CASA Graduate Program Flourishes: Successes of Ph.D. Students Promise Great Future for Anthropology

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1 CASA Cultural & Social Anthropology NEWSLETTER. VOLUME 6. Stanford University CASA Graduate Program Flourishes: Successes of Ph.D. Students Promise Great Future for Anthropology By German Dziebel Edited by James Ferguson The Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University illustrates the folk proverb, Judge the family by its children. Looking at the Graduate Program at CASA leaves no doubt that anthropology will thrive in the 21 st century. Since its inception in 1999, CASA has experienced a steady growth in the number of graduate applications. From a total of 113 in 2000/01, the number of applicants has steadily risen to the 2005/06 figure of 191 [see inset box]. These applicants compete for just five graduate positions each year. In addition to withstanding a selective admissions process, CASA graduate students also excell within the program. CASA graduate students have been exceptionally successful in obtaining university and external field and write-up grants. This year, field-bound Ph.D. students received grants and fellowships from a host of prestigious external agencies, including the Social Science Research Council, the FLAS program, the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation (indeed, an astonishing five CASA students this year received Wenner-Grens for research in 2006/07). c o n t e n t s Graduate Program Flourishes Letter from the Chair Conferences Awards Academic Technology Virtual Worlds? CASA Students Meet Clifford Gertz Highlighting CASA PhD Students MA Letter from the Field Lost In Shanghai: Encountering Security Guards in Gated Housing Communities PhD Letter from the Field Some notes from the City of God, Guatemala City, April 2006 Department Faculty New Books by CASA Faculty Transitions: Professor Carol Delaney Retires Alumni Profiles Alumni News In Memory of Mary Grantham-Campbell Perhaps the most impressive success of the CASA graduate students has been their organization of major conferences in 2005 and again in These conferences, conceived and organized entirely by students, have greatly enriched the intellectual life of the Department. This year s round of graduate conferences was inaugurated by Cultures of Contact: Archaeology, Ethics, and Globalization. The conference took place February 17-19, 2006, and brought together some 100 students and professors from within and outside of Stanford. It was closely followed by a sequel entitled The Anthropology of Global Productions (April 7-8, 2006). It attracted more than 125 CONTINUED ON PaGe 27...

2 Letter from the Chair James Ferguson This has been my first year as Chair of CASA, and just my third year at Stanford. It has been an extraordinarily full and satisfying year, both for me and for the Department as a whole. I have had a lot to learn, but the CASA environment of warm collegiality and superb professional support has made the learning process far less painful than I had imagined. I come out of the year with a tremendous sense of excitement about the Department and its achievements. It is clear that the Department is flourishing. The spectacular success of the graduate program, which we are featuring in this year s newsletter, is one sign of that. Applications to the Ph.D. program are at an all-time high, and up some 70% from what they were just five years ago. Graduate students are earning a very impressive array of grants, fellowships, and prizes, and we are also gratified to see their excellent record of placement in first-rate academic jobs. But one might equally point to the undergraduate program, where our number of majors has recently risen to 40 (from 27 in 2001/02), or to faculty research, which has seen the publication of no fewer than eight new books in 2005 and There is no doubt that these are good times for the CASA Department. It is a pleasure and a privilege to be in a position of leadership during such a period. The excitement and intellectual energy in the Department have been making an impression all around the country, I believe. When I travel to other universities (which I have, alas, been doing a bit too often lately), I have been struck by the extent to which a buzz about the department seems to be all around. The very impressive major conferences organized by the graduate students in recent years (discussed on page 3) have likely had much to do with this. The recent ground-breaking publications of the faculty, of course, are also a major cause. But whatever the reasons, there does seem to be a palpable sense of excitement afoot, a positive vibe about the Department and its successes. Our recent good fortune is, in part, a matter of having the right people in the right place at the right time. The Department has hired successfully at the senior level in recent years, and the junior faculty have been flourishing in both an intellectual and a professional sense. But I think that the good times also show that the organizational model that CASA adopted at the time of its origin has proven to be a highly successful one. It has created relations between sociocultural anthropologists and archaeologists that avoid the traps and dead-ends of the old subfield model, and instead allow genuine intellectual exchange around substantive topics of common concern (as evidenced in the successful new graduate seminar, Intersections, co-taught by Liisa Malkki and Lynn Meskell, or the innovative Anthropology of Sexuality course co-taught by Purnima Mankekar and Barb Voss). And it has positioned CASA faculty to pursue cutting-edge, forward-looking research agendas on some of the most pressing intellectual and practical questions of our time. (Recent research by CASA faculty explores such varied and non-traditional topics as archaeological approaches to sexuality, the masculinity of disabled men in China, the cultural politics of product liability in the US, the use of the internet to construct national identity in southern Africa, transnational partnerships between Italian and Chinese firms in the global fashion industry, and the study of negative memorials in post-9/11 New York City.) Such intellectual freedom, of course, is also made possible by the warm sense of community and mutual support that I have come to think of as perhaps the most distinctive and valuable attribute of our casa, our home. Needless to say, all of this leaves me with a great sense of satisfaction in being part of the CASA department at this moment in its history. I look to the future with a great sense of excitement and optimism. CASA 2005 / 2006 NEWSLETTER. VOLUME 6

3 A Successful Sequel: The Anthropology of Global Productions Robert Nathan Samet Photos by Nikhil Anand, Austin Zeiderman, Page Bertelsen The Second Annual Stanford Graduate Student Conference in Cultural and Social Anthropology, The Anthropology of Global Productions, drew more than 125 graduate students, professors, alumni and guests to CASA between April 7 th and 8 th, Over the course of the conference, participants reflected on the global as a challenge for anthropologists, ethnographers and scholars whose research deals with grounded practice and situated knowledge. Panelists confronted the problems and possibilities of global-speak from a variety of perspectives financial, governmental, bio-medical, environmental, technological, spatial, legal, and aesthetic. These diverse conversations converged in a pair of keynote addresses by Professor James Ferguson (Stanford) and Professor Anna Tsing (U.C. Santa Cruz). Both speakers prepared papers in conversation with the conference theme and generated lively discussion on the global and its relevance to anthropology. Keynote respondents Johannes Fabian and David Palumbo-Liu added to these conversations with their own generous reflections on the papers and the conference theme. In addition to the keynote speakers and respondents, the conference was fortunate to be joined by prominent scholars from across the country who served as panel discussants and workshop facilitators. These included Tom Boellstorff, Paula Ebron, Harry Elam, Johannes Fabian, Jim Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Bill Maurer, William Mazzarella, Lynn Meskell, Diane Nelson, Ananya Roy, Suzana Sawyer, Eric Sheppard, Anna Tsing, Kamala Visweswaran, Kath Weston, Hayden White, Eric Worby, and Sylvia Yanagisako. The conference was sponsored by generous donations from CASA, the Office of Student Affairs, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Graduate Student Council, and the Woods Institute for the Environment. It was also supported by the Office of the Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences, the Stanford Humanities Center, Bechtel International Center, the Department of Drama, the ASSU Speaker s Bureau, and the Center for African Studies. Conference organizers included graduate students from the first and second year cohorts: Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Elif Babul, Maura Finkelstein, Robert Samet, Rania Sweis, and Austin Zeiderman. Archaeology Conference Joshua Samuels and Kathryn Lafrenz On February 17 th 19 th the Stanford Archaeology Center held its fourth graduate student conference. Organized by second-year archaeology students in Cultural and Social Anthropology, Anthropological Sciences, and Classics, the organizing theme of the conference was Cultures of Contact. Participants presented work examining how the archaeological study of contact between past cultures is affected by present-day socio-political relationships and discourse, juxtaposing archaeological case studies of culture contact with the way that archaeology and heritage management are practiced in the present. By highlighting issues of colonization, culture change, and resistance both in the past and in the present, the conference organizers constructed a dynamic forum that brought participants with very different practical and theoretical backgrounds together around a set of issues that are becoming increasingly important for archaeologists to images courtesy of address. Speakers included graduate students and faculty from universities in the U.S., U.K., Spain, and France, as well as a representative from UNESCO. The conference benefited greatly from keynote addresses by CASA professor Lynn Meskell and Alison Wylie, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington and currently a Research Fellow at Stanford s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Over the course of the weekend, the conference drew well over 100 attendees. The sessions were held at Stanford s Humanities Center, with related events at the Archaeology Center s new location in Building 500. Only in its sixth year, many participants commented on the speed with which the Archaeology Center has established itself as a leading forum for global archaeological discourse, noting its diversity and vitality. Through its annual conferences, the Archaeology Center hopes to continue to provide a venue that ties together the many ways that archaeology is conceptualized and practiced, both at Stanford and beyond.

