977]

I delivered three invited lectures abroad, in person or by Zoom: France (Paris), Switzerland, and the University of Manchester. All were on one or another aspect of surveillance.

JOHN STEPHEN JUSTESON (JOHN JUSTESON) [PhD 1978]

I believe I was the department’s first archaeologist graduate student (1972-1976), recruited to work with newly-hired Prof. Ezra Zubrow; my first journal article, written in my senior year at Berkeley, was published in American Antiquity during my first year at Stanford.

My major topical foci have been number theory, writing systems, and historical linguistics; my cultural focus has been on Mesoamericans before the European invasion of the Americas. I have benefited from working with remarkable senior colleagues, notably Terrence Kaufman and Floyd Lounsbury; with the aid of five postdoctoral fellowships between 1979 and 2011; and from 30 years of collegial work as a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University at Albany (SUNY), Fall 1990 to January 2022.

PHILIP L. RITTER [PhD 1978]

Lots of travel

FREDERICK SPIELBERG [BA 1978]

Led simulation for World Health Organization to test European region’s capacity to report on incidents under the International Health Regulation, involving 43 countries (2022). Currently undertaking operational review of WHO’s emergency response in Ukraine and 8 refugee-receiving countries (2023-24). Also helping UNICEF develop its theory of change on Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Disaster Risk in two Pacific Island states (2023-24).

EDWARD TELLES (ERIC EDWARDS TELLES) [BA 1978]

I continue publishing and teaching. I was recently appointed to the board of directors of the University Network for Human Rights and the Center for Demographic Studies (CED) in Barcelona.

Alumni Updates

toric field of natural history promoted a unifying view of the world and knowledge of the world. The modern rise of narrow scientific disciplines promoted a dichotomy between nature and culture and scientific and folk knowledge. This has led to environmental degradation and science skepticism, which Michael R. Dove argues can be mitigated by a return to the holism of natural history.” https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300270105/ hearsay-is-not-excluded/

DAVID FETTERMAN [PhD 1981]

Professor Fetterman recently published Empowerment Evaluation and Social Justice: Confronting the Culture of Silence (Guilford Press). It applies anthropological concepts and techniques to the field of evaluation. It is similar to Sol Tax’s action ethnography in which community members are in charge of their self-assessment and the ethnographer or in this case ethnographic evaluator serves as a coach or critical friend. He also published the 4th edition of Ethnography: Step by Step (Sage). He received the Global Impact for his work applying ethnographic techniques to the elimination of tuberculosis in India. The award was announced on the NASDAQ billboard in Times Square.

IRENA STEIN (IRENE STEIN-NUNEZ) [MA 1981]

Published a book: Arepa, Classic + Contemporary Recipes of Venezuela’s Daily Bread.

PAUL ESPINOSA [PhD 1982]

National PBS documentary, Singing Our Way to Freedom.

KATHRYN ANDERSON-LEVITT (KATHRYN ANDERSON) [PhD 1982]

Bringing anthro perspectives to comparative education: “The Deficit Model in PISA Assessments of Competencies: Counter-evidence from Anthropology,” Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2023, and “An Anthropological Perspective on Globalization and Schooling” in The Oxford Handbook of Globalization and Education (pp. 51-75), 2023.

MARIKO SANO (MARIKO FUJITA) [PhD 1984]

MICHAEL R. DOVE [PhD 1981]

Yale University Press just published my latest book, Hearsay Is Not Excluded: A History of Natural History. The abstract and link are as follows: “The his -

Now volunteering as a head of local chapter (Midorizaka-Chiku) of Social Welfare Council in Hiroshima City.

Alumni Updates

JANICE E.STOCKARD [PhD 1985]

Co-authored with Evelyn Blackwood (Ph.D.‘93) first digital anthropology text “Cultural Anthropology: Mapping Cultures Across Space and Time” (Cengage 2018) with new pedagogy and GIS interactive maps, first-ever chapter on technology and culture change, best coverage of Native American cultures—and now available on Kindle!

STEVE SELLERS [BA 1986]

I continue to work as the COO at NatureServe, an environmental nonprofit in DC. This summer my wife, Allison (Harvard ‘87, currently Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Women and Gender Studies Dept at UVA) and I will have been married for 30 years, which might be an accomplishment. Our three incredible daughters continue to amaze us, which is their accomplishment.

