Anthropology at Harvard University Newsletter


	Dear Friends of Harvard Anthropology: This is our third e-newsletter. It appears in time for me to wish you all a happy, healthy, productive New Year. As you will see in the write-ups of the activities of Department members, there are many projects and programs underway in the three Wings. I wish I could tell you what the future picture of the Department as a whole will look like, but that still remains unclear. Where I can give assurances is with respect to our teaching programs. Undergraduates are increasingly attracted to the Department and also to the Human Evolutionary Biology teaching program spun off by our biological anthropologists. Our faculty, like our colleagues in the rest of FAS, have devoted considerable time to the efforts to reform undergraduate education including the development of secondary fields and the new general education initiative. We anticipate spending an equally intense and illuminating time responding to reports and initiatives at the graduate level. September’s Anthropology Day was a success and put on display, as it has in past years, the remarkable richness and diversity of research activities being conducted by faculty and graduate students. This Department has long been characterized by pluralism in its orientations and activities. And I take that to be one of our abiding strengths. Read the brief description of faculty activities and you will easily see what I mean. In 1980, Raymond Firth, one of the great British anthropologists, told me that what made anthropology truly important was that it asked the most important questions: questions that define what it means to be human. I continue to believe that that is the case. And increasingly it is recognized by our colleagues in other fields. Hence, even in a trying age, I remain greatly optimistic about our discipline and its subfields. Arthur Kleinman Rabb Professor and Chair

	Theodore C. Bestor, Professor of Anthropology, Social Anthropology Wing, was elected President of the East Asia Anthropology Section of the American Anthropology Association (AAA).
	Peter T. Ellison, John Cowles Professor of Anthropology, Biological Anthropology WIng, is teaching four courses this year, three undergraduate and one graduate, including a new seminar on "Evolution and Religion." He is in the process of editing a new book with his former student, Peter Gray, on "The Endocrinology of Social Relationships" while continuing doing research into the role of insulin signaling in mediating human life history transitions. Professor Ellison was elected to the National Academies of Science last spring.
	Michael Herzfeld, Professor of Anthropology, Social Anthropology Wing, has been honored to have his 2001 book Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society (UNESCO/ Blackwell) appear in translation into Chinese (Huaxia Publishing House, Beijing) and Italian (SEIF Editori, Florence), following its earlier publication in Polish by the Jagiellonian University Press, Cracow. Herzfeld, together with Prof. Theodore Bestor, has participated in the Harvard-Yenching conference on history and anthropology at Sun-Yat Sen University in Guangzhou, China and also gave a seminar and film presentation at Chinese University of Hong Kong, also recently completed a brief stint as a visiting professor at the University of Malta, during which time he also gave a public address on "The Multiple Meanings of Security: The Cultural Aftershocks of Colonialism in the Mediterranean World," which was co-chaired and hosted by the Maltese Minister of Foreign Affairs the Hon. Dr. Michael Frendo. He also participated in a forum with the Imam of Malta in a forum hosted by the U.S. Embassy in Malta, with a presentation on "The Misrepresentation of Culture: Demagoguery in High Places."
	Alain Houle, Lecturer on Biological Anthropology and Postdoctoral Fellow, spent his last two field studies in Kibale National Park, Uganda, where he studies mechanisms of coexistence among closely related species of monkeys as well as the nutritional benefits of social dominance among wild chimpanzee males and females. These two research projects are possible thanks to his abilities to climb tropical trees. Accessing the canopy opens the possibility to observe the primates intimately, to quantify food availability with great precision, and to sample fruit for biomass and nutritional analyses. Coexistence mechanisms among related monkey species were recently accounted in the "Journal of Animal Ecology". He also published a paper relating to the vertical stratification of food production in fruit trees in the "International Journal of Primatology". This discovery is critical because it provides a new way to look at foraging, re-emphasizes the importance of contest competition among frugivores, and provides a useful tool at testing socioecological models in species where avoidance is the dominant strategy and contests are avoided. His lectures include "Primate Social Behavior" and a research seminar on "Social Dominance and Competition Among Wild Primates", and one evening class at the Extension School: "Introduction to Primate Ecology and Social Behavior". He also lectures field classes in Panama and Nicaragua.
	Arthur Kleinman, Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology, Social Anthropology Wing, and Chair of the Department, has published What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life Amidst Uncertainty and Danger by Oxford University Press in 2006, it was a co-edited volume on AIDS in China. In November he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology.
	J. Lorand Matory, Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies, was awarded The Melville J. Herskovits Prize for his book Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé published in 2005 by Princeton University Press, judged the best of the year by the African Studies Association.
	Sonja Plesset, Lecturer on Anthropology, Social Anthropology Wing, recently published her book Women: Negotiating Gender and Violence in Northern Italy with the Stanford University Press.
	Jeffrey Quilter, Senior Lecturer on Anthropology, Archaeology Wing, and Deputy Director Curatorial Affairs & Curator, Intermediate Area Collections, Peabody Museum continues to work on the excavation and analysis of remains from the early colonial church complex and town of Magdalena de Cao Viejo in the Chicama Valley, Peru. The town was a forced resettlement of native peoples occupied between about 1578 and 1690.Two field seasons (2005 and 2006) have been completed with two more planned. Investigations will examine both the biological and social changes that occurred among native populations and colonizers.
	Mary Margaret Steedly, Professor of Social Anthropology, presented a keynote address, “Back to Culture?: Southeast Asian Studies in the 21st Century,” for the Anniversary Symposium on “The Future of Area Studies” in the Department of Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, Netherlands. Together with Professor Patricia Spyer of Leiden University, she has been awarded a grant from the School for American Research in Santa Fe to put on a seminar on the subject of popular media and mass politics entitled “Images without Borders,” to be held in May 2007.
	Jason Ur, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Archaeology Wing, has recently returned from a final study season at Tell Brak in northeastern Syria. His intensive surface collection has established its urban status in the late fifth millennium BC, making it one of the earliest cities in the Near East. These results were presented in November at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Washington DC. He flew the flag of anthropology at the inauguration of Harvard's new Center for Geographic Analysis in May with a study of State-Sponsored Irrigation Systems in ancient Assyria [pdf]. Articles published in 2006 include a study of digital terrain data for the identification of archaeological sites [pdf ] and an overview of the ancient landscapes of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (ca. 900-612 BC) [pdf]. Forthcoming book chapters include a study of Early Bronze Age road networks in northern Mesopotamia and late Antique irrigation systems in northwestern Iran. He wrote on the archaeological applications of his latest fixation, Google Earth, for the newsletter of the "Society for American Archaeology" [pdf].
	Marc Zender, Lecturer on Anthropology, Archaeology Wing, and Research Associate Peabody Museum, travels to Malmö, Sweden in early December to give a paper on "Classic Maya Religion" at the 11th Annual European Maya Conference. His recent and forthcoming publications include: "A Pinolteca Tzeltal Comparative Lexicon" (co-written with R. Radhakrishnan), Chacmool Archaeological Association, University of Calgary; "Teasing the Turtle from its Shell: AHK and MAHK in Maya Writing," The PARI Journal 6(3):1-14; and "Fit to be Tied: Funerary Practices of the Prehispanic Maya" (with Kathryn Reese-Taylor and Debra Walker) to appear in J. Guernsey and K. Reilly (eds), Ritual Acts of Bundling and Wrapping in Ancient Mesoamerica, Center for Maya Research, Washington.