4 Faculty Awards 2006 Graduate Service Recognition Award Akhil Gupta SCA Cultural Horizons Prize Sarah Jain, Dangerous Instrumentality: The Bystander as Subject in Automobility Michelle Z. Rosaldo Grants Natasha Dar Liang Dong Matthew Dong 2005 Graduation Awards - Undergraduate Nancy Ogden Ortiz Memorial Prize for Outstanding Performance in CASA 90: Theory in Cultural and Social Anthrpology Eva Tuschman Firestone Medal for Excellence in Research Caroline Schuster The Cultural and Social Anthropology Prize for Undergraduate Academic Performance Caroline Schuster Phi Beta Kappa Percy Anne Link Caroline Elizabeth Schuster (Individually Designed Major) Of Note: Maura Finkelstein, CASA 1st Year PhD Candidate participated as the Girl of All Work, in production of PBS Texas Ranch House aired this Spring Graduation Awards - Graduate The Cultural and Social Anthropology Prize for Academic Performance by a Masters Student Annette Borchardt Hai Binh Nguyen The Cultural and Social Anthropology Award for Service to the Department Tania Ahmad Stacey Camp The Robert Bayard Textor Award for Outstanding Anthropological Creativity Mary Grantham-Campbell The Bernard J Siegel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Written Expression by a PhD Student in Cultural and Social Anthroplogy Robert Rollings The Center for Teaching and Learning Centennial TA Award Jocelyn Chau Stanford Asian American Awards: Graduate Studnt Academic Award Rachael Joo 2005 Graduate Fellow of American Academy of Political and social Science Rama McKay Fisher Prize for student Writing from the Thurksih Studies Association Marcy Brink-Danan 2005 Society for Humanistic Anthropology Student Paper Writing Award Marcy Brink-Danan American Ethnology Society (AES) Honorable Mention Marcy Brink Graduate Student Paper Prize from the AAA Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists Marcia Ochoa Recent PhD Graduate Hires School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Adam Yuet Chau, Lecturer Brown University Marcy Brink-Danan, Assistant Professor San Francisco State Falu Bakrania, Assistant Professor Duke University Rachael Joo, Visiting Assistant Professor CASA 2005 / 2006 NEWSLETTER. VOLUME 6

5 Virtual Worlds? CASA Students Meet Clifford Geertz Claudia Engel, Ph.D. Academic Technology Specialist for CASA Wallenberg Hall is the home of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL) that brings together faculty, scholars, and students in an effort to link scientific understanding with educational practice. By exploring how technology and the learning spaces affect teaching and learning, Wallenberg Hall serves as the conduit for new practices in teaching and learning that eventually travel from experimental spaces to the regular classroom. Over the course of the last three years I have been collaborating with SCIL as well as CASA faculty to explore the extent to which these technologies can help facilitate, or possibly innovate learning in anthropology. Assuming that emerging digital technologies will affect the way anthropological research is done in the future, the generation of anthropologists trained today will increasingly be navigating virtual environments. In conversations with Prof. Paulla Ebron, Associate Professor at CASA, the idea emerged to take advantage of the video conferencing equipment provided in the Wallenberg classrooms to expand her classroom into a virtual space. Prof. Ebron s introductory course CASA 90 Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology explores the ways in which the social sciences and particularly anthropology can make a difference in social debates. The learning goal is to analyze the production of anthropological and sociological knowledge in the social, historical, political and ethical contexts in which ideas emerge. The pedagogical objective is to critically engage the thoughts of theorists, and to appreciate the strength and limits of the arguments presented, by raising questions about method and underlying assumptions. Readings cover a broad spectrum of major social theorists and anthropologists, like Foucault, Durkheim, Rosaldo, Haraway, and Geertz, who kindly agreed to be available for students questions from his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. I will be happy to talk to your students Clifford Geertz responded, as long as I haven t to do anything technical besides turning on the computer. Based on the assigned readings students had prepared a set of questions including: the comparative analysis of different cultures and its fit with multi-sited ethnography, Geertz relationship to structuralism, an assessment of his positioning in the history of American anthropology, and the role of the anthropologist in today s public arenas. Prof. Geertz virtual presence in the class was significant in several ways to the students understanding and work with his texts. First, discussing texts is one of the main activities in anthropological seminars. The discussion of one s own interpretations can be significantly enriched through the direct conversation with the author. In addition to providing a platform for exchange, the immediacy of the interaction generated an intellectual impact different from what is usually achieved by simply studying the texts. Second, the image of a live person and presence of personality added a new dimension to how Geertz work could be contextualized by the students. The visual, real-time interaction created an important link that brought ideas and person together. Students told me it made a huge difference to put the face with the person, recalls Prof. Ebron. They had read somebody, and then suddenly he appeared. The moment Clifford Geertz appeared on the screen, it was like a collective gasp of wonder. And they were struck with how engaged and lively he was. Finally, we found students extremely motivated by the opportunity to meet someone they had heard of but never ex- CONTINUED ON PAGE

6 Highlighting Highlighting CASA PHD Students Several CASA Ph.D. Students recieved Research Grants for the year. German Dzeibel spoke with them recently about their research and grants. Ashish Chadha, Dissertation Writer Ashish was awarded the Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year. Ashish s dissertation entitled Performing Science, Producing Nation: Archaeology and the State in Post-colonial India is both an ethnography of archaeological practice and an anthropology of the state in India, framed within science studies. His paper entitled Ambivalent Heritage: Between Affect and Ideology in a Colonial Cemetery will be published in the November 2006 issue of the Journal of Material Culture. This paper examines the significance of imperial cemeteries in the colony and explains why they are sites of neglect and decay in contemporary India. By examining the ideological and affective meanings of a colonial funerary landscape, it shows how monuments of colonial memories have transformed into signs of temporal ruptures, which disturbs the dichotomy between the colonial and the postcolonial. Ashish also finished a short film entitled End Note (16mm, 18 mins). The film is a cinematic interpretation of Samuel Beckett s 1967 dramaticule, Come and Go, in which three women reminisce about their times at school and rekindle and affirm old friendships. They share a strange secret about each other that is never made known to us. The film has begun a round of film festivals and in 2006 it has already been shown at the Bangkok, Lyon, Toronto, and Osnabrück, Germany Festivals. CASA 2005 / 2006 NEWSLETTER. VOLUME 6 Kevin O Neill, Third Year Ph.D. Student I was lucky to catch Kevin, who was in town for a week-long break from his field research in Guatemala City. Kevin defended his dissertation proposal early, received a Graduate Research Opportunity field grant and hastened for Guatemala City. His project entitled City of God: Christian Citizenship in a Post-War Guatemala City investigates an entanglement between evangelization and democratization. An ethnographic trailblazer, Kevin applies the Foucauldian concept of governmentality to understand the moral choices people make in order to negotiate the two models of citizenship. In his endeavor Kevin is assisted by Jim Ferguson (urban anthropology), Liisa Malkki (anthropology of religion and morality), and a Stanford alumnus, Carol A. Smith (University of California Davis), who has been a Guatemala scholar for 30 years. Kevin s Letter from the Field appears on page 10. Serena Love, Third-Year Ph.D. Student Serena was awarded a fellowship from the American Research Institute in Turkey for the academic year. Her research is about how Neolithic villages constituted themselves through the construction of mud brick architecture. She is doing a comprehensive mud brick analysis for a synchronic and diachronic examination of cultural change. Serena treasures her experience at CASA, which has furnished her with challenging but nurturing and supportive environment.