STEPHANIE KEITH [BA 1988]

2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist for breaking news team coverage with the New York Times about the fatal Bronx, NY fire that killed 17 people. First place in the Portrait category in Pictures of the Year International for a 2023 courthouse photo of Sam Bankman-Fried.

NICOLE HOLZAPFEL [BA 1989]

Adjunct Professor, Raritan Valley Community College, NJ, RISE Program (Returning & Incarcerated Student Education), providing higher education and degrees to people while incarcerated.

ROBIN KAMINSKY [BA 1989] Physician.

1990’s

TOHIYUKI SANO [PhD 1990]

Volunteering as a director of AMERASIAN SCHOOL IN OKINAWA, NPO, which is a small school for international students. If interested in the double language (Japanese and English), please check the website and help the school in any means.

TSUYOSHI SHIBATA [MA 1991]

Seiun Academy Japan.

KIMETHA VANDERVEEN [BA 1991]

Solo exhibitions of paintings in Southern California at Peter Mendenhall Gallery (Pasadena) and in Paris, France at the American University of Paris during the months of February through May, 2023.

CHRISTINA LI [BA 1992]

Program Director of a successful, minimally invasive surgery/advanced GI fellowship, and our oldest son is a senior, and currently applying to Stanford!

DEE ANN ESPINOZA (JONES) [MA 1993]

Espinoza Consulting Services is currently (espinoza-consulting.com) in Colorado, Wyoming, and California and gearing up for the next field season. Julian and I have been bi-locating to northern Spain a few months of the year. His projects here in the States have kept him busy too: www.youtube.com/@jearcollision3956.

ALYSON GIARDINI [MA 1993]

Preparing for empty nest. Enjoying my small town private practice and the last couple years with my kids at home. Not sure what’s next.

M. BIANET CASTELLANOS (JANET CASTELLANOS)

[AB 1993]

Bianet Castellanos teaches courses on Indigenous urbanisms; immigration; tourism; women, rage, and politics; American politics and popular culture; and the US-Mexico border. Her book, Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico (Stanford University Press 2021), analyzes how Maya families make sense of the cultural, political, and legal ramifications of neoliberal housing policies that privilege mortgage finance over land redistribution. It was awarded the Gregory Bateson Book Prize, Arthur J. Rubel Book Prize, and Edward M. Bruner Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize. She co-edited the anthology Detours: Travel and the Ethics of Research in the Global South with Arturo Aldama and Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera (University of Arizona Press 2019). She edited a forum on settler colonialism in Latin America for America Quarterly and recently co-edited Unsettling Global Midwests for American Studies Journal with Christopher Perreira, Thomas Sarmiento, and Jessica Lopez Lyman.

EMMA LEHNER MAMALUY (EMMA LEHNER) [BA 1993]

Working with nursing licensure and regulation, during the COVID pandemic, we developed innovative processes to facilitate accessibility of nurses to meet patient care needs.

FRED DOBB (FREDERICK DOBB) [MA

1994]

Director, Progresa English Program, Antigua Guatemala. I organize and direct a volunteer-based program for indigenous college scholarship students representing all of Guatemala’s 12 languages. Progresa is a 50-year-old Quaker program.

CLEA KOFF [BA 1994]

I’m enjoying parenthood while writing and living in Southern California. HarperCollins will publish my series of three crime thrillers featuring a pair of anthropologists, with the first book in the series landing on shelves in September 2024.

AMY BOROVOY [PhD

1995]

I recently completed a book manuscript, provisionally titled, In Search of Social Solidarity: Imagining Modernity Through Japan in the U.S. Social Sciences. The manuscript explores how, in surprising ways, Japan emerged as terrain for probing the limits of American liberalism and individualism in the latter part of the 20th century.

I also published an article on social control and Covid-19 containment in Japan in the first two years of the pandemic, “The Burdens of Self-Restraint: Social Measures and the Containment of Covid-19 in Japan,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 2022.

