Anthropology Newsleter Volume 11

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DEPA RT M EN T O F

ANTHROPOLOGY 2017-2018 newsletter Volume 11

Stanford University


C o n te n ts Letter from the Chair

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An interview with Katherine Verdery

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Bill Durham receives Dean's Award

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Department News

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PhD Letters from the Field

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Undergrad Fieldnotes

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Alumni News

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Student Achievements

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Anthropology Faculty

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Cover image: from the 2018 Graduate Student Conference held on April 27 and 28, 2018. Photo taken in Sungai Kapal Fisherman's Wharf, Pengerang, Malaysia by Chun-Yu (Jo Ann) Wang, Feb 2015


Let t er F rom T h e C h a i r Our newsletter this year features the achievements to be celebrated in the anthropology department in the 2017-2018 academic year. Among these is the continuing success of our faculty in receiving prestigious awards and grants to support their research. Professor Andrew Bauer received a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award to conduct archaeological and archival research in India during the 2018- 2019 academic year, while Professor Lisa Curran was awarded a Fire Science.gov Grant for a two-year project on forest management and the socio-economic implications of prescribed burning by Yurok and Karuk Indians. Professor Ian Hodder received a John Templeton Foundation Grant to complete the analysis and publication of materials from the interdisciplinary, long-term project on the Neolithic settlement at Çatalhöyük,Turkey, while Professor Krish Seetah was awarded a National Geographic Grant to initiate the project “Visualizing Complex Contact” which explores the usage of 3-D immersive technology to promote maritime heritage in Mauritius. Finally, Professor Barb Voss received grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies for the archaeological investigation of the home villages of 19th century Chinese migrants who participated in the largest voluntary migration in recorded history. The books published by our faculty this year meanwhile convey the remarkable range of timely issues to which our department contributes. Professor Matthew Kohrman’s book Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing In Critical Historical Perspectives (Stanford University Press 2018) offers a novel perspective on tobacco consumption which is the single largest cause of preventable death in the world today. Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press 2018) by Professor Andrew Bauer and his co-author Mona Bhan draws on archaeological, ecological, geological, and ethnographic material to challenge the divisions between humans as biological and geophysical agents in the Anthropocene, thereby opening up the possibility for a more inclusive politics around climate change. Professor Lynn Meskell’s book, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (Oxford University Press 2018), traces the conflicts over World Heritage sites in Cambodia, Israel, Palestine, Mali, Crimea, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria to reveal how an intergovernmental agency founded to foster peace, humanitarianism and intercultural understanding has increasingly fallen short of its mission. The anthropology students at Stanford have likewise continued to thrive. As can be seen by the student organized conferences and workshops described on pages 8 and 9, they continued to explore innovative interdisciplinary dialogues funded by the department as well as the Stanford Humanities Center. Meanwhile, in the past year our doctoral students have been appointed to teaching positions at Dartmouth, George Mason University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Rochester, and Yale University. Others have been awarded postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Yale. This year the department also marked two notable milestones. The first was the promotion of Professor Lochlann Jain to the position of Full Professor. The second is the retirement of Professor William (Bill) Durham who is also Bing Professor in Human Biology. In recognition of his outstanding contribution to teaching, mentoring and advising during this 40 years at Stanford, Bill was awarded the 2018 Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in Teaching. Bill will be retiring in September 2018, and the department will be hosting a party in his honor in the Fall quarter. Best wishes to all in the coming year, Sylvia Yanagisako Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology

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An interview with Katherine Verdery by Grace Zhou, Anthropology PhD Candidate

Katherine Verdery's new book, My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File, published by Duke University, was released in May 2018.

Katherine Verdery is the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She received her PhD from Stanford in 1977. Since 1973, she has been conducting fieldwork in Romania. Her books include The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania and What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Her most recent book is a memoir titled, My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File published by Duke University Press in May 2018. The writing of this memoir was sparked by Verdery receiving and reading a copy of her 2,781 pages-long secret police file. She learned that she had been closely followed by the secret police over a span of nearly two decades, that she had been considered a spy, and that many of her acquaintances, colleagues, and even close friends had been informing on her. Through the writing of this memoir, Verdery grapples with her initial sense of betrayal after decades of personal and professional investments in Romania. She delves into the ethical dimensions of anthropological research and considers how much the methodological practice of ethnography can seem to resemble espionage.

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For background for those who haven’t yet read the book: why did you choose to go to Romania during the Cold War? What was the attraction of this place that you admittedly didn’t know very much about? Was there something about the political moment or your theoretical questions that propelled you to a place like Romania? I had a professor at Stanford, Charles Frake, who always said, “It doesn’t really matter where you go to do your fieldwork, every place is interesting once you get there.” He said, “If you like to sail, then go to a place that has an ocean, if you like cold, go to the Eskimos.” With that sort of lead up, I found it easier to think about where I might go. I had some interest in going to the South Pacific. I was always interested in places on the margins. I did some work in the Celtic fringe of Great Britain. I also always had a kind of uninformed curiosity about what went on behind the Iron Curtain. So I thought, why don’t I go there to see what’s happening. I didn’t go because of a specific research project, but more of a generalized feeling of interest. You describe that first occasion when you went to Romania as a naive, but well-intentioned, 25-year-old doctoral student. You had heard that you’d be followed, but you felt that by being transparent, you would convince the security state that you were harmless. Could you talk about this disconnect around the meaning of transparency? How was it interpreted in Romania, which was ruled by secrecy at that time? Transparency is related to ideas about honesty and integrity and being a person of principle, and so on. I always thought about myself in those terms. I was pretty honest, and I was a person of integrity. I figured that if I went about my business, they would understand that I was really ok. That’s what I mean by transparency, that I didn’t have hidden objectives and wasn’t out to do any harm. Of course, I hadn’t the slightest clue what harm looked like from their point of view. In their notes, they say, “She’s always gathering sociopolitical information that’s going to make our country look bad, that’s going to make socialism look bad.” I might think that I’m innocent, but from their point of view, I was definitely not. I operated on that principle [of transparency] pretty much all the way through, even though I was constantly getting evidence that this was not a successful strategy. [Laughs] It was only when I started thinking about this book and reading the files that I started thinking about what it meant to start out with that assumption, and how it made me look even more like a spy from their point of view. The first book that I did was almost entirely a history. I had one chapter about ethnic relations in the communist period, and it was not a particularly critical discussion. But I also felt that having been a guest of this government for a year and a half, it wasn’t a good idea to be too critical. But in 1991 when I wrote a paper called “Theorizing Socialism” that became the basis for my work in What was Socialism, and What Comes Next, I definitely was not presenting socialism in the way that the secret police would have liked. I was using a lot of

that sociopolitical information that I collected [earlier], in order to come up with my own vision of socialism. So they were right to be anxious about what I was going to do with that material. In the process of reading your file, you discover your doppelganger, “Vera.” What was it like discovering this different persona? What was your process of coming to terms with this doppelganger, that you say you often found yourself disliking or being embarrassed by? It was very jarring to read. There were many pseudonyms that they gave me, different officers in different places. I used “Vera” because she had the most “pages.” I thought she came across as a pretty scary person. But as time went by, I began thinking, she was a pretty powerful person and they were scared of her. When I reached this realization, I accommodated much more to the image of this person that they considered evil. It seems to me that we as ethnographers are, on the flipside, also engaged in an interpretative project of understanding the people we meet in our field sites. We also translate intimate moments into our scholarly work, and construct personas and identities that some of the people we write about may not fully agree with. Have you had a similar reckoning about the perception of your books in Romania, with the people that you were writing about? That question can be better answered in about three months, because the Romanian translation is coming in June and we will be distributing it to a lot of people, but nobody there has read it yet. I don’t know what reaction they’re going to have. The most recent book that people talked about much was [Peasants Under Siege] about the collectivization of agriculture published in 2011. On the whole, that got an extremely respectful reaction. That was co-authored [with Gail Kligman]. For the most part, people don’t really tell you what they think about your work. They’ll say it was really interesting, but as soon as you leave the room they say, “God, this is such an awful book.” That’s true of people in our country too. [Laughs] I’ve gotten some negative reviews for some of my earlier work. But mostly in the more recent years, only that one about collectivization has been widely reviewed in Romania, and that’s primarily because we had a lot of Romanians on the research team, so they had an interest in getting out the word. In your book, your personal affection for and attachments to the people you got to know over many decades emerges really powerfully. Could you comment on how these attachments were affected by reading your security file? Ultimately, why did you decide to resist condemning those who informed on you, which is the takeaway highlighted in the New York Times article featuring your book? [“Should Anthropologists Judge the People they Study?” published April 13, 2018] Reading my file the first couple of times made me incrediContinued on page 6 VOLUME 11 | 2017 / 2018 NEWSLETTER

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Katherine Verdery (continued from page 5)

bly upset and angry because of all the people who I thought were my friends who were filing reports on me. Eventually, after I read it several times and began thinking about what I was seeing there, I began calming down. After I talked to a few of them, I felt much better about my relationship with them. I could see what was in their minds as they got involved. I learned a lot from them about what the experience had been like. Certainly at the beginning I was enraged and very, very upset. A number of the people that I was particularly upset by were dead already by the time that I read it, so I didn’t have any opportunity to approach them and say, why did you do this? I felt [my situation] was a lot more complicated than just, “my best friend reported on me.” I was trying to see the relations that I had with these people as part of a system of relationships they were all engaged in--for which, using me, if they were put in a position of being compelled to do it, could very well be a strategy for survival. I thought to myself, I’ve never been put in that position, I have no idea how I would react, and I don’t think it’s my place to get all high and mighty about that here. You write that the Romanian secret police couldn’t differentiate ethnography from espionage. Given the methods of ethnography, which differ from the central methods of other disciplines, and given anthropology’s history of informing and collaboration with colonial powers, what are your thoughts about methods training, and also ethics training, in the field of anthropology, since such training is often lacking or treated lightly in many PhD programs? Definitely. I’m hoping this book will be used in methods courses. There should be much more attention paid in methods courses to these kinds of questions. What does it really mean to be interviewing or talking with somebody else about their life? There are feminist interviewing practices and some other practices that emphasize how a question form of interviewing is really a power struggle. People should think about this when they’re going to do [fieldwork]. It’s easy to read all these older ethnographies, like Malinowski's, without thinking about some of these questions that have come up more in the last 20, 30 years. It’s important to think about those questions, and whether you can, in any way, justify what you’re doing when you’re bothering people and setting them up for discussions with the police. So I think it is a cautionary work. Could you talk about your process of doing follow-up research and returning to Romania to talk to friends and informers after reading your file, in particular, your experience of confronting the secret police officers who had been following you in the 1970’s and 80’s? What was that experience like and what insight did that provide? I decided that it would be interesting to see what these