7 Tiffany Romaine, Dissertation Writer Tiffany has recently received the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity s Graduate Dissertation Fellowship and the Giles Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, both for the year. She declined the CSRE award in order to take the Whiting. Tiffany investigates biomedical consumer services that are being marketed as insurance against the effects of aging and offer to literally buy time. Specifically, she focuses on three applications of cryopreservation technology to the human body: the freezing of embryos during in-vitro fertilization treatment (IVF); the freezing and banking of oocytes (unfertilized eggs); and cryonics, the freezing of the legally dead with the hope that these bodies will be revived and restored to health in the future. These practices offer to buy time by stopping the biological clock or by pausing the process of death in order to resume life in the future. Tiffany argues that through attempts to buy time, consumers are trying to manage otherwise unpredictable futures, and, in doing so, they are creating new sensibilities and assurances about themselves in the present moment and the trajectories of their lives. By engaging the wide range of perspectives that surfaced during her research, she examines the cosmologies that frame questions of personhood, life and death, and time (what constitutes a person, where does personhood begin and end, and how the valuation of individuals is understood) and which inform these consumption practices. She found that these cosmologies are formulated in relationship to subject positionings in terms of gender, sexuality, race, class, religious beliefs, occupation, and nationality as well as personal experience. Tiffany conducted 18 months of ethnographic field research during the summers of 2001 and 2002, and July 2003-August 2004 in various field sites: an IVF clinic and embryology lab in the San Francisco Bay Area; two international conferences for research cryobiologists; a cryobiology research facility; a cryonics facility in Arizona (one of two in the U.S) where she lived and worked among cryonicists; the Bay Area cryonics community; various online or virtual cryonics communities; and by looking at cryopreservation marketing materials and popular reporting on these applications of cryopreservation technologies. This academic year Tiffany taught three courses (2 in CASA and 1 in Feminist Studies). Stacey Camp, Third Year Ph.D. Student Stacey received a Graduate Research Opportunities Grant from Stanford s School of Humanities and Sciences to support archaeological and archival research related to her dissertation during the summer of She also recieved a Visiting Scholar Fellowship from the Autry National Center to conduct archival research. Stacey s dissertation project examines Anglo- American reform movements and Americanization programs targeted at Mexican immigrants in 19 th -early 20 th century California. It examines how these projects reflect shifting Anglo American notions of citizenship and national belonging and how Mexican Americans responded to these shifts through consumption practices. Her program advisor, Professor Barbara Voss, has been incredibly supportive of her research, and Stacey has learned a great deal from her by participating in Voss s multiple archaeological projects. CONTINUED FROM PG 5- Virtual Worlds perienced in person. They thoroughly engaged with the material in preparation for an academic conversation that continued on even after the event had ended. We expect this experience to have an impact on how CASA classes might be opened up into virtual spaces in the future. Video conferencing has been part of distributed learning environments for decades, however, usage today has become much more convenient since all that is required (as in our case) is a laptop, standard chat-software, and a small camera. This makes the technology rather transparent and extremely portable. An additional small application captured the entire session as a digital video file, which allows us to revisit the conversation. Our project also shows how ideas incubated in Wallenberg Hall can be disseminated throughout the Stanford campus and beyond. Jonathan Peele, Computer Manager from the Information Technology Group, who stood by Prof. Geertz at the Princeton end said: I m happy that everything went smoothly. This was our first time also. We definitely plan to use it in the future. This event would not have been possible without the generous collaboration of Paulla Ebron, Eric Grant, Jonathan Peele, Bob Smith, and of course, Clifford Geertz. Thanks to everyone. 7

8 A Letter from the Field Lost in Shanghai: By Liang Dong, CASA Masters Student Encountering Security Guards in Gated Housing Communities The first night I was in Shanghai, I rode the subway on my way back to the Century Park stop where I lived and conducted most of my fieldwork. When I emerged from the underground into the humid summer air, it was late and darkness had enveloped the city. Tall residential buildings jutted out across the dark, empty skies of Pudong, which was markedly different from the busy skyline of Puxi. Although these high-rises belonged to different gated communities, against the backdrop of the night, they looked eerily identical. I made my way down the road and stopped at the gate of what I believed to be my place of residence. The security guard on duty seemed to sense my hesitation and approached me, demanding to know whom I was visiting. I fumbled, further confirming my out-of-placeness, and tried to explain that I had just moved in. A back-and-forth ensued that mainly involved him questioning me on my building number, my landlord, where I came from. After some confusion, we both realized that I was at the wrong housing complex. He pointed me in the right direction and sent me off with a charge to be careful. I managed to find my way back but this incident stood out in my mind. This was my first formal interaction with the security guards who would later become my informants, although that night, our roles were reversed and I was the one being observed and questioned. The encounter also helped frame my understandings of place and belonging in these gated communities as well as of the everyday experiences of the security guards who patrol these spaces. Under Mao socialism, most urban residents in China lived in large, undifferentiated public housing units assigned based on their work units (danwei). With the advent of market reforms in the early 1990 s, the state began to experiment with experiment with privatization, culminating in a national housing reform policy in By 2000, most public housing belonging to work units had been thoroughly priva- tized. At the same time, the floodgates to the construction of new private homes had been opened. As the largest developing country in the world, China s fastest growing economy is now largely fueled by the real-estate sector. Today, the housing market is restructuring the everyday lives of people who are dealing with new issues of land ownership, deepening class divides and shifting interactions. CASA 2005 / 2006 NEWSLETTER. VOLUME 6 A parallel force shaping these urban reconfigurations is the influx of migrant workers who move from rural areas to cities in search of better job prospects. The number of migrant workers in 2000 was estimated to be upwards of 100 million. Two thirds of these migrants are men, who have been em-

9 ployed in sectors such as construction, service, and security. Although migrants workers serve as a substantial labor base for urban production, they are often blamed for the decay of civic infrastructures and the perceived rise in crime rates. In light of these trends, the spatial politics of gated housing communities that employ migrant men as security guards are an especially fertile area for study. In the course of my fieldwork, I was interested in how the privatized gated communities become sites for new sets of power relations and identity formations. What kinds of post-socialist subjectivities are being produced in this space, and how do security guards figure prominently into this process? How do migrant men, the property management companies who employ them, and the residents mediate these complicated and often contradicting claims to security, place, and belonging? Hu was my first informant. He had come to Shanghai three years before from a rural part of Jiangsu province. Shortly after he arrived, he heard about employment as a residential security guard in Pudong. Hu told me that because of a migrant s lack of wenhua (used here to refer to education), only jobs requiring physical labor were open to them. This implicit division between occupations that require wenhua and those that do not reflects Cartesian thinking about the body as separate from and subordinate to the mind. Working as a security guard, thus, is conceived of as a bodily endeavor. In addition to education, wenhua is more broadly defined as civilization. Hu s understanding of his own perceived lack through the framework of wenhua speaks to dominant discourses of rural migrants, ignorant and uncivilized, as a hindrance to China s national push for modernity. After a series of interviews, Hu was hired as a zhangang (standing guard). The first few months, he found the work challenging: For 15 days a month, 12 hours a day, I had to stand outside at the gate. The work was very ku (bitter). One must stand for many hours during the day. Even when it is very hot in the summer, one has to stand under the sun in full uniform. In the winter, when it is very windy, one must do the same. Many people quit, but my body could bear it, so I stayed. These experiences speak to the physical nature of the work, as well as the focus on training the body. Stationed at the main gates, the security guards are charged with the public and highly ritualized task of regulating the flow of traffic that passes through. In doing so, they learn to embody the spatial order of the complex. At the same time, these performances of security are never seamless, but often contradictory and contingent. Facing strategic decisions regarding who to let in, who to stop and question, and who to turn away, the security guards also actively mark and produce spatial meaning. In three months of research, I traversed the gates of the various real estate developments countless times. Each time I would be reminded of that first night I spent in Shanghai. Having stood awkwardly under the scrutiny of the security guard myself, I was particularly attuned to the complex performances and resistances practiced at the edges of these housing complexes. In recent years, the rise of privatized gated housing communities in urban China has significantly transformed social relationships. I hope that these various ethnographic details offer glimpses of how the presence of migrant men working as security guards in these communities disrupts understandings of class, gender, and spatial location. Liang Dong is a co-terminal B.A. and M.A. student in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology. She spent the summer in Shanghai conducting fieldwork funded by the Michelle Z. Rosaldo grant. Her research interests include gender, embodiment, spatial politics, post-socialism, and labor migration in China.