SARA

MATLIN (SARA “SALLY”

MATLIN) [BA 1996]

In 2023, the ACLU of Northern California honored me with the 2023 Lola Hanzel Courageous Advocacy Award, which recognizes “individuals who have a demonstrated commitment to civil liberties by giving generously of their time, talents, and support to preserve and defend the Bill of Rights.” Also in 2023, I opened my consulting firm, Matlin Legal, to offer community organizations and funders legal support for their nonprofit advocacy. With 30+ years in the nonprofit field, I provide practical guidance 501(c)(3)s and (c) (4)s that are ramping up their lobbying, voter engagement, and coalition activities. I help non -

profits understand their federal/IRS (and California) advocacy rights and implement compliance systems that match their organization’s values and capacity. My fees are on a sliding scale, based on my firm’s equity-based priorities. Please visit my website at MatlinLegal.com to learn more or explore a collaboration.

2000’s

ROBIN BALLIGER [PhD 2001]

Robin Balliger’s current research project is on arts, culture, and racial politics in the context of urban restructuring in Oakland, CA. She published two articles and has a third in peer review on policing, disinvestment, and mutual aid. Balliger has completed a book-length ethnography of the foreclosure crisis and gentrification in one West Oakland neighborhood. After her institution (San Francisco Art Institute) closed suddenly in 2022, Balliger served as Lecturer in the Stanford Anthropology Department in 2023 and was excited to teach a graduate seminar on “Policing and the Carceral State,” in addition to the core cultural anthropology theory course for undergraduates. She also enjoyed working informally with Stanford students on the topic of worker cooperatives in the U.S., and on punk/squatter movements in 1980s SF and Berlin.

HOLLY M. MORTENSEN [MS 2002]

“In November 2023, Dr. Mortensen was awarded the prestigious Author S. Flemming Award, in the area of Applied Science and Engineering for her research efforts in building computational tools to help in the analyses and integration of environmental health and toxicologically relevant data types. The Arthur S. Flemming Awards honor outstanding federal employees. The winners are selected from all areas of the federal service and are recognized by high-achieving private sector organizations and federal agency heads up to and including the president of the United States. The Flemming Awards are a joint presentation of the National Academy of Public Administration and The George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration.” In 2022-2023 award year, the Author S. Flemming Award was awarded to only 12 out-

Alumni Updates

standing selected public servants across government in all subject areas. https://tspppa.gwu.edu/ arthur-s-flemming-awards https://www.epa.gov/ sciencematters/meet-epa-computational-biologist-holly-mortensen-phd”

RACHEL SEARS (RACHEL WHITE) [MA 2003]

In February, I finished building a home that took nearly five years from breaking ground to moving in. My husband, two daughters and I are delighted to finally be living in it!

GWEN AMBLER [BA 2003]

Working for a small, early-stage medical device start-up, I have been running our clinical research evaluating a next-generation oximeter that can accurately assess arterial and cellular oxygen levels in people of all skin tones. It has been rewarding developing a device that both reduces racial bias in medicine and provides clinicians with a novel assessment of organ perfusion that could transform identifying and treating various forms of shock. Based on data we collected in emergency departments, the FDA awarded Opticyte with a Breakthrough Device Designation last year. This work builds on my prior experience in global health managing clinical trials for drugs, vaccines, and devices designed to benefit populations in low- and middle-income countries.

DIANA REDDY [BA 2003]

You can find info on some of my recent projects and publications here: https://www.dsreddy.com/

STACY WATERS [MA 2004]

Most recent project is a docuseries produced by Waters Creative examining the maternal health crisis in the U.S. The 3-part series called The Risk of Giving Birth was produced for Rhode Island PBS and is being distributed to other PBS stations around the country. It is also available to watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhrMrqYW9MQMKedU3CXXK2Uq-_ y8g05oN&si=qFZwEJhYa-F1ld99

GERMAN DZIEBEL [PhD 2006]

Since graduating from Stanford in 2006, I have been applying my anthropological training to solving 21st-century marketing and advertising problems, while maintaining research activity. In 2021, I published a discussion paper entitled

CROW-OMAHA KINSHIP: REVITALIZING A PROBLEM OR GENERATING A SOLUTION? in the journal Kinship UCLA. In 2022, I published a discussion paper introducing a novel etymology of the Russian ethnic self-name Rus’ at the flagship Russian anthropology journal Etnograficheksoe obozrenie. As a Vice Chair of the Theoretical Anthropology Commission, I co-led a panel entitled “Theory of Kinship as Theory of Anthropology” at the 19th IUAES-WAU World Anthropology Congress 2023. I maintain a blog called Anthropogenesis devoted to an interdisciplinary approach to modern human origins and dispersals, and run an online forum devoted to comparative Indo-European linguistics. My new paper entitled “A Re-Analysis of Proto-Indo-European Cognate Sets. I. Pre-Laryngeal Consonant Loss Rule” has been submitted for publication.