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people were like. When I started off with this plan to do a little searching, it was completely a fluke. I was sitting at my computer trying to find the telephone number of a friend of mine in Romania. I saw that there was a website, whitepages.ro. So I just started typing in the names of some people, and then I typed in a couple of my secret police officers and there they were--their names, their addresses, and maybe their telephone numbers. I thought, well, I could try to find these guys. That would be interesting. But I didn’t go in with a fully developed questionnaire. I just wanted to see what would happen if I met with them. I was very surprised by what happened because all 3 of these people were extremely friendly and willing to talk with me, even one whom I caught completely unaware. I just went to his apartment because I didn’t have his phone number. It threw me for a loop, because I expected them to be fearsome and stern, but they were smiling. They’re bringing me a bouquet of flowers. It changed my sense of what kinds of people they were. It made me think what would it be like to be recruited as an informer by someone like this, who might be personable and charming and really make you want to work with them. That was one of the main insights. The other one was that I felt, at the end of all that, I had in a sense been recruited myself to their point of view. Seeing the organization as not being so terrible. So I had to struggle with that. Some Romanian friends who read earlier drafts said, “You have to take a position. You can’t just say that they were so nice.” [Laughs] I kept having to work on what I could do with this material, in way more thoroughly than I have with my ethnographic data. What was the difference for you in writing this memoir and your other ethnographies? In what ways was it more or less difficult? It took me longer to figure out what I was going to do with this material. Usually by the time I get back from fieldwork, or from research on a project, I can tell you roughly what the argument is going to be and how I’m going to break it up. In this case, I just kept trying to figure out what to do. I wasn’t sure what to do with all of this stuff. And there was so much of it. I would write sections and give them to friends to look at, and they would say, “No, this is terrible, this isn’t going to work.” I think I’ve revised this more than any other work I’ve done. Also, I’ve had to put more of my emotional self into it than I usually do, so I felt that I was exposing myself more. That was a little unnerving. But I thought that if it were to have the kind of use that I was hoping for, then I would have to be fairly open about my feelings and things that had happened in the process. As someone who first went to Romania when socialism still seemed robust and healthy, who then experienced the fall of the Soviet Union and other socialist projects, Continued on page 25


William (Bill) Durham Awarded the 2018 Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Lifetime Achievement in Teaching William (Bill) Durham, Professor in Anthropology and Bing Professor in Human Biology, has been awarded the 2018 H&S Dean’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in Teaching. The award recognizes Bill’s 40 year career at Stanford and his outstanding contribution in teaching, mentoring, and advising. “It’s heartening to see the H&S Dean’s Office recognizing the profound impact Bill Durham has had on Stanford students,” said Sylvia Yanagisako, the Chair of the Department of Anthropology and the Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. “Bill cares deeply about pedagogy. His teaching and advising of students in both the Department and the Program in Human Biology has been stellar.” Bill has taught in Human Biology and Anthropology at Stanford since 1977. Known for his exuberant lectures, Bill is masterful at turning lessons into scientific tales to make his classes more interesting and engaging. As a student, Bill learned that hypotheses by themselves are not enough to explain problems; they must also be tested. To that end, he guides his students in using the scientific process to explore issues and breaking them down into testable hypotheses. He encourages his students to work in teams to test hypotheses and to approach issues in an interdisciplinary way, and by doing so, they are empowered to think they can solve any problem. As Paul Fisher, current Director of Human Biology, states: "Bill is a natural story teller, whose lectures present a cliff-hanging narrative, and lead students to formulate questions and then hypotheses. He makes passionately clear the inextricable link between biology and culture. Bill is animated, as he walks

across the room and relays details with inimitable body language and incredible enthusiasm. He engages the audience as if they were wearing 3-dimensional glasses and part of his show.” Bill’s kindness to and patience with the students before, during, after, and outside class is exemplary. Even with his busy schedule, he always finds time to support his students in their vision. For his advisees, he pulls out all the stops, making introductions across his network and helping them figure out how to execute and fund their projects. Madeline Lisaius, currently an MA student in the School of Earth Sciences, recalls that when she was a freshman, “[Bill] thoughtfully considered my research proposals, gave advice on what classes to take and which professors to talk to, and talked to me as a young academic. In every meeting, he made me feel like I was a true researcher and scientist, and gave me the tools to continue growing. “Thanks to Bill, I am a National Geographic explorer: he pushed me to consider a grant that I never thought I could get and then supported me all along the way… In planning my field work, he guided me with such depth of thought - not telling me how to modify my methods, but pointing me down the path to create robust methods in my own right as a young researcher... The Stanford community is so lucky to have such an incredible mentor.” Bill is set to retire in September of 2018. The Department of Anthropology will be hosting a party in his honor in the Fall quarter. Please contact Emily Bishop at ebishop1@stanford.edu if you would like to receive an invitation to the celebration.

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De p a r t m en t News

Conferences and Workshops Precarity/Promises Anthropology Graduate Conference Pablo Seward and Shan Huang (Co-chairs) The conference also featured two keynote addresses: “Politics, Interrupted: Accounting for Silence in Contemporary Indonesia” by Tania Li (University of Toronto) and “Oil and the Licit Life of Capitalism in Equatorial Guinea” by Hannah Appel (UCLA). In addition, Laurence Ralph (Harvard) led a workshop titled “Torture Trees.” Finally, conference participants had the opportunity to join Karen Nakamura (UC Berkeley) in a screening of two of her films, “A Japanese Funeral” (2010) and “Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan” (2007).

On April 27 and 28, 2018, the Department of Anthropology held the “Precarity/Promises Anthropology Graduate Conference,” organized by a committee of nine graduate students. The conference gathered a group of 24 graduate students from the U.S, Mexico, and Canada, whose work broadly engages with differences within and across states of precarity through the figure of the promise. Student presenters were divided into six panels, including “Transgression, Security, and Reform in the City: Rethinking the Social Through Urban Futures”, “Promises on the Move: Power, Violence, and the Politics of Space”, and “Precarity and Promises Realigned: Movements, Mobilization, and the Poetics of Recognition,” among others. Graduate students from the department were paired with faculty from Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz and served as discussants for the panels.

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The conference organizers appreciate the support of the Department of Anthropology, the Urban Beyond Measure Initiative, and the East Asian Studies Intellectual Community in making this conference possible. This conference is part of a larger tradition of graduate student conferences in the department, which we hope will continue for years to come.


D epartment News

Conferences and Workshops Worlds of Work and the Work of Networks: A Stanford Humanities Center Geballe Workshop Nethra Samarawickrema and Şamil Can What is work? What kinds of labor become registered as work? What is the work of networks in lubricating the movement of people, commodities, capital, and ideas? These are the questions our workshop, ‘Worlds of Work,’ explored through an intellectually exciting and generative year. Speakers shed light on our main workshop theme--the work of networks-from both historical and contemporary perspectives, tracing the significance of social ties for transnational movements of people, capital and commodities. From commodity chains linking Italian design firms to production houses in China (Sylvia Yanagisako), Armenian trading networks (Sebouh Aslanian), from precarious populations forced into Kurdish smuggling networks (Firat Bozçalı), to decolonial desires on Sri Lanka’s tea plantations (Mythri Jegathesan), and from movements of migrants and pearls across the Bay of Bengal (Sunil Amrith and Pedro Machado), to foreclosures and dispossessions in Sacremento (Noelle Stout), and arboricultural possibilities in gardens

(Smriti Srinivas), these themes have uncovered the critical yet often unacknowledged work of networks. Our dissertation writing workshop, which ran parallel to the speaker series, brought together an interdisciplinary community of students from anthropology, history, engineering, and theatre and performance studies who work on themes as diverse as credit and debt amongst insolvent Muslim traders in Delhi (Samil Can), trading networks from Nigeria (Vivian Lu), the lives and labor of seafarers (Johanna Markkula), construction work and management in the United States (Afroz Algiers), intimate economies and care in Kyrgyzstan (Grace Zhou), dalit activism and networks of care in Kerala (Vivek Narayan), and speculative mine work, trade and trust in Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean (Nethra Samarawickrema), migrant movements between Germany and the US (Benjamin Hein), and labor and urban culture in Namibia (Stephanie Quinn).

Sound and Vision: The Forefront of Publishing in Anthropology by John Moran At the end of spring quarter, the Department was lucky to be visited by the outgoing editors of Cultural Anthropology, Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, who are also known for their Cultures of Energy podcast. Howe and Boyer joined graduate students over dinner for a demystification of the journal's peer-review and publication process, as well as its transition to open-access publishing. They drew attention to the Fieldsights section of the journal's website, which includes short articles reviewed by editors, such as the publicfacing Hot Spots series that addresses pressing topics in global news. They also highlighted the

Contributing Editors Program, in which graduate students create and curate content for the journal's website. Most excitingly, the outgoing editors walked students through the Sound + Vision section of the journal, which incorporates sound and video in peer-reviewed academic articles--the first, but likely not the last, anthropology journal to do so. The presentation left one hoping that the department may soon find the resources to hire a visual ethnographer, and begin training graduate students to more fully incorporate sound, video, and digital media into ethnographic research and publishing.

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De p a r t m en t News

Awards and Grants Krish Seetah received a 2017-2018 National Geographic Grant for his project titled Visualizing complex contact: using 3-D immersive technology to promote maritime heritage in Mauritius Mauritius is an island created by maritime endeavor. Moreover, while the maritime context has resounding local significance, Mauritius itself was a critical node in the movement of people, goods and ideas during the period of European expansion. This small island witnessed the ‘Great Experiment’ as the British sought desperately to find new ways to provide labor following the abolition of slavery. As such, the island is important to a global audience. Despite this significance, the rich maritime context remains largely silent, and far out of reach of local and international audiences. Our proposed project harnesses the power of cutting edge gaming platforms to enrich the narrative of Mauritius’ maritime past. Working with local colleagues, we will deliver on the research front, by providing an integrated GIS solution to start the maritime heritage research program, and on the outreach front, by producing immersive, interactive, visualizations that promote an entirely new approach to storytelling. At a greater level, our project situates maritime heritage as a pillar of the Blue Economy, which has major implications for developing sustainability and local resilience in order to protect the cultural resources of this nation.