10 A Letter from the Field Some notes from the City of God By Kevin Lewis O Neill, CASA Third Year PhD Student Guatemala City, April 2006 Excuse me? I asked the question with some surprise. Caught off-guard, I could feel my face turning pink and my hairline beginning to perspire. Carlota, an evangelical pastor and the woman leading this particular cell, or evangelical support group, asked again: Kevin, why don t you give the closing prayer tonight. With all eyes on the once silent observer and now awkward participant, I scrambled to think of what I could possibly say that might be salient to the group of ten evangelicals huddled around a Guatemala City kitchen table, and yet would acknowledge that we do not share a common theology. Trying desperately to nuance the material I had heard over the last few hours as well as the reams of sermons, interviews, prayers, radio broadcasts, and cassette recordings that I had combed through up to that point, I squeaked a spiritually tone-deaf prayer that left the group wanting in both quality and quantity. Carlota was not happy. As she sighed, I fished a tissue from my back pocket to dab my brow. Kevin. I know you have a plan. You re investigating how the mega-churches are changing the culture [of Guatemala City]. Carlota s ability to approximate my research project was reassuring, but her tone was not. She spoke to the group but her eyes lingered on me from time to time for effect. She encouraged us to be engaged in our prayer lives and to feel the weight of what the group was trying to do: to save Guatemala. She ended her meditation with a reminder that could also be read as a mandate: We have a lot of work to do. To understand the texture of this work as well as the moral weight that it places on the believer is why I am in Guatemala City at the moment, shuttling between oceanic mega-church services and the very kind of intimate spaces of belonging where Carlota took my weak efforts at prayer to task. Framed more broadly, my dissertation research aims to understand the continued entanglement of democratization and evangelization at the level of Christian citizenship in present-day Guatemala City. 10 A myriad of developments have made questions over Guatemalan citizenship a palpable, public debate. Those developments include Guatemala s decade-long postwar-period, indigenous rights movement, efforts at democracy, economic restructuring, migrant labor circuits, and increased levels of urban violence. These developments have also made it difficult for Guatemala City evangelicals to distinguish between the things of Caesar and those of God, to understand the bounds of their Christian citizenship. Yet, evangelical mega-churches have begun to provide answers. They have begun to take an increasingly prominent role in shepherding the country s born-again believers, a group that now accounts for somewhere around 40% of the population, 1 by providing a new language of national belonging. One prominent pastor preached: In reality, [evangelical Christianity] is the only real option to unite our country in the future. The only option for a united Guatemalan identity. There is no other. Multicultural. Pan-cultural. Multi-everything. No. Where CASA 2005 / 2006 NEWSLETTER. VOLUME 6

11 are we as a nation? Where we are is looking for a united, singular vision of a Guatemalan nation. We have no other options without a doubt We have the key in our hands. We have an obligation to produce this transformation of Guatemala into an [evangelical] Christian nation 2 Making good on one s obligation to transform Guatemala, I have learned, starts with the believer s mind and heart; it s an evangelical rationality based on a causal logic where the thoughts of an individual form one s actions, and these actions eventually congeal into habits, molding character and, ultimately, the nation. It is a rationality that not only links states of mind with the nation-state but also makes Christian practices, like fasts, prayers, and examinations of conscience, very real acts of (Christian) citizenship. All of this puts into context what was at stake in my failed attempt at prayer as well as what Carlota did next. Before dismissing the group for the evening, Carlota asked if we could all pray for my research. As awkward became uncomfortable, I soon found myself with several cell members laying their hands on me, praying that my research would not just go smoothly but be inspired. In this moment, I asked myself what I expect all ethnographers must ask themselves from time to time while in the field: What am I doing here? Yet, at the very same moment, I realized that my question is the very same question that my informants ask themselves daily, keeping their thoughts, actions, habits, and character aimed at a goal that was clearly outlined during a recent Sunday morning sermon: We understand [God s] cultural mandate as the construction of a city, as the construction of a society. What city? The city of God. 3 The ultimate question, of course, is: What effect does all this have on constructions of personhood, modes of governance, and, yes, the felt reality of Christian citizenship in postwar Guatemala City? This is the very question that guides me everyday as I negotiate the capital of the largest, most industrialized country in Central America, or, as my informants know it, the City of God. Kevin O Neill is a Third Year Ph.D. student at CASA. He is currently conducting his field research in Guatemala on a GRO field grant. Kevin s primary interests revolve around the relationship between religion and political economy in the Americas. More specifically, how new forms of global Christianities and capitalisms touch down and become inescapably interrelated within Guatemala City. Kevin studied philosophy and theology at Fordham (BA, 2000) and religion at Harvard (MTS, 2002). FOOTNOTES: 1. Jesús García-Ruiz Le néopentecôtisme au Guatemala: entre privatisation, marché et réseaux. Critique internationale. 22: Harold Caballeros. June 13, Hacia una vision de una nación cristiana: El papel de la cultura. Cassette CE130604B-5. Guatemala, C.A.: Ministerios El Shaddai. 3. Harold Caballeros. February 12, Que nos hace a nosotros ser relevantes. Cassette VC120206A-1. Guatemala, C.A.: Ministerios El Shaddai. 11