JENNIFER M. CHERTOW [MA + PhD 2007]

I published a book: Styx by Khaos (my pen name) in 2011. You can purchase it at: https://chipmunkapublishing.com/?s=styx It is also available on Amazon, Google Books, and several other vendors. The book details my mental health journey starting with one incident that occurred during pre-dissertation field research in India a year into my doctoral program while at Stanford and goes through more recent situations up until publication in 2011. A sequel is in the works. At the moment, I am teaching as a substitute in my alma mater, Evanston Township High School. After completing two years of coursework and a rotation in surgery during medical school, COVID hit, and I left school to teach. I wanted to give back to my community, even in the context of mass shootings, to let students know that their community cared about them and was “safe.” I teach students from AP to special needs, 9th-12th grade. I also tutor privately all AP’s and honors classes as well as SAT/ACT; GRE; college and graduate school applications. I continue to swim, sing, paint, and most recently act.

FRANCISCA JAMES HERNÁNDEZ [PhD 2007]

I continue to head an academic department I co-founded in 2017, Ethnic, Gender, Transborder Studies & Sociology. We serve our students and community in numerous ways, including by organizing free public educational events every semester. This spring, our event is Climate Action, Sustainability, and Eco-Justice: Thinking Globally,

Acting Locally, and will be the first event at our college that is eco-minded-no plastics purchased and with a goal of zero waste.

DAVID TERCA [BA 2008]

Became Regional Assistant Chair of Emergency Medicine for KP Northern California.

KRISTIN V. MONROE [PhD 2009]

Editor, City & Society.

MITALI THAKOR [BA 2009]

In 5th year of faculty position and finishing my book manuscript, Facing the Child: The Digital Policing of Child Pornography, under advance contract with MIT Press.

2010’s

ELIF BABÜL [PhD 2011]

Was elected as “president elect” to the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. Will assume the role of president in 2026-2027 for two years.

BRYN WILLIAMS [PhD 2011]

Bryn has spent the last year working to protect Colorado residents from abusive monopiles as the manager of the Antitrust Unit in the Colorado Department of Law. The Unit has been very busy recently. Notable matters include filing a lawsuit to stop the proposed merger between Kroger and Albertsons, addressing the NCAA’s anticompetitive treatment of student athletes, challenging Google’s search engine monopoly at trial, and investigating private equity roll-ups in the healthcare industry, among many other actions and investigations.

BRUCE O’NEILL [PhD 2013]

Bruce O’Neill published in 2024 his book, Underground: Dreams and Degradations in Bucharest with the University of Pennsylvania Press as part of its “The City in the Twenty-First Century” book series. Underground moves beneath Romania’s capital, Bucharest, to examine how the demands of global accumulation have extended urban life not just upward into higher skylines, and outward to ever more distant peripheries, but also down -

Alumni Updates

ward beneath city sidewalks. O’Neill’s previous book, The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order, was published by Duke University Press in 2017.

CORISANDE FENWICK [PhD 2013]

Promotion to Professor of Late Antique and Islamic Archaeology (2023) and awarded Philip Leverhulme Prize for Archaeology (2022). Currently PI/ Co-I of 3 ERC and AHRC-funded projects re-evaluating the impact of the Arab conquests on everyday life, environment and agriculture in North Africa which involves directing excavations with Tunisian, Moroccan and German colleagues at 11 sites. I am also Director of the British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies, a British International Research Institute sponsored by the British Academy.