Barb Voss received a 2018-2019 Wenner-Gren Foundation Grant for her project titled Investigating Homeland Communities of 19th century migrants from China's Pear River Delta: Cangdong Village Archaeology The Cangdong Village Archaeology Project (CVAP) is an investigation of qiaoxiang (home villages) of 19th century migrants from China’s Pearl River Delta. Over 2.5 million people left this region of China in the latter half of the 19th century for destinations throughout South Asia, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, making this the largest voluntary migration in recorded history (Takaki 1998:32). Our primary objective is to use artifacts and samples from archaeological excavation to contribute information towards key questions about daily life and village culture in qiaoxiang during the late Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties and the early Republic period (1912-

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1949). We focus on five dimensions of material practice that are represented in artifacts recovered from prior surface investigations of Cangdong Village: foodways, trade, household material culture, craft production, and homebased religion. Excavation will focus on four key historical periods: 1700-1800, a period of relative peace and stability in Cangdong; 1800-1850, when the region was impacted by Spanish and British colonial activity in coastal areas 100km south; 1850-1920, the period of massive out-migration; and 1920-1950, when most transnational migration ceased.

Barb Voss received a 2018-2019 Grant from the Freeman Spogli Institute for international Studies (FSI) for project titled Research on Qiaoxiang (Home Villages) of 19th Century Transpacific Migrants Guangdong Province, People’s Republic of China The grant will support the continued development of an interdepartmental research program on qiaoxiang (home villages) of 19th century Chinese transmigrants. With prior support from the FSI China Fund, we launched the pilot phase of this research program in 2016-2017. The archaeological and historical research program was incredibly successful, resulting in the completion of the first-ever archaeological excavation of a qiaoxiang village (Cangdong Village in Kaiping County), and the completion of exploratory reconnaissance in archives in Jiangmen, Kaiping, Xinhui, Taishan, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, resulting in the collection of 70 family law contracts from the Qing and Republic Era.

Barb Voss received a 2018-2019 award from the Stanford Archaeology Center for project titled The Archaeology of the Asian Diaspora: Support for Collections Management, Data Analysis, and Inter-Project Coordination The primary impetus for the award stems from the initiation of a new, six-year research program on Asian Diaspora labor on Stanford Campus Lands. The funding will support development of type collections and data sets from existing Asian Diaspora projects, that are housed at or directed from the Historical Archaeology Lab. These materials can then be used to: (1) train campus archaeology staff, students, and community members in the identification and analysis of Asian diaspora material culture; (2) develop


D epartment News

research hypotheses that can be investigated through campus lands research; and (3) provide a basis for comparative analysis of campus lands investigation results.

Lisa Curran received at 2017-2019 FireScience. gov Grant for project titled Forest management and socio-economic implications of prescribed burning by Yurok and Karuk Indians This project aims to identify perceived prescribed burning regulatory constraints for Yurok, Karuk, SNRF, and other regional fire managers as well as to evaluate and model the costs and benefits of prescribed burning under current and projected conditions. Labor, equipment and supplies costs will be analyzed across agencies and burn areas on public, private, and Tribal lands to compare how these forms of ownership affect costs and prescribed burn site selection. The benefits analyzed will include the reduction of wildfire risk (burn probabilities) and future fire suppression costs, job opportunities, as well as the generation of timber products (e.g., bio-fuels and timber) from pretreatment thinning and cultural and subsistence opportunities (e.g., basketry materials and deer harvests) from posttreatment ecological changes. Harvest efficiency rates and travel times to harvest locations will be compared among prescribed burn areas, unburned areas, and wildfire areas to identify if cultural fire management objectives are met. Additionally, property ownership types at harvest locations will be evaluated to determine if property managers differ in permitting access to indigenous resource users.

(human remains), and those in charge of the ceramics, lithics, bone tools etc.). The work will involve the final analysis of materials, writing specialist chapters for the volumes, and writing collaborative essays for publication in relation to the questions of ‘how did human consciousness come about?’, ‘where does human creativity come from – was it always there or did it emerge as de Chardin argued?’, ‘was the appearance of very large settled communities the catalyst that transformed consciousness and creative.

Andrew Bauer received a 2018-2019 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant Andrew Bauer received a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award to conduct archaeological and archival research in India during the 20182019 academic year. Andrew’s research project is designed to investigate aspects of the social history of the Deccan, casting particular attention on how historical land reform on the Raichur Doab (northern Karnataka) articulated with new settlement communities and competing imperial and political claims to the region during the Medieval and Early Modern Periods.

Ian Hodder received a 2018 John Templeton Foundation Grant for project titled Consciousness and creativity in the Neolithic at Çatalhöyük, Turkey Although this additional proposal grew out of the 2016 political unrest in Turkey, the project has taken advantage of the potential change to enrich its work. Specifically the extension of the work (that was supposed to be completed in 2017) into 3-months of work in the summer of 2018 will allow more time for in-depth study and analysis and more opportunity for interaction and co-writing between researchers. The research and publication will be carried out by an international team of specialists using an integrated database. The 31 researchers will include the field archaeologists who excavated the site, and laboratory specialists (eg archaeobotanists, archaeozoologists, bioarchaeologists VOLUME 10 | 2016 / 2017 NEWSLETTER

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D epartment News

New Books Andrew Bauer and Mona Bhan, co-author Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene

Cambridge University Press (2018) This book offers a critical reading of the Anthropocene that draws on archaeological, ecological, geological, and ethnographic evidence to argue that the concept reproduces the modernist binary between society and nature, and forecloses a more inclusive politics around climate change. The authors challenge the divisions between humans as biological and geophysical agents that constitute the ontological foundations of the period. Building on contemporary critiques of capitalism, they examine different conceptions of human–environment relationships derived from anthropology to engage with the pressing problem of global warming.

Matthew Kohrman

Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing In Critical Historical Perspectives

Stanford University Press (2018) In Poisonous Pandas, an interdisciplinary group of scholars comes together to tell that story. They offer novel portraits of people within the Chinese polity―government leaders, scientists, tax officials, artists, museum curators, and soldiers―who have experimentally revamped the country's pre-Communist cigarette supply chain and fitfully expanded its political, economic, and cultural influence. These portraits cut against the grain of what contemporary tobacco-control experts typically study, opening a vital new window on tobacco―the single largest cause of preventable death worldwide today.

Lynn Meskell

A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of PeacE

Oxford University Press (2018) In 1945, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded as an intergovernmental agency aimed at fostering peace, humanitarianism, and intercultural understanding. Its mission stemmed from a European organization called the International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, founded by such prominent figures as Henri Bergson, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Mann. Often critiqued for its inherent Eurocentrism, UNESCO and its World Heritage program today remain embedded within modernist principles of "progress" and "development" and subscribe to the liberal principles of diplomacy and mutual tolerance. However, its mission to combat conflict, destruction, and intolerance, while noble and much needed, increasingly falls short as recent, much-publicized conflicts over World Heritage sites in Cambodia, Israel, Palestine, Mali, Crimea, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria have underlined.

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Letter fro m th e F i el d

Dean Chahim, field researcher

1. A regulation basin in the former lake, enclosed by the perimeter fence of the new airport visible in the distance. One of the few areas of the former lake that is still seasonally covered in water.

At seven sharp, I hop on the rickety company bus that takes engineers and other workers to the expansive construction site of the New Mexico City International Airport on the eastern periphery of Mexico City’s urban sprawl. The bus bounces along the badly deformed pavement, a sign that we are driving on what was once an enormous lake – and is rapidly sinking under the weight of vehicles and buildings. A toll booth marks our entry into the heart of what was once Lake Texcoco.

There is of course, nothing natural about the sinking here, which has been devestated by decades of groundwater over-exploitation to satiate the thirst of the metropolis of 22 million. The countless groundwater wells along the highway are a subtle testament to this fact. On the side of the wells are the barely visible words: “Lake Texcoco Ecological Park” – a fading reminder of prior attempts to turn the area

The lake is divided in two by the Peñon-Texcoco highway. To the north is the sprawling, 4,431-hectare construction site, now surrounded by dozens of miles of 20-foottall metal fence, with heavily-guarded entry gates with militarized police in black balaclavas. To the south, one catches glimpses of what the low yellow and green grasses that once covered this entire landscape, which alternated between lake and marsh with the coming and going of the rains. Getting off the bus, the ground we stand on vibrates like a trampoline as heavily loaded trucks, full of red tezontle volcanic rock roar by. This rock, along with basalt, is essential to the process of “improving” the soil through “preloading,” which attempts to essentially squeeze the water out of soil and accelerate its compression – ideally to achieve a decade’s worth of “natural” rates of sinking in less than a year.

2. One of the dozens of quarries that have destroyed the hills and threatened the water supplies of indigenous communities on the eastern periphery of the new airport. Continued on page 14

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Dean Chahim (continued from page 13)

into a natural preserve. These now-defunct efforts sought to restore parts of the massive lake and use it as a habitat for birds and as a means to regulate water and the climate, preventing floods and dust storms. Just a few days before, I was sitting in a community meeting in one of the many small towns to the east of the new airport who have watched their hills literally disappear – after being dynamited, ground up into small rocks, and loaded into dump trucks destined for the airport. There, a protest sign stuck with me: “What irony? Only in Mexico are mountains destroyed to kill a lake.” The sign points to the absurdity of the airport project and the urbanization it will spark in the eastern fringe of the city. Beyond the devastation of the mountains, there is the more insidious problem of the “killing” of the lake itself. Lake Texcoco – which once reached Mexico City’s downtown - was finally drained in the 1960s, but the dry lakebed has been long used to regulate the city’s floodwaters. The new airport will pave over much of this area. Government consultants have designed new regulation basins and plan to repurpose a massive drainage tunnel still under construction, the Eastern Emission Tunnel (TEO) to manage the water. But their plans do not consider that the TEO was designed to alleviate flooding for the poor urban periphery, not for an airport. The vast urbanization the airport will “detonate” in the region, to use the wording of billionaire Carlos Slim, one of the principal investors in the project, will vastly increase the runoff and sewage that the drainage system must handle, likely well beyond its original design.

4. Furniture and clothing, ruined by sewage-tainted floodwaters, awaiting disposal in a poor peripheral neighborhood.

neighborhoods in fetid water. The cynical answer – and one consistent with my own research with the city water utility – is that when the physics allows it, excess flows of water will be dumped on the streets of the poor to save the runways of the rich. This is not out of malice – most of the engineers and their families live in (or are from) poor peripheral neighborhoods. But engineers are under constant scrutiny by politicians, and if they want to keep their jobs, they must be very careful who they flood.

3. The Eastern Emission Tunnel is by some accounts the world’s biggest sewer. When complete, it will carry sewage and rainwater more than 30 miles underneath the mountains to the north of Mexico City.

The question, then, is where will this water will go? The city already faces chronic flooding – and many days per year when the entire metropolitan drainage system is simply full, or even overflows, covering (most frequently poor)

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5. One of the pumping stations and canals within the airport site, which engineers hope will be able to hold back the floodwaters during the rainy season.