12 12 Paulla Ebron (Associate Professor; PhD Massachusetts at Amherst, 1993) Comparative cultural studies, nationalism, gender, discourses of identity; Africa, African-America. Dr. Ebron has spent the academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Her most recent publication is Performing Africa (Princeton University Press, 2002) which explores how Africa is produced, assimilated, and consumed through performance and how encounters through performance create the place of Africa in the world. James Ferguson (Professor; PhD Harvard, 1985) Political anthropology, development, cities, globalization, neoliberalism; southern Africa (Lesotho, Zambia, South Africa). Recent articles include Decomposing modernity: history and hierarchy after development (in Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, eds., Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, 2005) and Seeing like an oil company: space, security, and global capital in neoliberal Africa, American Anthropologist, 2005). A new book, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, has just been published by Duke University Press. Akhil Gupta (Associate Professor; PhD Stanford, 1988) Spatial construction of identity and difference, ethnography of the state, comparative ontology, anthropology of food, discourse of development, peasants, bureaucracies, applied anthropology; South Asia. He has just finished a manuscript, an ethnographic investigation of the Indian state, tentatively entitled, Red Tape and co-edited another book, The Anthropology of the State (with Aradhana Sharma; Blackwell, 2006). An article Globalization and Postcolonial States, will appear in Current Anthropology (April 2006). Ian Hodder (Dunlevie Family Professor; PhD Cambridge, 1975) Archaeology, archaeological theory, material culture, excavation in Turkey. While continuing to work on the Catalhoyuk Project in Turkey, he has in been on leave in Cambridge, UK, on a Guggenheim Fellowship, writing on the origins of agriculture and on the ethics of global cultural heritage management. A new book entitled The Leopard s Tale. Revealing the mysteries of Catalhoyuk appeared in 2006 published by Thames and Hudson. Miyako Inoue (Assistant Professor; PhD Washington University, 1996) Linguistic anthropology, semiotics, Japan, urban studies, gender, sound technologies and modernity. Recent publications include: Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan (University of California Press, 2006). What does Language Remember?: Indexical Order and the Naturalized History of Japanese Women (Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2004), Listening Subject of Japanese Modernity and His Auditory Double: Citing, Sighting, and Siting the Modern Japanese Woman (Cultural Anthropology, 2003), Speech Without a Speaking Body: Japanese Womens Language in Translation (Language and Communication, 2003). Sarah Jain (Assistant Professor; PhD U.C. Santa Cruz, 1999) Law, technology design, medical anthropology, gender, representation. She is currently working on her second book, Commodity Violence (Duke UP, 2007), which analyzes American automobility to better understand how the destruction wrought by automobility has been represented. Recent publications include, Dangerous Instrumentality (Bystander as Subject in Automobility), (Cultural Anthropology, February 2004), which was awarded the Cultural Horizons Prize; Violent Submission, (Cultural Critique, forthcoming); Urban Violence: Luxury in Made Space, (Mobile Technologies of the Future, Mimi Sheller and John Urry (ed.), Taylor and Francis, 2005); and an entry for Technology and Gender, Race and Class, The Oxford Dictionary of Science, Technology and Society (Oxford University Press, 2005). Her book, entitled Injury, was published in April by Princeton University Press. Jain is currently a Rockefeller Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Matthew Kohrman (Assistant Professor; PhD Harvard, 1999) Medical anthropology, embodiment, disability, tobacco, gender, consumption, state formation, China. Recently published books include a monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in Modern China (Univ. of California, 2005) and a Chinese-language public health text, Striding Along the Road to Health: A Handbook for Giving Up Smoking (China News United Publishing, 2005). Recent articles include Should I Quit? Tobacco, Fraught Identity, and the Risks of Governmentality (Urban Anthropology, 2004) and Smoking among Doctors: Clinical Governmentality, Embodiment, and the Diversion of Blame in Contemporary China (under review). Current research examines smoking, cancer, and subjectivity in urban China, supported by a NIH Career Development Award. Liisa Malkki (Associate Professor; PhD Harvard, 1989) Political violence; refugees and exile; the politics of humanitarianism and internationalism; history and memory; religion and cosmopolitics; critical studies of art and visuality (Tanzania, Burundi, Namibia). Recent Publications: With Allaine Cerwonka. Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Field Research. (University of Chicago Press; March 2006). Figurations of the Human, Moralizing World Order (in preparation). Purnima Mankekar (Associate Professor; PhD Washington, 1993) Postcoloniality, media studies, nationalism, ethnicity, feminist theory and ethnography, memory and popular narrative, sexualities, transnational cultural studies; South Asia and Asian American studies. Her book entitled Screening Culture, Viewing Politics won the Kovacs Award from the Society of Cinema Studies and an honorable mention for the Sharon Stephens Award given by the American Ethnological Society. Purnima co-edited a book, Caste and Outcaste, with Gordon Chang and Akhil Gupta (Stanford University Press, April 2002). She is currently working on two book manuscripts. The first, India Travels: Transnational Public Cultures, Gender, and the Reconfiguration of Belonging, is about the role of media and public cultures in the re-production of notions of Indianness at different nodes in a global circuit of images, texts, and commodities. The second manuscript, titled Counterpublics? South Asian Identity and Community after 9/11, examines how South Asian Americans, chiefly Sikhs and Muslims, responded to hate violence in the wake of September 11, She also has a book (co-edited with Louisa Schein) under review titled Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia, on the role of media in the recharging of erotics in different sites in Asia and across Asian diasporas. Lynn Meskell (Professor; PhD Cambridge 1997) Social archaeology, materiality, feminist & postcolonial theory, ethics, ethnography, South Africa, Egypt, Turkey. Her most recent books include Embedding Ethics (2005, Berg) and Archaeologies of Materiality (2005, Blackwell). She is founding editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology and a new series with Duke University Press, Material Worlds. She is currently working on a new volume, Cosmopolitan Archaeologies, and conducting fieldwork around the Kruger National Park that examines the constructs of natural and cultural heritage and the related discourses of empowerment ten years after democracy in South Africa. CASA 2005 / 2006 NEWSLETTER. VOLUME 6 Department Faculty

13 Barbara Voss (Assistant Professor; PhD Berkeley, 2002) Historical archaeology, prehistoric and historic California, feminist archaeology, gender and sexuality studies, the archeology of architecture and structured space, politics of cultural resource management. Recent publications include her co-edited volume, Archaeologies of Sexuality (Routledge 2000). Current research programs include an on-going excavation program at the Presidio of San Francisco [funded in part by the Presidio Trust] and a study of the archaeological collection from the first Chinese overseas community in San José, California for which she has received funds from the History San Jose. Michael Wilcox (Assistant Professor; PhD Harvard, 2001) Early colonial or contact period interactions between Europeans and Native Americans, the production of narratives of contact, conquest and colonization and contemporary Native American culture, history and identity. Since his arrival from Harvard (PhD 2001), Professor Wilcox has worked to facilitate communication and scholarly interaction between contemporay Native Americans, anthroplogists and archaeologists. His first book, The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Contact (University of California Press), represents a sharp departure from traditional accounts of contact, colonization and disappearence for Native Americans. Rather than explaining the disappearence of Native Americans, his work provides a narrative of presence and persistence among Native Americans in contemporary society. His other interests include the cultural production of memory, the creation of the vanishing primitive in modernity, the historical construction of race among social scientists and the application of postcolonial theory to contemporary Indigenous scholarship. Professor Wilcox and his wife Julie serve as Resident Fellows at Murray House, the Comparitive Studies in Race and Ethnicity undergraduate house. Sylvia Yanagisako (Professor; PhD Washington, 1975) Kinship, gender, capitalism, race and ethnicity; U.S., Italy. Her ethnography of family capitalism in northern Italy, Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy was published in 2002 (Princeton University Press). A volume questioning the four-field configuration of American anthropology, Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology, co-edited with Dan Segal was published in 2005 by Duke University Press. She is currently working on a collaborative research project on the formation of transnational capitalism between the Italian and Chinese textile and garment industries. Emeriti Harumi Befu (Emeritus; PhD Wisconsin 1962) globalization, diaspora, cultural nationalism; Japan. Most recently he co-edited the book Japan s Diversity dilemmas: Ethnicity, Citizenship and Education (with Soo im Lee and Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, iuniverse Inc, 2006). George Collier (Emeritus; PhD Harvard 1968) Social anthropology, history, quantitative methods; Spain, Mesoamerica, Latin America, southern Europe. Jane Collier (Emeritus; PhD Tulane 1970) Cultural anthropology, anthropology of law, political anthropology, feminist theory; Mesoamerica, southern Europe. Carol Delaney (Associate Professor; PhD Chicago, 1984) Cultural anthropology, gender, religion; Mediterranean, Middle East, Turkey. She teaches part time in the Religious Studies Department at Brown University where she is also an Invited Research Scholar at the John Brown Library. Her recent publications include: Columbus s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem (Comparative Studies in Society and History, April 2006). Charles Frake (Emeritus, PhD Yale 1944) Cognitive anthropology, maritime anthropology; Pacific Islands, Europe. James Gibbs, Jr. (Emeritus; PhD Harvard 1961) Anthropology of law, psychological anthropology, anthrpology of film; Africa. Renato Rosaldo (Emeritus; PhD Harvard 1971) History, society; island Southeast Asia, U.S. Latinos and Latin America. His edited collection, Cultural Citizenship in Island Southeast Asia was recently published by UC Press and his poetry book, Prayer to Spider Woman/Rezo a la mujer araña, was recently published in Saltillo, Mexico by Icocult and was awarded an American Book Award, G. William Skinner (Emeritus; PhD Cornell 1954) Regional analysis, demographic anthropology, comparative family systems, agrarian societies; China, Japan, Southeast Asia, France. George Spindler (Emeritus; PhD UCLA 1952) Cultural change and transmission; educational and psychological anthropology; native N. America, American culture, Europe. He continues to teach courses in Cultural and Social Anthropology and in the School of Education. Robert Textor (Emeritus; PhD Cornell 1960) Ethnographic futures research; impact of high technology. Thailand, Southeast Asia, Japan. Alums Create Research Fund to Honor Prof. Gibbs The Professor James Lowell Gibbs, Jr. Endowed Research Fund was established in late 2005 by Sterling (BA 68) and Larry (BA 70, JD/ MBA 76) Franklin, Trustees of the Morris S. Smith Foundation. Sterling took the introductory course in Anthropology taught by Professor Gibbs in Spring, 1968, Sterling s last quarter at Stanford. He was very impressed with the course content ( it really opened my eyes ), with Professor Gibbs teaching ability, and with Professor Gibbs kindness to his students. Sterling said, He was the kind of college professor you would want every student to have a chance to be taught by. Sterling remembered Professor Gibbs fondly, and he decided to establish the endowed research fund to celebrate Prof. Gibbs 75th birthday in June, The Gibbs Endowed Research Fund will provide research grants to be awarded by the University s Undergraduate Research Programs in cooperation with Professor Gibbs, the Department of Anthropological Sciences, the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Center for African Studies. The gift from the Morris S. Smith Foundation was matched by CUE, and will include funds which had been raised by Dr. Carla Winston, a PhD student who studied under Prof. Gibbs, on the occasion of Prof. Gibbs retirement in Asked to comment, Prof. Gibbs said, I am honored and excited. This funding will enable outstanding students to conduct excellent anthropological field research on African peoples. 13