	Carla Martin, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of African and African American Studies, sub-discipline Anthropology, conducts research on popular music and its sociolinguistic implications in the Cape Verdean diaspora. She presented her pre-dissertation research at three conferences in 2006 - at the Cape Verdean Creole Institute Teacher's Day Conference in Brockton, Massachusetts; at the Society for Caribbean Linguistics conference in Roseau, Dominica; and at the Society for Ethnomusicology conference in Honolulu, Hawai'i. She received research grants to spend the summer of 2006 in search of the lost works of Cape Verde's first Pan Africanist poet and to film for an ethnographic media piece on the same. Most recently, she has begun an exploration of the musical and linguistic practices of musicians and fans of Cape Verdean descent as they are transformed on the Internet. Martin enjoys collaborating with members of the local Cape Verdean community to promote rising artists and the pedagogical use of the Cape Verdean language.
	Maple Raza, Ph.D. Candidate, Social Anthropology Wing, has recently been profiled in "Ethnography and Video Activism" an article appearing in Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 6, December 2006 >>see the full article
	Anthony Shenoda, Ph.D. Candidate, Social Anthropology Wing, is conducting ethnographic research for his doctoral dissertation on miracles and materiality among Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt. The research for this project is being conducted mostly in Cairo neighborhoods, but he has been visiting sites of importance for Copts throughout Egypt. He has been awarded funds through the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship at Harvard, Summer Research Grants from the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, as well as Pre-Dissertation funding from the Weatherhead Center at Harvard. In Spring 2006 he was awarded a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Bok Center. :: website
	Priscilla Song, Ph.D. Candidate, Social Anthropology Wing, has returned from two years of multi-sited dissertation fieldwork (2004-2006), during which she studied fetal cell transplantation procedures in Beijing, monitored health discussion forums in cyberspace, and interviewed patients, doctors, and scientists around the world about their experiences with experimental and alternative treatments for catastrophic neurological disorders. She is currently writing up her dissertation, provisionally entitled "Culturing Cells, Making Miracles: An Ethnographic Study of Therapeutic Experimentation in China."
	Grete Viddal, Ph.D. Candidate, Social Anthropology Wing, is examining how descendants of Haitian migrants in eastern Cuba articulate and maintain a distinctive identity through dance, and enables a nuanced understanding of how migrants influence regional and national cultures. Several waves of refugees and migrants from Haiti brought well-defined traditions of dance, music, and religion with them when they settled in eastern Cuba, but this phenomenon has received relatively little attention in official narratives about Cuban cultural history. Her article, “‘Sueño de Haiti’: Danced Identity in Eastern Cuba” was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Haitian Studies (JOHS), forthcoming in Winter 2007. She will be presenting preliminary research at Bannzil Kiba Kreyol 2007 in Havana, an upcoming conference organized to promote contact and exchange between scholars and cultural activists from various countries where Creole languages are spoken.
For a complete listing of Department Events please visit www.anthropology.fas.harvard.edu