My dissertation revolves around a central paradox exemplified by the airport scheme: how have large urban conglomerations continued to grow in spite of increasingly hard environmental limits? The fieldwork has taken me from this engineering consultant’s offices in the new airport to the flood control command center of the city water utility and out into the flooded streets of the city during the long, wet summer nights. At the airport, I’ve been assigned to a group of engineers tasked with making the massive construction somehow work. For the airport to be a “success,” engineers and workers from a plethora of companies and dysfunctional conglomerates must prevent the airport from flooding while forcibly drying out the soil under the massive runways to achieve ten years’ worth of compression in just a few scant months. Given that the soil is unlike almost anything else in the world – and that the area continues to be the confluence point for a dozen rivers and artificial drainage canals, it’s perhaps an unmanageable challenge. That is precisely why it is such an interesting site: I want to understand how engineers deal with, on both a “technical” and personal level, the ostensibly impossible demands placed on them to grow the city through projects like these. The office where I “work” (part-time) as an engineer is a large, squat warehouse-like modular structure referred to as an “encampment.” Despite the massive scale and controversial nature of the project, the work environment is surprisingly mundane: it feels like almost any other office with the water cooler gossip, elaborate Tupperware-packed lunches, well-loved coffee makers, and corporate propaganda on the walls. Aside from the occasional gust that kicks up dust from the dry lakebed when walking outside, you would be forgiven for forgetting you are in the middle of what was once a lake - and participating in an environmental catastrophe in the making.

6. A flooded street in a peripheral neighborhood. The manhole cover has been removed to facilitate drainage.

But back at our desks an hour later, these conversations abruptly stop – and we go back to working on making our tiny piece of the puzzle work. Far from the glamour one imagines from the propaganda, the actual work of building the airport is often slow, tedious, and boring, carried out by engineers and workers who would very often rather be anywhere else.

As I struggle with the most minute details of an engineering plan – to get the curves and text just so, as my boss requested – I’ve similarly come to understand how easy it is to lose sight of the broader problems of the project. Engineering seems to rely on this kind of legal and administrative division of technical labor into tiny chunks, not just for technical “efficiency,” but to ensure that no one has the time or technical basis to question the whole. Lunchtime is a rare release from the grinding minutae. In cafeterias that have sprung up around the lakebed, engineers often quietly swap gossip about failing technical schemes. Not always openly, many grumble about the absurdity of the entire idea of building an airport in a lake – and express their support for the opposition presidential candidate who has promised to cancel the whole project.

7. The remnants of Lake Texcoco are these marshlands, which continue to be the habitat for migratory birds.

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L ett

e

om t r fr

It had only been a few days since a light rain had fallen, but the sun rays that now cover the Black Oak leaves on the forest floor had become dry enough to carry a flame. The Southern exposure and deciduous canopy allowed the moisture in the leaf litter to evaporate, which in turn brought out the fire crews from the Karuk and Yurok Tribes, among other fire professionals dressed in soot stained yellow collared shirts and hard hats. They carry shovels, Pulaskis, McLeods, and the requisite drip torches. A team of six began their work at the top of the property, dragging flames across the steep slopes of the Klamath mountains, while others made sure those flames didn’t cross the fire line, and risk burning a nearby home. The fire holders encountered no difficulties, as the fire refused to move across the still moist mineral soil. In contrast, the fire lighters had to fight the thick understory composed of California hazelnut, blackberries, and young California bay laurels and Douglas firs. It has been 10 years since this property last burned, which isn’t that long compared to the majority of the region, yet the plentiful sun and rain had caused the land to become overgrown and unsuitable for routine human use. In this remote corner of Northwest California, California Indians continue to be reliant on the foods, medicines, and fibers from the rivers and mountains for ceremony, subsistence, and material culture. Burning rejuvenates and clears the underbrush to give people easier access for gathering and hunting, and limits the spread of unintentional or lightning sparked fires. Just two months later, I am in another Black Oak woodland,

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Fi el d

by

he

Letter f rom th e F iel d

Tony Marks-Block, field researcher

yet this one has been burned regularly every 3 – 5 years for at least the past three decades. The difference in the landscape is palpable. The California hazelnut stems are straight and unbranched, and the leaves are beginning to show. Basket weavers and their families from throughout Northwest California have traveled hours to gather stems here because it is one of the few places where hazel was burned 12 – 20 months before. After a group of us gather hazel branches for a couple of hours we begin to peel the bark from the stems, and people discuss what they plan on weaving— baskets for ceremonies, baskets for acorns, and baskets for babies. There are many babies who will need a cradle, and strong hazelnut stems typically compose the majority of these baskets. I have seen many infants fall easily asleep tied in their cradle, and the cradles also create safe places for babies to observe


the world around them. The cradles are a critical component of indigenous beliefs on child rearing, and given that they are constructed and gathered by family from local stems and roots, they are a key connection to land and culture. Thus, broadcast fires in these forests are fundamental to the social fabric that many families are revitalizing in the wake of boarding schools, land dispossession and other colonial machinations. Getting fire on the ground in Northwest California is not a simple or easy task. State and federal land managers and regulatory agencies suppressed wildfire and prohibited indigenous burning for decades. Between 1945 and 1995 the U.S. Forest Service and private timber companies prioritized timber extraction and tree plantations, which supported the commodity-driven economies of settler-colonists and criminalized the fire-centered culture of indigenous peoples. As a result, Black Oak woodlands and other ecosystems that thrive with frequent, low-intensity fires are less abundant in these mountains (and throughout California), and basket weavers do not have sufficient materials to teach the next generations how to weave. In the Fall of 2017, a Forest Service fire manager showed me the challenges of reintroducing fire to areas that have not been burned in half a century or more at a prescribed fire unit on the Six Rivers National Forest. Years ago, Karuk

basket weavers identified this location as a good place to burn and gather California hazelnut and it was finally being burned. Yet while some of the understory was still smoldering next to us, a large portion of the unit would not burn. Like many other parts of this forest, 50 – 75 year old Douglas firs now dominate the overstory, young Douglas firs are prolific in the understory, and broadleaf trees, like Black Oak and Madrone are dying due to lack of sun. The small size of fir needles and the deep shade of fir trees make burning these forests difficult after the first Fall rains when there is a hint of moisture in the leaf litter. Thus, my fire manager friend was frustrated that he couldn’t meet his objectives to kill the young Douglas firs, and top-kill the hazelnut for basketry. Ecological changes make prescribed burning difficult, and current political and economic constraints impede prescribed burning when climatic conditions are ideal. Despite policies seeking to reverse the negative consequences of fire suppression and exclusion, it is often environmental laws, like the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act that require long and complex planning and scoping exercises, making it difficult for Tribes to assert their sovereignty and restore fire to their lands. Once those hurdles are passed, resources are often inadequate to support planned prescribed fires. For example, the Six Rivers National Forest did not have sufficient equipment or personnel available to prescribe burns in the late summer before dampening rains because the Forest Service prioritized suppressing wildfires. A week after the unit I visited was burned, permits for other planned fires in the region were revoked because backup firefighting resources were all sent to suppress the calamitous fires burning in Mendocino, Sonoma, and

Napa counties. Resources for lighting more controlled fires have been usurped to suppress ever-larger wildfires, which are growing in size due, in part, to past and ongoing fire suppression efforts. Fire-adapted forest ecosystems subjected to suppression accumulate more and more dead woody fuels, which given the inevitable lightning strike or unintentional spark, will only burn more intensely than forests that are burned regularly. As such, it is hard to get out of the fire suppression cycle. Karuk and Yurok Tribal members and descendants are creatively attempting to reassert their autonomy within and outside the confines of federally controlled Tribal governance systems to get more fire on the land. From the basket weavers, fire professionals, ceremonial families, and community organizers, there are people working to reverse the legacy of Western forestry for the next generations and those who came before. Their efforts remind me of the ingenuity used by Coyote and other spiritual relatives in a Karuk story I have been told many times. To paraphrase, in the time before humans, Coyote organized many different animals to collectively bring fire from the edge of the world to Karuk territory, and to do so each animal used their unique attributes and skills. Burning is a highly spiritual practice, connected to these ancestors and spiritual beings. These powerful connections to the past and future are what make my field work extremely inspirational and humbling, and I hope they can inform our relationship to the land across California and the continent.

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Un d er g rad Fi eld n otes by While it is unlikely that the utterance of a phrase like, “with my ogles, I varda one hot dish of chicken…he’s one hell of an omi-polone hoofer!” would be met by anything other than confused, blank stares today, this was not always the case. In fact, in 1960’s Britain, responses might have ranged from furrowed brows to undone trousers, as the ability to comprehend and speak what appeared to be a distinctly English-adjacent language spoke volumes about one’s social status. The language, known as Polari, was popularized during a time of immense social and political persecution, and was used in large part by gay men1 who sought sex and companionship without fear of consequence. Enabling speakers to quickly differentiate between those who were “in the know,” and those who were not, Polari operated as a form of codespeaking whose linguistic exclusivity afforded a degree of safety during an era of uncertainty. However, the language’s intentionally narrow scale and scope has left many to wonder about its effects. Some, for example, have taken to interpersonal analyses and have examined how Polari became an undeniable hallmark of gay identity during the period of its use (Kulick, 2000; Raban, 1973). Others have taken more structural approaches and inquired about the social dynamics informing the processes of both exclusion and acceptance, as well as about the contexts affecting Polari’s use (Livia & Hall, 1997; Johnstone, 1997). However, scholars on both sides have refused to bridge this dialogic aporia, and countless crucially important questions about the nature of language and power have remained without adequate answer.