LAUREL FISH [BA 2014]

After 8 years working in the labor movement, I was hired to lead a coalition of over 30 faith, labor and community organizations in Spokane, WA. Together we have won $10 for childcare stabilization, held public officials accountable to make sure housing levy funds are spent with integrity, and developed everyday people as civic leaders. In my private life, I’m mom to a four-year-old son and one-year-old daughter who motivate me to build a stronger, more equitable community for them to grow up in.

HANTIAN ZHANG [PhD 2015]

Published fiction and nonfiction in literary journals like AGNI and Prairie Schooner.

MARIA FERNANDA ESCALLON [PhD

2016]

I am happy to share that my latest book published by Cambridge University Press is out! Becoming Heritage Recognition, Exclusion, and the Politics of Black Cultural Heritage in Colombia examines the consequences of cultural public policy on marginalized communities and minority groups. If you are interested in purchasing it, let me know and I can get a discounted copy for you. I can also help with student copies for your classes!

AMELIA FARBER [BA 2016]

Currently working towards a PhD in Education at the University of Oxford, continuing my passion for environmental education research in the

Alumni Updates

Galápagos Islands (which all started with an inspirational Sophomore College trip with Stanford Anthro Professor Bill Durham!). For my doctoral research, I worked with some very environmentally-savvy 9-year-olds, and am working on finishing analysis of interview, focus group, and survey data for my dissertation which is entitled: “Constructing Local Ecological Knowledge: How Children in the Galapagos Islands Learn about their Environment.” Alongside the PhD, I teach undergraduate education courses for St. Clare’s, Oxford, work part-time with a West Coast tech company, and continue my hobby of baking, recipe development, and food photography within the blog Sisters Sans Gluten. I live in Oxford, UK, with my incredible partner, Scott, and we love to find and cook amazing food, explore the outdoors, and spend time with family and friends.

SAMUEL WALTON REEVE (SAM REEVE) [BA 2018]

2nd Year Master of Divinity Candidate at Harvard Divinity School.

SYDNEY WALLS [BA 2018]

Research Coordinator at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics.

ELANDRE DEDRICK [PhD 2019]

New role at World 50 Group producing high-level conversations for Fortune 500 C-suite executives.

2020’s

CAROLINE AUNG [BA 2020]

In 2022, I received my Master’s degree in City Design and Social Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I researched the relationship between urbanization and the growth of the tech industry. I subsequently moved to Philadelphia to work as a community planner and advocate in Philadelphia Chinatown. I’m now excited to start my doctoral degree in Critical Geography this fall at the CUNY Graduate Center!

SOPHIA HU [BA 2020]

Started my research fellowship at the Center for Transgender Health and Division of Plastic Sur -

gery at Harvard University and was awarded 1st prize in the American College of Surgeons Young Surgeons Essay Competition for archival research in gender affirmation surgery.

JUSTINE

ISSAVI

[PhD 2021]

In the past two years, I’ve established and led the research division at an online optical company, crafting its foundational strategies and integrating innovative research methodologies. This initiative not only positioned the company at the forefront of industry advancements but also culminated in my recent promotion to a directorial role, recognizing my contribution to our strategic growth and market leadership.

ANGIE CAMPBELL [MA 2023]

Overall program management and strategic planning of a multi-institutional team conducting human subjects research in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America. Our research is focused on improving prevention, care, and treatment of drug-resistant TB, TB/HIV co-infection, latent TB infection, and subclinical disease; and understanding transmission of TB and the relationship between TB and non-communicable diseases such as diabetes.

Awarded Staff Excellence Award in Leadership by Rollins School of Public Health, 2023.

SRIHARI NAGESWARAN [BA 2024]

PhD Student at UC Berkeley.

Student Achievements

Undergraduate Awards

Nancy Ogden Ortiz Memorial Prize for Outstanding Performance in ANTHRO 90B Theory in Cultural and Social Anthropology

Leila Wang Gaouette

Sophia Bi

The Joseph H. Greenberg Prize for Undergraduate Academic Excellence

Lola Dare Ehlert McAllister

Srihari Nageswaran

The James Lowell Gibbs, Jr. Award for Outstanding Service to the Department in Anthropology

Skye Hathaway

Yuyu Yuan

The Robert Bayard Textor Award for Outstanding Creativity in Anthropology

Yuer Liu

Caroline Skwara

Firestone Golden Medal for Excellence in Research

- Dean’s Pool

Yuer Liu

Franz Boas Summer Scholars

“Planting Resistance: Food Sovereignty Movements under the Global Agriculture System.”