14 n e w b o o k s b y c a s a fac u lt y Lynn Meskell Embedding Ethics (Ed with Peter Pels) Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise. Invoking different disciplinary practices from biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, contributors show how ethics should be resituated at the heart of, rather than exterior to, scientific activity. Positioning the researcher as a negotiator of significant truths rather than an adjudicator of a priori precepts enables contributors to relocate ethics in new sets of social and scientific relationships triggered by recent globalization processes--from new forms of intellectual and cultural ownership to accountability in governance, and the very ways in which people are studied. Case studies from ethnographic research, museum display, archaeological fieldwork and professional monitoring illustrate both best practice and potential pitfalls. Archaeologies of Materiality (Editor) Archaeologies of Materiality explores the philosophies that underpin materiality for specific cultural moments across time and space. Drawing on social theory, this volume provides a range of object orientations and is one of the first books to showcase substantive archaeological case studies devoted to the exploration of materiality. From prehistoric to contemporary contexts, this collection explores the idea of a material universe that is socially conceived and constructed, but that also shapes human experience in daily practice. Each case study demonstrates the saliency of materiality by linking it to concepts of landscape, technology, embodiment, ritual, and heritage. Archaeologies of Materiality will be of interest to students and scholars studying archaeology, anthropology, museum studies, and material culture studies. Sarah Jain Injury Miyako Inoue Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan This highly original study provides an entirely new critical perspective on the central importance of ideas about language in the reproduction of gender, class, and race divisions in modern Japan. Focusing on a phenomenon commonly called women s language, in modern Japanese society, Miyako Inoue considers the history and social effects of this language form. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a contemporary Tokyo corporation to study the everyday linguistic experience of white-collar females office workers and on historical research from the late nineteenth century to 1930, she calls into question the claim that women s language is a Japanese cultural tradition of ancient origin and offers a critical genealogy showing the extent to which this language form is, in fact, a cultural construct linked with Japan s national and capitalist modernity. Her theoretically sophisticated, empirically grounded, interdisciplinary work brilliantly illuminates the relationship between culture and language, the nature of power and subject formation in modernity, and how the complex nexus of gender, language, and political economy are experienced in everyday life. Injury offers the first sustained anthropological analysis and critique of American injury law. The book approaches injury law as a symptom of a larger American injury culture, rather than as a tool of social justice or as a form of regulation. In doing so, it offers a new understanding of the problematic role that law plays in constructing Americans relations with the objects they consume. Through lively historical analyses of consumer products and workplace objects ranging from cigarettes to cheeseburgers and computer keyboards to airbags, Jain lucidly illustrates the real limits of the product safety laws that seek to redress consumer and worker injury. The book draws from a wide range of materials to demonstrate that American law sets out injury as an exceptional state, one that can be redressed through imperfect systems of monetary compensation. Injury demonstrates how laws are unable to accommodate the ways in which physical differences among citizens are imposed by the physical objects of culture that distribute risk differently among populations. The book moves between detailed accounts of individual legal cases; historical analyses of advertising, product design, regulation, and legal history; and a wide reading of cultural theory. 14 CASA 2005 / 2006 NEWSLETTER. VOLUME 6

15 Matthew Korhman Striding Along the Road to Health: A Handbook for Giving Up Smoking Chinese-language public health text, Striding Along the Road to Health: A Handbook for Giving Up Smoking (Co-authors: Matthew Kohrman (first author), Li Xiaoliang, Zhang Haopeng, Xiao Xia, and Yang Yan. China News United Publishing, 2005). Developed in collaboration with the School of Public Health, Kunming Medical College, and China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Beijing: China News United Publishing. Ian Hodder James Ferguson Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order In Global Shadows the renowned anthropologist James Ferguson moves beyond the traditional anthropological focus on local communities to explore more general questions about Africa and its place in the contemporary world. Ferguson develops his argument through a series of provocative essays which open as he shows they necessarily must into interrogations of globalization, modernity, worldwide inequality, and social justice. He maintains that Africans in a variety of different social and geographical locations increasingly seek to make claims of membership within a global community, claims that contest the marginalization that has so far been the principal fruit of globalization for Africa. Ferguson contends that such claims demand new understandings of the global centered less on transnational flows and images of unfettered connection than on the social relations that selectively constitute global society and on the rights and obligations that characterize it. The Leopard s Tale. Revealing the mysteries of Catalhoyuk Çatalhöyük, in central Turkey, became internationally famous in the 1960s when an ancient town thought to be the oldest in the world was discovered there together with wonderful wall paintings and animals, including leopards, sculpted in high relief. The archaeological finds included the remains of textiles, plants, and animals, and some female terra-cotta figures that suggested the existence of a mother goddess cult. The initial excavation was interrupted in 1965, and answers to the riddles of this Neolithic site remained unresolved until Ian Hodder initiated a new campaign of research in the 1990s. Described by Colin Renfrew as one of the most ambitious excavation projects currently in progress, undertaken at one of the world s great archaeological sites, this has been a truly multidisciplinary undertaking, involving the participation of over one hundred archaeologists, scientists, and specialists. Hodder and his colleagues have established that this great site, dating back some 9,000 years, provides the key to understanding the most important change in human existence the time when people moved into villages and towns, adopted farming as a way of life, and began to accept domination of one social group by another. Through meticulous excavation procedures and laboratory analyses, they peel back the layers of history to reveal how people lived and died and how they engaged with one another, with their environment, and with the spirit world. Harumi Befu Japan s Diversity Dilemmas: Ethnicity, Citizenship, and Education Co-Edited with Soo im Lee and Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu Japan s Diversity Dilemmas: Ethnicity, Citizenship, and Education reveals how Japanese society is now in the midst of dramatic transformation brought on by demographic change and globalization. Foreigners are coming to Japan and many more will come in the near future to meet the demands of an economy that needs workers to compensate for an extremely low birth rate. The ramifications of this influx of foreigners into a society that has based its identity on a mythical ethnic purity are enormous. This book examines the effects of globalization on both new and older ethnic communities. It shows the ways in which minorities, in particular Koreans, are changing their conceptions and practices regarding nationality. It explores issues of human rights and emerging conceptions of citizenship in Japan. It also looks at how forces of globalization are affecting the state ideology of homogeneity and how a new image of diversity and multiculturalism is slowly developing. Several authors focus their attention on implications for education in citizenship education, ethnic education, and international education. N e w B o o k s by C A S A FAC U LT Y 15