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Tony Hackett, undergrad anthropology Sophomore

A view of Polari that takes into account the social and political circumstances of its emergence suggests that Polari was a useful tactic in navigating oppressive conditions. The coded nature of Polari enabled speakers to “go undercover” and avoid discrimination on personal and political levels. More importantly, Polari helped to normalize certain aspects of the gay identity and argue that it played a crucial role in the creation of a gay subculture of the era. An essential element of “queer performativity,” Polari subverted gendered and sexual norms and allowed for the expression of identity and performance in ways that would have been otherwise suppressed given the circumstance. The Binnie-Hale of Brighton Pier2: The story of Polari While constantly changing, Polari, as well as its attendant sense of secrecy, enabled individuals to safely navigate the heteronormativity of daily life. This quiet rebellion occurred in tandem with the increased criminalization of homosexuality in Britain and was partially the result of a trend toward urbanization, which put gay men into unprecedented proximity (Mellor, 1983). However, despite their physical closeness, the fear of repercussions forced many to remain in hiding (Baker, 2002). During a time when men were forced to find each other in increasingly undetectable ways (Baker, 2002), Polari became an easy answer, as it was familiar to a large number of homosexual men who watched Round the Horne, and its “coded” nature enabled them to converse in ways that were unintelligible to outsiders and the police (Barrett, 2017). The ability to “drop in

a few words” and see if “they were3 picked up” by the listener enabled gay men to safely and secretly find others who were “in the know” (Leap, p. 49). Many gay men gained a new sense of freedom, as they were able to find each other for sex or companionship without the burgeoning fear of potential exposure (Hancock, 1984; Barrett, 2017). However, gay men met for much more than just casual sex. In fact, many used Polari as a tool to coalesce, forming independent networks of both platonic and sexual relationships. While there certainly existed gay bars, clubs, and stores in the “urban underworld,” Polari dramatically widened the scope of the communitybuilding effort and connected many with an otherwise “non-existent” subcultural group (Baker, 2002). Because it was only passed via word of mouth, the language was treated as a “rite of passage” for new members of the gay community, and it acted as a bridge for many to join the larger “in-group” (Brougham & Baker, 2016). Similar to Dr. Ben Rampton’s conception of “crossing,” this form of initiation dually acted as a form of “enculturation,” as well as movement across otherwise unmalleable social boundaries (Rampton, 1995). For example, one might share information about a new joint opening up downtown, 1. While there is undoubted difficulty in ascribing a single definition to this term, I use “gay” most generally to refer to homosexually-identified men. 2. According to Alywin’s Load of Cockney Cobblers, this Polari translates to roughly: “A story about queers” Continued on page 25


Un d erg rad Fi eld n ot es by

katherine zechnich, undergrad anthropology senior

On Homelessness, Community, and the Practice of Noticing This past summer I conducted research for my thesis on the intersection of health and housing. I wanted to better understand how the medical system addresses housing as a social determinant of health, and the ways in which various actors (including people experiencing homelessness themselves) understand the care that they provide for a “homeless population.” Growing up in Portland, Oregon, I was accustomed to seeing homeless people on the sidewalks of certain downtown neighborhoods and freeway off-ramps. The evening news frequently discussed the city’s “homeless crisis,” with these public conversations centering around efforts to clean up parks and encampments. As I started volunteer shifts at my field sites - a day-shelter downtown, an emergency department, and a housing-first organization in Portland’s suburbs - I also began to practice the ‘art of noticing.’ Apart from hours spent directly in “the field,” I paid attention to how Portland as a city engaged with people living on the streets. I noticed complaints about vagrancy in the comments section of online news articles, the way people avoided eye contact with the man asking for money outside of Powell’s, and how people (several of whom I came to recognize) moved their belongings and their bodies throughout the downtown blocks. As I paid attention, even quietly, people, and their everyday lived experiences, became visible. Indeed many of these daily routines - greeting friends, sleeping, asking for money - were public. In some ways this is the very definition of life without a home; actions we understand to be private, to occur in one’s own space, are made public without that space. How are these public routines then made invisible? Why does the person leaving the grocery store work to avoid eye contact with the person selling the weekly edition of Street Roots outside?

The medical settings I observed seemed to present a similar paradox of visibility: patients experiencing homelessness made up a large subset of local emergency departments’ high utilizer population (78% of one study’s high utilizer cohort met the HUD definition of homeless), and yet their underlying social needs, specifically housing, were hard to understand and address within a biomedical context. Furthermore, patients’ health and housing status were often interconnected. For example, if a patient has diabetes, it is often difficult to store and take insulin consistently without the security of a house and refrigerator. Therefore, this patient might be seen repeatedly for high blood sugar while her housing status is understood to be a separate, or at least untreatable, issue. I came to question, therefore, how certain concerns were made invisible within a medical context, even though they related directly to patients’ health. Once these observations become visible, they are difficult to ignore. No longer do they go unnoticed, and I, as the observer, am also forced to question my own role. As expected, I learned a lot about our medical system, social services, and the people experiencing homelessness. But I also learned a lot about myself and our community. Why does the shopper leaving the store look past them? Why do our health care workers seem to gaze only through the lens of medical training? In what ways have I participated in the same processes that make invisible certain people and experiences? Given the privilege of observation I had as a researcher and the position from which I was able to practice noticing, I was able to recognize new points of connectedness. I witnessed the ways in which social determinants influence health, the devastating effects of homelessness, and a health care system ill-equipped to address it. I also found myself encouraged by moments of caring exhibited by healthcare workers, social service providers, and people living on the streets, growing awareness of the impact of homelessness on our community’s health, and increasing recognition that our health care system needs to address them. I hope to use this ‘practice of noticing’ to increase my awareness and compassion and to better understand my role and responsibility as a community-member in shaping this system.

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A lu mn i News

1950 Nancy M Williams (BA 1950) Honorary Reader in Anthropology, School of Social Science, University of Queensland. James H Erickson (AB 1952) Retired physician (U.S. Public Health Service) and retired minister (Evangelical Covenant Church). Adjunct Professor, Aurora University, Dept. of Biology and Health Sciences. Coordinator of Senior Ministries, Geneva Lutheran Church.. Enjoying retirement, after over 37 years in military medicine, medical school, graduate school and undergraduate teaching, and various ministry settings. at home and abroad.

1960 Lynda Lytle Holmstrom (BA 1961) Professor Emerita, Sociology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. I’m still active professionally and in Stanford alumni clubs (e.g., SWAN; Stanford in Boston). It was great to have a Boston visit from our new President in which he spoke about the future of Stanford and extended an invitation to each alum to submit an idea for the planning process. I dutifully complied and wrote a proposal based on my research. I’ve said for years that violence against women is probably the top public health problem we face both locally and globally. So I suggested how Stanford should and could “become a world leader in research in the prevention of and response to violence against women and girls by fund raising to develop an interdisciplinary center or program dedicated to this goal that would include research fellowships for faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate students." Joanne T Alexander (BA 1963) Retired. Songwriter/singer--2 new songs last year--"Passing Through Time" and "Soy Mujer". One this year--"The Last Goodbye". Stories published on Smashwords.com. See "Turning Points: It Started with the Dog" and other stories starting in the Turning Points series. Rosana L Hart (BA 1964) Writer at Hartworks LLC. I'm writing my memoirs as a series of short books, and the first two will be out soon. "Around the World at Nineteen: Explorations and Romances" and "African Summer: A Crossroader in Sierra Leone" describe events that happened during my Stanford years and

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there are a number of places where I comment on how anthropology was shaping my worldview. Kathryn T Molohon (BA 1964) Professor Emeritus, Anthropology Program, Laurentian University. George Gmelch (BA 1968) Professor, USF and Union College. New book: IN THE FIELD: THE LIFE AND WORK OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, University of California Press, 2018. Finalist for the Casey Book Award: PLAYING WITH TIGERS: A MINOR-LEAGUE CHRONICLE OF THE SIXTIES. University of Nebraska Press. 2017 Anya Peterson Royce (AB 1968) Chancellor's Professor of Anthropology and of Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington. I was given the 2018 Tracy M. Sonneborn award for Distinguished Research, Creative Activity, and Teaching. I was also awarded the Medalla Binniza [Medal of the Zapotec People], by the Fundación Histórico Cultural Juchitán for distinguished scholarly contributions to the Isthmus Zapotec. I was appointed a member of the Board of Directors, Ériu Dance Company, Ireland, directed by Breadán de Gallai,and to the International Advisory Board, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica. I published a book chapter “Being Curated by a Divine Force:"" The Forty-plus year Success of the Pilobolus Dance Theater, Chapter in volume Psycho-Cultural Analysis of Folklore (in memory of Alan Dundes) P. Chenna Reddy and M. Sarat Babu, eds.B R Publishing Corporation, Delhi, 2018 (ISBN 9789386223425) as well as "Elizabeth Colson (1917–2016): reflections on a conversation", Anthropology Southern Africa Vol. 40 Iss. 2,2017. Savannah E Walling (BA 1968) Artistic Director, Vancouver Moving Theatre; Associate Artistic Director, Downtown Eastside Heart of the CIty Festival. Vancouver Moving Theatre/Coast Salish Territory: • Partnered on Survivors Totem Pole raising and potlatch witnessing ceremonies in Pigeon Park (Sacred Circle Society); • Co-produced 14th annual Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival; • Partnered with City Opera Vancouver and Pacific Opera Victoria on chamber opera Missing by Metis librettist Marie Clements. Set in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and along the Highway of Tears, Missing was created to give voice to the story of Canada’s missing and murdered indigenous women: to show that each and every one of

these women are valued; • We will share a family’s healing story created in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with communities across Canada. Weaving Reconciliation: Our Way is co-produced in collaboration with partners across Canada (May 17-June 16, 2018). Led and performed by Indigenous artists, the new play and cultural encounter is woven around indigenous storytelling, cultural teachings, lived experience, oral history and the ancient bone game of Slahal. George W Nowell (AB 1969) Sr. Attorney, Law Offices of George W. Nowell. Approaching 40th anniversary of graduation from the Stanford Law School and 40 years of practicing Admiralty, transportation and Insurance Law using lessons learned from the faculty and classmates of 1967-69. Thank you!

1970 Eric Almquist (AB 1970) Partner, Bain & Company. Published two recent articles on what customers value: 1) The Elements of Value, Harvard Business Review, September 2016; 2) The B2B Elements of Value, Harvard Business Review, March/April, 2018. Chuck Fulkerson, JR. (BA 1970) Semi-retired. Sold a dozen watercolor paintings of historic Main Street Newtown (CT) houses to an area bank for a tidy sum. All now hang in bank's lobby. My article and paintings about the challenges of painting plein air (on site, in the moment) appeared in June 2017 Railfan/Railroad, a nationally circulated magazine for train lovers. Ellen Gruenbaum (AB 1970) Professor and Head, Department of Anthropology, Purdue University. Completing my 10th--and final!--year as department head. Fall semester I will be a Fellow of the Center for Social Sciences at Purdue, working to complete the writing of my book project on generating changes in FGC practices in African contexts, based on long-term ethnographic research and interviews with activists. Plan to retire back to California by early 2019. Stephen F Jones (BA 1970) Retired from 40 years in the microwave radio industry. We spent several weeks in Bhutan in October 2017. We felt like we were seeing how our ancestors lived in northern Europe in the 12th century. Their