Emma Rose Harden

“Investigating Landscapes of Dispossession and Modes of Resistance in Communities of Migrant Field Workers in Coachella Valley.”

Lizbeth Luevano

Graduate Awards

The Bernard J. Siegel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Written Expression by a PhD Student in Anthropology

Chun-Yu (Jo Ann) Wang

The Robert Bayard Textor Award for Outstanding Creativity in Anthropology

Paras Arora

Saad Lakhani

The Anthropology Prize for Academic Performance

Byron Gray

The Anthropology Award for Outstanding Graduate Research and Publication

Gokce Atici

The Anthropology Annual Review Prize for Service to the Department

Angela Leocata

Ben Baker

Poornima Rajeshwar

Rachael Healy

Shan Huang

Victor Marquez Padrenan

Anthropology Faculty

Andrew Bauer Associate Professor

Research Areas:

Environmental Anthropology, Materiality, Political Anthropology & Political Economy, Science & Technology Studies

Lisa Curran

Research Areas: Professor

Colonialism & Indigeneity

Paulla Ebron Associate Professor

Research Areas:

Anthropology & the Arts, Environmental Anthropology, Materiality

Ayana Omilae Flewellen Assistant Professor

Research Areas:

Anthropology & the Arts, Colonialism & Indigeneity, Gender & Sexuality, Materiality, Race, Ethnicity, & Collective Identity

Duana Fullwiley

Associate Professor

Research Areas:

Anthropology & the Arts, Colonialism & Indigeneity, Environmental Anthropology, Materiality, Medical Anthropology, Political Anthropology & Political Economy, Race, Ethnicity, & Collective Identity, Science & Technology Studies

Angela Garcia Professor

Research Areas:

Anthropology & the Arts, Anthropology of Religion, Colonialism & Indigeneity, Environmental Anthropology, Gender & Sexuality, Materiality, Medical Anthropology, Political Anthropology & Political Economy, Race, Ethnicity, & Collective Identity

Thomas Hansen

Research Areas: Professor

Anthropology of Religion, Colonialism & Indigeneity, Political Anthropology & Political Economy, Race, Ethnicity, & Collective Identity

Miyako Inoue Associate Professor

Research Areas:

Linguistic Anthropology

Lochlann Jain Professor

Research Areas:

Medical Anthropology

Richard Klein Professor

Research Areas:

Colonialism & Indigeneity

Matthew Kohrman

Associate Professor

Research Areas:

Environmental Anthropology, Gender & Sexuality, Materiality, Medical Anthropology, Political Anthropology & Political Economy, Science & Technology Studies

Tanya Marie Luhrmann Professor

Research Areas:

Anthropology of Religion, Medical Anthropology, Science & Technology Studies

Kabir Tambar

Associate Professor

Research Areas:

Anthropology of Religion, Colonialism & Indigeneity, Linguistic Anthropology, Political Anthropology & Political Economy, Race, Ethnicity, & Collective Identity

Sharika Thiranagama

Barbara L. Voss

Research Areas:

Anthropology & The Arts, Gender & Sexuality, Race, Ethnicity, & Collective Identity

Research Areas:

Colonialism & Indigeneity, Gender & Sexuality, Political Anthropology & Political Economy, Race, Ethnicity, & Collective Identity

Mudit Trivedi

Associate Professor Assistant Professor

Research Areas:

Anthropology & The Arts, Anthropology of Religion, Materiality, Political Anthropology & Political Economy

Serkan Yolacan Assistant Professor

Research Areas: Professor

Anthropology of Religion, Materiality, Political Anthropology & Political Economy

Department of Anthropology

450 Jane Stanford Way

Main Quad, Building 50

Stanford, CA, 94305

For More Information on Department Programs and Events, Contact us at:

Tel: (650) 723-3421

Fax: (650) 725-0605

Email: anthropology@stanford.edu

Web: https://anthropology.stanford.edu

Thomas Blom Hansen

Mercedes Martinez Milantchi

Poornima Rajeshwar

Dylan Cha