16 16 Professor Carol Delaney Retires from CASA Professor Carol Delaney retired this year after almost 20 years with the department. Carol joined the Stanford Department of Anthropology in 1987 with a strong regional focus on the Mediterranean. She did archaeological work at Can Hasan in Turkey and on the island of Melos in Greece. Her anthropological fieldwork was conducted in a remote village in central Turkey. For Carol, Stanford was a place of intense creativity. While here she wrote The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society (1991), and Abraham on Trial: the Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (1998). Her latest book, Investigating Culture: An Experiential Introduction to Anthropology (2004) offers a refreshing hands-on alternative to more traditional textbooks by challenging readers to think about culture in new ways and to apply these ideas to their own lives. She is still pursuing the vibrant lifestyle of an anthropologist teaching at Brown, lecturing elsewhere, and researching Christopher Columbus. She recently updated German Dziebel on her current projects and research: Marcy Brink, PhD As I transition from the status of a CASA doctoral student to an Assistant Professor at Brown University, I take this liminal moment to recall defining moments of the past year. This year I was honored to share a stage with Renato Rosaldo at the Society for Humanistic Anthropology awards ceremony at the AAA in D.C., where I received the Best Student Paper Prize (Renato won for poetry). At the time, I was teaching in MIT s anthropology program, where working among so many Stanford graduates (Program Head Jean Jackson, Hugh Gusterson, Stefan Helmreich, and Heather Paxson) was a special pleasure. Producing my dissertation, Reference Points: Text, Context and Change in Definition of Turkish-Jewish Identity, in August prepared me for another big project: giving birth to my son, Ari, in December. Although both labors seemed endless, CASA 2005 / 2006 NEWSLETTER. VOLUME 6 Transitions My first article on this new project, Columbus s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem has just appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History (April 2006). I have been teaching two courses this semester in the Religious Studies Department at Brown. They are entitled Fundamentalism in the Modern World, and Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. Next year I will begin my half-time appointment at Brown teaching one course each semester beginning with my freshman seminar, Investigating Culture. In May, 2006 I am leading the Stanford Alumni tour to Turkey again. In March, I gave the first lecture in a new series established by the new department of Middle East Studies at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. I called my lecture The Story of Abraham: Foundation for Unity or Strife in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Two memorable events happened to me last year. Last May, I went to Spain to visit places important to Columbus, met with a descendent of his and was able to view and handle some original documents. Then, I went to Cambridge England for the world premier of an opera, Abraham on Trial, that was in part inspired by my book of the same title. Alumni Profile- Moving On at least having a child only took nine months! Now I look forward to watching both babies grow, as Ari learns to crawl and the dissertation grows into a book manuscript. Entering the job market made it clear that doing research with a community of Turkish Jews put me in an unusual position vis a vis departmental trends in theory and area specialization. Although Jews can be considered diasporic, transnational and urban, many university anthropology departments were interested in recently uprooted or moving populations. Luckily, my research about seemingly marginal actors (Jews in Turkey) and training in anthropological methods were just what Brown s Program in Judaic Studies sought in a new hire. As I read the job announcement, I knew that the fit was ideal. With a breastfeeding baby in tow, I headed down to Providence on a snowy day in February to interview for the

17 position. While my husband camped out with the baby in a warm hotel room, I enjoyed discussions about anthropology, history, literature and language with colleagues at Brown. The Program in Judaic Studies interdisciplinarity attracted me from the start, given that my doctoral training drew upon the knowledge not only of CASA faculty, but also Stanford s linguists and historians. With a co-appointment in Judaic Studies and Anthropology, the new position will allow me to continue working on Jewish topics while remaining connected to the discipline in which I trained. Given the Program s emphasis on comparative studies, I hope to bring the research questions I asked in Turkey to other areas of the world, namely Cuba and Israel. Having taught at Stanford, Tufts and MIT, I am learning that teaching is like yoga: a practice that gets better with time. I m most looking forward to meeting the students at Brown, about whom I have heard much praise. In the upcoming year, I will continue to learn how to teach by creating and/or reinventing three courses: Social Science Approaches to Judaic Studies, Israeli Society and Linguistic Anthropology. Alumni Profile- the The Community Knowledge Project: What are you waiting for? Michael J. Montoya, PhD 2003 Assistant Professor, UC Irvine In this post identity politics climate, many research agendas only thinly conceal age old professional and sociocultural hierarchies. Needed is research that works to institutionalize scholarship that counters the gendered, class, ethnic and nation based privilege of our discipline, while at the same time contesting the zero sum end-game that poses as political, intellectual or social enfranchisement. Forsaking my pessimism, I work to create partial, locatable accounts of health inequality by forging intellectual alliances across disciplines and between university researchers and people active in communities. My earlier research demonstrated the problematic use of Mexicana/o ethnicity in genetic epidemiology wherein biological reductionism and racialization surfaced as a deep epistemological means for social reproduction. Building upon this analytic, I am currently exploring the boundaries of biomedical and social sciences in order to find a critically integrated approach to solving health inequalities among Chicano/Latino communities. This emerging research agenda has been funded by the NIH- National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and entails joining with like-minded collaborators from the life and social sciences as well as others with stakes in health outcomes and social equality. Specifically, I seek to create ethnographic accounts of the life conditions of real people in a manner robust enough Social Science Approaches looks through a Jewish lens at contemporary social theory and method, thereby critically examining major themes in anthropology, sociology, psychology and linguistics: race, nationalism, diaspora, kinship, gender and modernity. Linguistic Anthropology, a core class in the Department of Anthropology, has long been offered by Bill Beeman (recent CASA Visiting Professor). My colleagues at Brown have been most welcoming, including anthropology department chair David Kertzer, whose work in political anthropology was central to my earlier work on campaign symbolism. Finally, I have the good fortune to continue working with Carol Delaney, my dissertation advisor, as she is now teaching in the Religious Studies department at Brown. Students or alumni interested in learning more about Judaic Studies or anthropology at Brown, my research or publications can keep in touch (beginning September 2006) by accessing my information on the university web site: Departments/Judaic_Studies. - quantitatively and qualitatively to compete with the bioreductionisms of biomedical research and the lowresolution accounts derived from research conducted independent of active community participation. The life course, fetal programming and biocultural theories of disease causality that are deservedly gaining strength in medical anthropology and in social and cultural epidemiology are desperately in need of on-the-ground data of real people living real lives in stratified social orders. To this end, I have launched the Community Knowledge Project which examines diabetes and childhood Leukemia as embodied expressions of inequality in one Southern California neighborhood. Among other things, micro-ethnographies, ethnobiographies, and network maps will be added to epidemiological, demographic, toxic emissions, and exposure data to characterize the non random impact of living (sometimes well and at other times not) in precarious urban conditions. By dividing the labor between research into the lived conditions of bodies in certain contexts and research into the pathophysiological and biological impact of those life conditions, I hope to demonstrate that interdisciplinary and politically engaged approaches to health research offer better conceptual and predictive possibilities than conventional disciplinary research alone. Admittedly ambitious, this project presumes that waiting for others to carry out such situated knowledge projects seems a silly waste of my privilege. 17