A l u mn i N ews combination of Buddhism and pagan spirit worship seems very similar to the Catholic church and animism co-existing 800 years ago in Europe. The people are very friendly and not yet too corrupted by Western vices! Carolyn L Clark (BA 1971) Professor of Communication (tenured, retired) Salt Lake Community College. It was fun to attend my 45th reunion at Stanford in 2016. At the reunion, I completed the OVAL training for interviewing prospective Stanford students. I've been enjoying helping out with these interviews for the past two years. It's inspiring to see the quality of the students who are applying. Edward Leven (BA 1971) Retired. Recently trained to be a Volunteer Naturalist at Savino Canyon in Tucson, AZ, part of the US Forest Service. Teaching elementary school children about the Hohokam people who lived in the Tucson Basin. W. Bruce Masse (BA 1971) Guest Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory. I am working on three books that together represent a natural science approach to mythology. My approach utilizes archaeology, geosciences, astronomy, and biology to study the natural observational content of worldwide myths and oral traditions, focusing on methods and data that place myth storylines into historical, metaphysical, and chronological context. This effort represents a follow-up to Myth and Geology, co-edited with Italian geologist Luigi Piccardi, published in 2007 by the Geological Society of London. The three books currently in preparation include: Islands in the Sky: Traditional Astronomy and the Role of Celestial Phenomena in Hawaiian Myth, Language, Religion, and Chiefly Power (University of Hawai‘i Press); Myth and the Mythmakers: A Natural Science Perspective on the Coevolution of Myth, Religion, Philosophy, and Science; and O‘odham Traditions of the Hohokam War: A Native American Iliad and Odyssey. The latter two book projects are being prepared for proposal submission late in 2018. Eleanor T Perkins (BA 1972) Retired. Still here!! :-) Laurie J Price (BA 1972) Professor Emeritus, Anthropology. California State University East Bay. As Anthropology faculty over the past 30 years, I taught anthropology to 8000+ students, including courses in Research Methods, Theory, Latin

America, Environmental Anthropology, Life History, Applied Anthropology, and Medical Anthropology. I also oversaw the M.A. projects and thesis writing of 150+ anthropology graduate students, including students who worked in Haiti, Ghana, Rwanda, the Navajo reservation, Silicon Valley, and Oakland. I also did two tours of duty as department chair. My recent scholarship includes AAA/SfAA research presentations on cultural production in climate change activism (India, U.K., Spain, and U.S.). With retirement in June 2018, I plan to finish writing up that (and other) research for publication. Verne ("Van") Dusenbery (AB 1973) Professor Emeritus, Anthropology, Hamline University. In May 2017, received a Lifetime Achievement Award for "distinguished contributions to the Study of the Sikh Diaspora" from the Dr. Jasbir Singh Saini Endowed Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Elaine C Wong (AB 1973) Senior Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University. I recently served on the Brandeis Task Force on General Education, which after a process lasting two years has gained approval from the faculty and Board of Trustees to implement new general education requirements for the class of 2023. These new requirements will include courses in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Studies in the United States; Difference and Justice in the World; and Digital Literacy, Oral Communication, Quantitative Reasoning, and Writing Intensive Foundational Literacies, as well as non-credit Health, Wellness and Life Skills modules. Jean DeBernardi (BA 1973) Acting Chair and Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta. I am still teaching in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta in Canada. I just completed a research project on "Material Identity: The Anthropology of Contemporary Chinese Tea Culture" and in 2017 presented a paper on the history of tea packaging at a conference on "Food Packaging: Uncovering the History" in Tokyo. Stephen A Dougherty (BA 1973) Mostly retired and writing some novels for fun. I have a couple of books up (or about to be up) on Amazon. If you remember me, you might buy "Taboom" or "Scamland" for your amusement and edification. Assuming I don't get lazy, I should finish a 3rd book in the next year. Oh, I'm also bicycling 10,000 miles per year along the beach in Los Angeles.

Barbara Salomon (BA 1973) Retired attorney and mediator. Spending part of each year in N Wisconsin, not far from George and Louise Spindler’s Menominee. Cultural and environmental change are the constants. Rhonda Martyn (BA 1974) Faculty, Dance Department, Cabrillo College, Aptos, CA. I am co-directing the Cabrillo College Spring Dance Concert with my Department Chair on May 11, 12 and 13 at the Crocker Theater. Created two new pieces of choreography - one is danced on rolling office chairs to music by Shakira and the other is survey of Latin Dance styles including Salsa, Cha-Cha-Cha, and a Flamenco form called "Sevillana". Hector Neff (AB 1975) Professor of Anthropology, CSULB. Other than teaching undergraduates, my main current activity is archaeological fieldwork in Nicaragua. I have NGS and university funding to investigate the impact of ancient volcanism in the vicinity of present-day Managua. As I write (March 23, 2018), three students, another colleague, and I are excavating a sub-volcanic ash archaeological deposit called La Arenera ("sand quarry") that appears to date to the Tempisque Period (300 BC - AD 500). We had hoped to find preserved structures and/or agricultural fields, but so far that hope has not been realized. Frederick Spielberg (BA 1978) Specialist, Child Protection and Humanitarian Action UNICEF-Colombia. As part of a multi-sectoral international working team, helped design and implement an on-line simulation of a hypothetical infectious disease outbreak for analysis and action by the Principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee of humanitarian organizations based in Geneva. Post-simulation debriefing (Geneva, December 2017) served to assess the value of current protocols for humanitarian action by UN agencies, international NGOs and the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement. Dan Callahan (AB 1979) VP of Sales and Marketing, CGNET. Spent most of Summer 2017 in Rome, working with the World Food Programme on a change management initiative. My Italian comprehension has improved a lot! Jonathan D Salk (BA 1979) Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and Psychiatrist in Private Practice in West Los Angeles, CA. Publication of book, A New VOLUME 11 | 2017 / 2018 NEWSLETTER

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A lu mn i News Reality: Human Evolution for a Sustainable Future. City Point Press, 2018, Publication Date: June 26, 2018. Jonas Salk and Jonathan Salk. In a time of transition in a world troubled with chaos and confusion, A New Reality takes a long-term perspective, offering hope for the future.

1980 Julie Cohn (MA 1980) Research Historian, Center for Public History, University of Houston. I am pleased to report that MIT Press released my book, The Grid: Biography of an American Technology, at the very end of 2017. The book examines the development the North American electric transmission network over the course of the twentieth century, with a focus on the strategies and technologies used to control power on the grid. Laurette Hayden (BA 1980) Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. After working for over 25 years as a network television executive, I returned to school, earning a Masters in Clinical Psychology from Antioch Universtiy. I then began a second career, becoming a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I currently maintain a private practice in West Los Angeles, working with individuals, couples, families and groups dealing with depression, anxiety, complex trauma, relationship issues, life transitions, chronic and acute illness, grief and loss, and military/veteran challenges. I'm also a Clinical Specialist with the Department of Neurology at UCLA and work part time at a treatment center. In addition, I provide pro bono counseling for veterans and family members through The Soldiers Project. My anthroplogical focus at Stanford helped prepare me for both careers! Previously, I counseled students (K-12) in several Los Angeles County schools, provided community curbside counseling for homeless youth and offered home-based intervention and support for Early Head Start families. I have additional training and/or certification in EMDR, Somatic Experiencing® and the Gottman Method of couples counseling and provides clinical supervision for MFT interns. Prior to becoming a therapist, I worked for over 25 years as a television network executive and producer. Monica G Brickwedel (AB 1983) Cultural Geography Teacher at Granada High School in Livermore, CA. 33rd year of

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teaching after completing STEP Emily Lee (BA 1984) Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco. • Co-chaired inaugural Stanford Asian Pacific Alumni Summit, Stanford, April 2017; • Faculty Director, Cultural Psychiatry Area of Distinction, UCSF Psychiatry Department; • Stanford Asian American Alumni Award 2017; • Stanford Award of Merit 2018 Steve Sellers (BA 1984) Business Consultant. My consulting work focuses on socially responsible businesses and non-profits in the early stages ($0 $100 mil in revenue) of their growth. Over the past year I've been based in Oakland, working with Fair Trade USA as their interim COO to help guide them through a set of organizational and operational challenges. I love the Fair Trade model, which harnesses consumer choice to power sustainable global development. Julia L Offen (BA 1986) Analyst, Topos Partnership; Fiction and Creative Nonfiction Editor, Anthropology and Humanism; Society for Humanistic Anthropology competition chair: Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and Ethnographic Fiction and Creative Nonfiction Writing Contest; Freelance Editing. Sarah Bryer (BA 1989) President and Executive Director, National Juvenile Justice Network (NJJN). In the last two years, NJJN has adopted an explicit focus on integrating anti-racist approaches throughout its national operations and larger membership body. Our work has begun with an analysis of the distribution of power within our membership organizations as well as scrutiny of our policy proposals, communications and language, and national alliances. Danyelle M O'Hara (BA 1989) Program Director of the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities Sustainable Forestry African American Land Retention Program.

1990 Alison C Holcomb (BA 1990) Director of Strategy, ACLU of Washington State. In the past year, I have enjoyed serving as the Board Chair for the International Drug Policy Consortium and helping facilitate a governance review for the growing

organization. I've also rejoined the ACLU of Washington during a period of record growth and reorganization in the wake of the November 2016 elections, and I am leading the restructure and expansion of its legislative advocacy program. Carol Eunmi Lee (MA 1990) Professor of Integrative Biology, Trainer in Genetics, Trainer in Genome Sciences, University of Wisconsin. Published the most cited paper in my field, on the Evolutionary Genetics of Invasive Species. Dee A Espinoza, MA, RPA (BA 1993) CEO, Espinoza Consulting Services; Trustee, Town of La Jara; Board Member, Colorado Minority Business Advisory Council. My husband, Julian, and I celebrated our 11th anniversary and look forward to harassing each other for many years to come. We acquired a new puppy, Rocky (aka Rockford Piles). All the kids and grandkids are doing well. Our businesses have also been busy and growing. Espinoza Consulting Services is in its 8th year (www.ecs-arch.com) and JEAR Collision Repair is in its 3rd year in its new facilities (jearauto.wixsite.com/collision). We keep hiring more employees and own three commercial buildings. We are busy buying and tearing down blighted properties. In 2017, I completed the Stanford Latino Entrepreneur Leaders Program (lban. us). It was great to be back on the farm and brought back many fond memories. Scott G Ortman (BA 1994) Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Colorado Boulder. Recent accomplishments: Linda S. Cordell Book Prize, School for Advanced Research; External Faculty Appointment, Santa Fe Institute; Co-Director, CU/Pojoaque Pueblo Youth Culture Camp. Michelle Chase (BA 1995) Assistant Professor of History, Pace University. Michelle is a historian of Modern Latin America and the Caribbean. She is currently an assistant professor at Pace University. Her book, Revolution within the Revolution, on the gender politics of the Cuban Revolution, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. She lives in New York with her husband, Vinod, and their two sons, Rishi (5) and Rohan (3). Carolyn Laub (AB 1995) Nonprofit strategy consultant. Affiliated with Wonder: Strategies for Good and Public Equity Group. Carolyn founded and led (1998-2014) a youth-led social justice non-profit, Gay-Straight Alliance Network,


A l u mn i N ews which organizes LGBTQ youth to create safe and just schools. Her proudest accomplishment is helping pass a law to require LGBT-inclusive history and social studies instruction in California and then leading a coalition of youth and family organizations and academics to successfully advocate for approval in 2016 of the most LGBT-inclusive K-12 history curriculum framework in the nation and, in 2017, 10 LGBT-inclusive history and social studies textbooks. Students will learn about topics such as: LGBT families, famous LGBT rights pioneers such as Bayard Rustin, Sylvia Rivera, and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, gender and sexual diversity in the Harlem Renaissance, the struggle for transgender civil rights, and marriage equality. Carolyn currently works as a nonprofit strategy consultant, social entrepreneur, and executive coach. In 2017, she returned to Stanford as a Social Entrepreneur in Residence (SEERS) Fellow. Perla Cavazos (BA 1997) Vice President of Government Affairs at Central Health (Travis County Healthcare District). I recently gave birth to my first child, Rosalinda Marie, and am enjoying my most significant personal accomplishment! I am enjoying motherhood and the new challenge of balancing work and parenthood. Additionally, two months after returning to work I was promoted to VP of Government Affairs. I am now part of an Executive team working hard to expand access to health care for individuals in our community who are low income or uninsured. Social justice and equity is something I learned as an undergrad collecting ethnographies of Mexican Americans in California and Texas. I’m glad I can put that education & experience into practice.

2000 Kathleen Coll (PhD 2001) Associate Professor of Politics, University of San Francisco. Cuauhtemoc Gonzalez (BA 2002) Associate Pediatric Dentist. Graduated from University of the Pacific School of Dentistry in San Francisco in 2015. Completed Pediatric Dental Residency at Yale/ New Haven Hospital in New Haven, CT in 2017. Sarah J Pollet (BA 2003) UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. Nicole Fox (MA 2004) Economic Officer, U.S. Embassy Manila.

I cover the environment, science & tech, health, energy, and mining portfolio at U.S. Embassy Manila. I also serve on the Board of the Forest Foundation of the Philippines and served as the Press Officer for the 2017 ASEAN Summit. Mollie A Chapman (BA 2006) Postdoc at the Institute of Geography, University of Zürich. The past 6 months have been a whirlwind. On top of successfully defending my dissertation in Resource Management and Environmental Studies, I became a Swiss citizen and began a postdoc at the University of Zürich, leaving my home of 5 years in Vancouver, Canada. My dissertation can be found here: Chapman, M. A. (2017). Agri-'culture' and biodiversity : rethinking payments for ecosystem services in light of relational values. Resource Management and Environmental Studies. Vancouver, Canada, University of British Columbia. Doctor of Philosophy - PhD. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/24/ items/1.0362233". Francisca L James Hernandez (PhD 2007) Instructional Faculty and Head, Dept. of Ethnic, Gender and Transborder Studies, Pima Community College, Tucson, AZ; Research Assoc., Southwest Institute for Research on Women (SIROW), University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Co-founded and current Head of the Dept. of Ethnic, Gender and Transborder Studies (EGTS), Pima Community College, Tucson, AZ. Established the annual Raquel Rubio Goldsmith Lecture in EGTS at Pima College, which most recently featured National Book Award winner Joy Harjo. Established an annual EGTS Summit at my college; this year (May 7) fellow Stanford alum and sociologist, Dr. Angela Valenzuela (UT Austin), will give the keynote address. Received the Victoria Foundation Award for Teaching/ Service in Higher Education. Co-founded the Ethnic Studies Articulation Taskforce to facilitate the transfer of Arizona’s community college students to the state’s public universities. Invited participant in Policy History Conference panel, "The Year of the Woman, Past and Present" (May 2018). Travelled to Mumbai and Goa, India, for two weeks last June with dear friend and fellow Stanford anthro alum, Rosalva Aida Hernández, to visit university colleagues and enjoy the sights. Carolyn M duPont (BA 2008) Director of Environmental Transactions, Quantified Ventures. I joined Quantified Ventures in 2017 to build the field of conservation finance through Environmental

Impact Bonds -- working on financing urban and coastal resilience projects, agricultural improvements, recreation infrastructure on national forests, and more. My husband Johnny '09 and I had our first baby, Nate, in October 2017, and are living in Boston. Would love to catch up with anyone who's around! Cora L Garcia (MA 2008) Adjunct Instructor, Anthropology, Merritt College. Jocelyn B Hunter (BA 2008) Graduate student at Sonoma State University, California. Completed a Master's degree in Cultural Resource Management from Sonoma State University. Mitali Thakor (BA 2009) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sexualities Project at Northwestern University, with affiliations in Anthropology and Gender & Sexuality Studies. In Fall 2018, Mitali will join the faculty at Wesleyan University as an Assistant Professor in the Science in Society Program. You can read more about her work at http://www.mitalithakor.com and on Twitter at @mitalithakor.

2010 Jessica Havlak (BA 2010) Manager at ICF. Got married. Graduated with MPH in Communication and Marketing from The George Washington University Mullen Institute of Public Health. Jennifer S O'Neil (BA 2010) Center for Global Education. Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Predeparture and Reentry Programming Coordinator. My passion for international education began when I participated in Stanford's Santiago, Chile program. This experience left me itching for more international connections. Therefore, after graduation I moved to southern Spain to teach English, with the intent of staying for 6 months. Now, 5 and a half years later, I am just moving back to the states, with a Spanish husband (and dog) in tow. At Hobart and William Smith Colleges, I work closely with students both before and after they study abroad. As a member of the Center for Global Education team, I am responsible for developing a variety of innovative programs and activities designed to better prepare students to make the most of their international experiences. In addition, I oversee a wide range of reentry

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A lu mn i News activities that encourage students returning from abroad to reflect on and remain engaged with the new places and perspectives they encountered and to share their experiences with our campus community. I am constantly sharing the lessons I learned from Stanford's anthropology program with my students. International education truly changed my life and I am lucky enough to be in a position where I am helping the next generation become more globally minded. Kelsey Broderick (BA 2011) Analyst at Eurasia Group. After leaving Stanford, I lived in China for three years before attending Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. I am currently a political risk analyst covering Asia at Eurasia Group in Washington, DC. Gaylan Dascanio (BA 2011) Department of Anthropology Alumna. In May 2018, I will be graduating from the University of Colorado School of Medicine with an MD degree. I will then start my residency in the Department of Pediatrics at UT Southwestern in Dallas, TX. During medical school, I was part of the Global Health Track and performed a research project on health screening recommendations for international adoptees, which was presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in 2016. I have also had the opportunity to publish several poems and personal essays in various medicine-related journals and books over the past few years. This year, I was selected to become a member of both the Gold Humanism Honor Society and the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. More personally, in April 2018, I married my Stanford sweetheart of 8 ½ years :) Rania Sweis (PhD 2011) Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies. • Published journal article in Medical Anthropology Quarterly titled, "Security and the Traumatized Street Child: How Gender Shapes International Psychiatric Aid in Cairo" (2017); • published journal article in Childhood titled, "Children as Biological Sufferers? The Paradox of International Medial Aid with Homeless Children in Cairo" (2017); • published book chapter titled "Do Muslim Village Girls Need Saving? Critical Reflections on Gender and the Suffering Child in International Aid" in

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the book The Global Status of Women and Girls, edited by Lori Underwood and Dawn Hutchinson, Lexington Books, (2017). I am currently finalizing book manuscript titled In the Name of Young Humanity: The Politics of International Medical Aid with Children in Egypt. Karen A Acevedo (BA 2012) Registered Nurse at La Clinica de la Raza and Masters Student at UCSF. Currently enrolled in the Masters of Science in Nursing program at UCSF. I will be graduating in June 2018 with an MSN and begin my new role as a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner. Andres Y Gonzalez (BA 2012) Second Year Law Student, University of Hawaii. This past year I have had the honor to serve the Hispanic National Bar Association - Law Student Division as co-president of region XVII representing Northern California and Hawaii. I was recently selected as one of the ATJ Tech Fellows and will be spending the summer in New York working with LawHelpNY and Nassau Suffolk Law Services. Susannah R Poland (BA 2012) Associate Director, Putney Student Travel / National Geographic Student Expeditions. For the past four years I have been developing adolescent education programs in Nepal and Bhutan for National Geographic Student Expeditions, Putney Student Travel, and Phillips Academy Andover. I use mindfulness and design thinking as tools to teach anthropological methods and service-learning in the field. I also study Early Buddhism and practice meditation, and recently sat a six-week silent meditation retreat. Erika N Alvero (BA 2013) Staff reporter, Pleasanton Weekly. I'm now a journalist, currently covering education and water in Pleasanton and the Tri-Valley. Elizabeth Rosen (BA 2013) Media Analyst at NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). I lived through two natural disasters in 2017: Hurricane Irma and the Northern California Wildfires. Daphne Martschenko (BA 2014) PhD Candidate University of Cambridge,

Faculty of Education. Daphne Martschenko has been in the UK since graduating from Stanford. Coming first for a Master's in Politics, Development, and Democratic Education, she's now in the third year of PhD at the University of Cambridge in the Education department. Daphne's research combines the sociology of education with bioethics, examining the ways in which behavioral genetics research on intelligence does and could shape how American educators conceptualize intelligence and student success. Specifically, her dissertation explores how genetics research on IQ and educator understandings of intelligence may engage with the phenomenon of ethnic minority and lowincome underrepresentation in US gifted education programs. Alongside her PhD, Daphne was elected 2017-2018 President of Cambridge University Women's Boat Club. She's competed in the 2015 and 2016 Boat Races against Oxford, the most televised and watched rowing event in the world. As the first person of color to row in the Boat Race in 2015 and the first person of color to be elected President of an Oxford or Cambridge University Boat Club, Daphne is advocating for increased diversity and accessibility in the sport of rowing. She ended her rowing career on March 24th, 2018 with a clean sweep for Cambridge University, the first since 1993. Finally, Daphne has continued her work with the non-profit organization Camp Phoenix of which she was a member of the founding team during her time at Stanford in 2013. Camp Phoenix brings joyful learning to historically marginalized children in the Bay Area through regular mentorship and a three-week sleep away camp near Half Moon Bay. Daphne looks forward to finishing her PhD, which she anticipates completing in the fall of 2018 before returning to the United States and continuing her passion for social justice and equity. Anna Malaika G Nti-Asare-Tubbs (BA 2014) Doctoral student and Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. I am a PhD student in the department of sociology at the University of Cambridge and I received the prestigious Gates Cambridge scholarship.


Tony Hackett (continued from page 18)

advance knowledge of an impending police raid, or provide simple advice, and in doing so, aid in the collective continuance of the community. Polari thus became an essential tool by which individuals were able to eschew institutionalized social norms and instead operate in accordance with their own wants and needs. It is for this reason that the “code-switching,” afforded to Polari speakers more broadly, acted as a means of institutional defiance, as it both facilitated and encouraged “criminal” homosexual acts, though in subtle and often unnoticed ways. For this reason, Rodgers contends that Polari and gay slang more generally housed the potential to both “promote group cohesion” as well as “constitute a form of social protest” (Rodgers, 1972). Acting in ways incongruous to the social order enabled Polari speakers to decry the stigmatization of homosexuality, constantly renegotiating their interactions with others and with the state. Nishta-Nanti that3: Remembering Polari Although a once well-kept secret, Polari has remained all but forgotten today. Whether manifest in discourse between gay individuals on social media platforms and the internet, or in the existence of entire disciplines, the influence of Polari has been recognized by both linguists and non-linguists alike. Despite its implications for understanding language, gender, sexuality, and performance more broadly, Polari has perhaps remained most important for revealing the relationships between identity and culture.

In all, Polari appears to be a means by which individuals were able to renegotiate what it meant to be gay for both themselves and for their communities. By “switching codes,” gay men were able to rechoreograph the normative world order, all the while redefining the language and how it was used. Equally true, though, and often unnoticed, is the inverse. That is, the language and its use came to define the lives of gay men, shaping their interactions with others and the world more broadly in processes not unlike those that continue to exist today. And thus, when we conceive of Polari and other forms of code-speak, we are conceiving of much more than a mere form of communication. We are conceiving of social re-scripting, of survival strategies, and of world-building. We are conceiving of language as an instrument with the power to captivate, to collectivize, to constrain, and to construct. And yet, perhaps most importantly, we are conceiving of both a mirror and a guide for social progress, offering immense insight into survival through the bona, the naff, and the meese4.

3. According to the Polari Dictionary, this phrase translates to roughly: “Don’t forget that!” 4. According to the Polari Dictionary, this phrase translates to roughly: “The good, the bad, and the ugly.”

Katherine Verdery (continued from page 6)

and then conducted seminal research after these transformations—what, to you, seem to be the most interesting approaches to studying formerly socialist states, now 25 years after the end of the USSR? The answer to that is controversial because there have been a lot of graduate students who went to work in the former Soviet bloc without knowing very much about what had gone before. I remember talking with a friend of mine who was running a series at Cornell University Press on socialism and post-socialism. He said, "We’ve gotten so many manuscripts from people just back from their first fieldwork and they give a lot of rich information but they don’t know what to do with it." This is one reason why, up until the last time I taught my Eastern Europe class, I started with work on the socialist period. I said, "You have to know something about how this worked." I gave students my own chapter on theorizing socialism. Some of them said, "We don’t re-

ally feel like we need to know this." But, I feel that one does need to know this. The communist years have become a reference point for a lot of people who lived through them. It’s an important part of understanding that very common experience. Now, the numbers of people who lived through it are dwindling, but they’re still substantial and there’s still a very lively image cultivation about what communism was like, and not a very favorable one, that has its own political utility. How to study it? In an ideal world, you’d want to study some of the classics of Marxism, like Lenin’s book on development, some Marx, and then read about the histories of Eastern Europe that tell you something about the circumstances in which all of this happened, namely circumstances in which it made no sense to try socialism.

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St u de n t Ac h i evem en t s Undergraduate Awards Nancy Ogden Ortiz Memorial Prize for Outstanding Performance in Anthro 90B Theory in Cultural and Social Anthropology Alexa Romano Anthropology Award for Outstanding Performance in Anthro 90C Theory in Ecological, Environmental, and Evolutionary Anthropology Becca Nelson The Joseph H. Greenberg Prize for Undergraduate Academic Excellence Oscar Lee The James Lowell Gibbs, Jr. Award for Outstanding Service to the Department in Anthropology Anthony Hackett Katherine Zechnich The Robert Bayard Textor Award for Outstanding Creativity in Anthropology Julia Rose Maxwell

The Michelle Z. Rosaldo Summer Field Research Grant Inhae Yap "Commodifying Afro-Modernity: Value Creation and Object Agency in the Commercial Afterlives of Seydou Keita" Cora Cliburn "A Collegiate Comparison: Sustainability Consciousness Among American and Chinese University Students" Janet Diaz "Violence Against Women in the Nonprofit Industrial Complex"

Franz Boas Summer Scholars Jack Andraka "Disease Dollars: An Ethnographic Study of Foreign Aid and Ebola in Sierra Leone" Keith Nobbs "Someone Else's Skin: Acting, Anthropology and the Ethics of Representation" Parsa Nowruzi ""Little Kurdistan": Kurdish Diaspora and Mother Tongue in the United States"

Department Award of Merit Cora Cliburn

Roxanne Dobson "Discipline and Class in All-Girls Secondary Schools in Jamaica"

Graduate Awards

New Job Placements

The Bernard J. Siegel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Written Expression by a Ph.D. Student in Anthropology Lauren Yapp

Stefanie Bautista University of Rochester, Visiting Assistant Professor

The Robert Bayard Textor Award for Outstanding Creativity in Anthropology Hannah Moots The Anthropology Prize for Academic Performance Koji Lau-Ozawa Nina Horstmann Gabriela Oppitz The Anthropology Prize for Outstanding Graduate Research and Publication Annalisa Bolin The Annual Review Prize for Service to the Department Yasemin Ipek Kathryn Takabvirwa

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Aisha Ghani University of Minnesota, Assistant Professor Daivd Gilbert UCB, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship Jennifer Hsieh Harvard at the Fairbank Center, Postdoctoral Fellowship Yasmin Ipek George Mason University, Assistant Professor Vivian Lu African Studies at Yale University, two year Postdoctoral Fellowship


A nthropol ogy Faculty Andrew Bauer (Assistant Professor; Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2010) Intersections of social inequalities, landscape histories, and modern framings of nature in South India. Lisa Curran (Professor; Ph.D. Princeton, 1994) Political ecology of land use; governmental policies/transnational firms; natural resource sector; ecological dynamics; land rights/ rural livelihoods; NGOs/protected areas/donor agencies; REDD carbon payments; corruption; Asia/Latin America. William H. Durham (Professor Emeritus recalled to active duty; Ph.D. Michigan, 1977) Biological anthropology, ecological and evolutionary anthropology, cultural evolution, conservation and community development, resource management, environmental issues; Central and South America. Paulla A. Ebron (Associate Professor; Ph.D. Massachusetts at Amherst 1993) Comparative cultural studies, nationalism, gender, discourses of identity; Africa, African-America. James Ferguson (Professor; Ph.D. Harvard, 1985) Political economy, development, migration and culture; neoliberalism and social assistance, Southern Africa. James A. Fox (Associate Professor; Ph.D. Chicago, 1978) Linguistic anthropology, historical linguistics, biology and evolution of language, archaeological decipherment, settlement of the New World, mythology, computational methods; Mesoamerica, Americas. Duana Fullwiley (Associate Professor; Ph.D. UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, 2002) The Anthropology of science; Medical anthropology; Genetics and identity; Economic anthropology; Global health politics; Africanist anthropology; Race; Health disparities; Environmental resource scarcity as a source of ethnic conflict, Senegal, West Africa, France, and the United States. Angela Garcia (Associate Professor; Ph.D. Harvard, 2007) Medical and psychological anthropology; violence, suffering and care; addiction, morality and science; subjectivity; ethnographic writing; Unites States, Mexico. Thomas Blom Hansen (Professor; Ph.D.) South Asia and Southern Africa. Multiple theoretical and disciplinary interests from political theory and continental philosophy to psychoanalysis, comparative religion and contemporary urbanism. Ian Hodder (Professor; Ph.D. Cambridge, 1974) Achaeological theory, the archaeology and cultural heritage of Europe and the Middle East, excavations in Turkey, material culture. Miyako Inoue (Associate Professor; Ph.D. Washington University, 1996) linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, semiotics, linguistic modernity, anthropology of writing, inscription devices, materialities of language, social organizations of documents (filing systems, index cards, copies, archives, paperwork), voice/sound/noise, soundscape, technologies of liberalism, gender, urban studies, Japan, East Asia.

and medical apologies; queer studies; art and design. Richard Klein (Professor; Ph.D. Chicago, 1966) Paleoanthropology; Africa, Europe. Matthew Kohrman (Associate Professor; Ph.D. Harvard, 1999) Medical anthropology, governmentality, illness experience, gender, China. Tanya Luhrmann (Professor; Ph.D. Cambridge, 1986) The social construction of psychological experience, social practice and the way people experience their world, the domain of what some would term the "irrational." Liisa Malkki (Professor; Ph.D. Harvard, 1989) Historical anthropology; historical consciousness and memory; mass displacement and exile; racial essentialism and mass violence; nationalism and internationalism; the ethics and politics of humanitarianism; religion and contemporary missions in Africa; religion and globalization; social uses of the category, art, and the politics of visuality. Lynn Meskell (Professor; Ph.D. Cambridge, 1997) Archaeological theory, ethnography, South Africa, Egypt, Mediterranean, Middle East, heritage, identity, politics, embodiment, postcolonial and feminist theory, ethics, tourism. John W. Rick (Associate Professor; Ph.D. Michigan, 1978) Prehistoric archaeology and anthropology of band-level hunter-gatherers, stone tool studies, analytical methodology, animal domestication; Latin America, Southwest U.S. Krish Seetah (Assistant Professor; Ph.D. University of Cambridge, 2006) Zooarchaeology, human-animal relationships, colonialsm, Indian Ocean World. Kabir Tambar (Assistant Professor; Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2009) Religion and secularism, pluralism and nationalism, the politics of affect, Islam, Middle East, Turkey. Sharika Thiranagama (Assistant Professor; Ph.D. University of Edinburgh, 2006) Ethnicity, Violence, Gender, Kinship, Displacement, Political Anthropology and Political Theory, Sri Lanka, South Asia. Barbara Voss (Associate Professor; Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 2002) historical archaeology, archaeology of colonialism, culture contact, Spanish-colonial archaeology, overseas Chinese archaeology, postcolonial theory, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, cultural resource management, public archaeology, community-based research, California archaeology. Sylvia J. Yanagisako (Professor; Ph.D. University of Washington, 1975) Kinship, gender, feminist theory, capitalism, ethnicity; U.S., Italy. EMERITI Harumi Befu, George A. Collier, Jane F. Collier, Carol L. Delaney, Charles O. Frake, James L. Gibbs, Jr., Renato Rosaldo.

S. Lochlann Jain (Professor; Ph.D. U.C. Santa Cruz, 1999) Extra-legal forms of communications, such as warning signs VOLUME 11 | 2017 / 2018 NEWSLETTER

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

2017-2018 Newsletter Volume 11 Department of Anthropology Stanford University Editors: Ellen Christensen, Emily Bishop

Newsletter Design & Layout: Emily Bishop

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


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