18 CASA alumni news 18 Rickard, Ruth [Atkins] (Humanities 43) Lives in Laguna Hills, CA. Williams, Nancy (BA 50) Honorary Reader in Anthropology, School of Social Science, U of Queensland. Research focuses on consultancies in relation to native title, cultural and natural resource issues for Australian Aboriginal organisations and state governments. Kress, Florence [Stanley] (BA 53) Retired SFUSD elementary teacher. Serves as docent at Asian American Museum of Art SF, DeYoung Museum SF, and Legion of Honor Museum SF. Becker, Joan C [Cortelyou] (BS 55) Retired, Burton, WA. Studying small towns (really small towns!), and consulting with small weekly newspapers. Shephard, Cynthia (MA 56) Retired, conducting independent research on adapting various responses to dense populations to the theory of speciation as in the article on Evolutionary Biology Science, 10 March 06. Focused esp on speech in urban areas compared to silence for rural hunters. Robinson, David A (MA 57) Retired, Culver City, CA Bell, Martha March (BA 59) Retired in Sebastopol, CA. Interests include: raising Hackney Ponies, fiber arts with homespun wool, support and marketing art projects for children in a Guatemala orphanage. Leathers, James (BA 60) Human Resources Consultant, County of Los Angeles Lytle Holmstrom, Lynda (BA 61) Professor, Dept of Sociology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA. Currently studying the college application process. Among prior publications is an autobiographical chapter, Working the Third Shift, that includes a section on life as an undergraduate at Stanford. Howard, Alan (PhD 62) Professor Emeritus, U of Hawaii, Recent Publications: Presenting Rotuma to the World: The Making of The Land Has Eyes,Visual Anthropology Review 22(1): Currently working on: An Historical Demography of Rotuma; and Island Legacy: A History of the Rotuman People (with Jan Rensel). Submitted to U of Hawai i. Seymour, Susan (PhD Harvard 62) Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Pitzer College. Recent publications: Multiple Caretaking of Infants & Young Children: An Area in Critical Need of a Feminist Psychological Anthropology, ETHOS 32 (4) 2005 (Awarded Stirling Prize by Society for Psychological Anthropology). Edited/authored Intro to special issue of Ethos: Contributions to a Feminist Psychological Anthropology, 32 (4) Current project: biography of Cora Du Bois. Lozier, John (BA 64) Retired from West VA U Extension Service. Current interests: Venezuela, Latin America, sustainable agriculture, live traditional CASA 2005 / 2006 NEWSLETTER. VOLUME 6 music, environmental education, agrotourism, ecotourism. Mitchell, Don (BA 64) Professor, Dept of Anthropology Buffalo State College. Retiring this year after 33 years of teaching. Continues to write and publish ethnographically-oriented fiction and poetry. Won the Journal of Humanistic Anthropology Prizes for Poetry and Fiction in the 90 s. Myers, Joseph Peter (JD 64) Private Practice as Personal Injury Lawyer in Riverside, CA Rohner, Ronald P (PhD 64) Professor Emeritus, Director- Ronald and Nancy Rohner Center for the Study of Parental Acceptance and Rejection. Int l research on interpersonal acceptance and rejection, esp parental acceptancerejection and intimate adult relationships American Psychological Assoc Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology. June, 2006 Turkish Psychological Association hosting 1st Int l Congress on Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection in Istanbul ( leading to an Int l Society ( Reynolds, Terry R (MA 65) Curator of Collections and Exhibit, New Mexico State U Museum. Interests include: Ethnohistory of Border Families and their businesses, Ethnohistory of Pueblo and Hispanic Village Economics. Snyder, Alice Ivey (BA, MA 65) Stanwood, WA, culture and cognition McNeely, Virginia Narsutis (AB 66) Retired State Administrator, Spiritual Director, Education for Ministry Mentor and Mentor Trainer for Sewanee, Stephen Ministry Leader, Reader of General Ordination Exams for Episcopal Church and various local lay ministries. Robins, Elliot (BA 67) Assistant Dean, Graduate College Union Institute and Univ, Cincinnati, OH. Interests include: Doctoral Progam Development and Social Science Research Pedagogy/Methods. Savageau, Ann [Birky] (AB 67) Associate Professor, Dept of Environmental Design, UC Davis. Interests include: mixed media sculpture and sustainable design. Burton, Mike (PhD 68) Professor, Dept of Anthropology, UC- Irvine. Current projects: paper on Language Families and Social Structure; book on food systems in Micronesia; anthropological study of causes and consequences of global warming; and study of Marshallese youth in the US. Gmelch, George (BA 68) Professor of Anthropology, Union College. Current projects: wine tourism in Napa Valley. Recently edited, Baseball without Borders: The International Pastime, U Nebraska, due out this summer. Hitchcock, Ann (AB 68) Chief Curator, National Park Service. Recent exhibit: The Power of Context: National Park Service Museums at 100 Years.

19 Johnson, Judith (MA 68) CEO and President of Green Door, a community mental health program. Getting homeless people back to work. Walling, Savannah (Elaine) (BA 68) Artistic Director, Vancouver Moving Theatre. Playwright, director, choreographer, musician, dancer and educator. Organized 1 st and 2 nd annual Down Eastside Heart of the City Festivals (VMT/ Carnegie, ). Currently co-writing and overseeing artistic development of The Shadows Project, a community shadow play with images and puppets about addiction for families. Bourne, Peter (MA 69) Visiting Scholar Green College, Oxford U, CHMN Med. Educ. Coop with Cuba. Co-authored The Global Impact of the Cuban Health System (Oxford U) & produced film on same topic, out Sept Gerdes, William Forest (MA 69) Retired, living at the Sea Ranch when not traveling. Using anthropological perspective to personally explore SE Asian cultures, especially the Filipino culture. Nerlove, Sara Beth (MA, PhD 69) Program Director, Patnerships for Innovation, National Science Foundation. Current interests are well represented by the broad swath that this program cuts; ( crssprgm/pfi and in Solicitation NSF o6-550) O Grady, John P (BA, MA 69) FACOG, Mercy Medical Center: Family Life Center; Director: Obstetric Services; Professor Tufts U School of Medicine. Working on 5th textbook/obstetrics Prokosch, Eric (PhD 69) Retired January Currently does freelance consultancy work on human rights (torture, dealth penalty, disappearances ) and humanitarian law issues. Riles, Phillip (BA 69) Sacramento, CA. Educational Consultant with a focus on binocular vision deficits and reading progress, as well as leadership training in child development and parenting. Kincaid, Margaret Gray (BA 70) Graduate Student at Columbia U in Historic Preservation. Using knowledge of Anthropology with Cultural Landscape reports. Kronenfeld, David B (PhD 70) Professor of Anthropology, UC-Riverside. Article in ANTHROPOS suggesting the need for a new typology of kinship terminologies and discussing the issues that lie behind the need. Gruenbaum, Ellen (AB 70) Professor of Anthrology, Cal State Univ, Fresno. Sabbatical project on activist movement against female genital cutting in Sudan, Conducted rural research for UNICEF and CARE in Sudan on FGC abandonment efforts. Publications: Medical Anthrology Quarterly (forthcoming) and Journal of Middle East Women s Studies (2005). St. John, Paul (BA 70) Deputy County Counsel, San Bernardino County, CA (Attorney). Tanaka, Kenneth K. (AB 70) Professor of Buddhist Studies, Musashino U, Tokyo. During upcoming sabbatical, plans to work on book in Japanese on Cultural Personality differences between Japanese and Americans for Japanese audience. Interested in contemporary Pure Land Buddhist doctrine. Van Rheenen, Fredric J (MA 70) Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Psychiatric Consultant, Oncology and Hematology divisions Stanford Medical Center. Teaching Stanford Medical Center Fellows, Residents, Interns and Medical Students about the psychosocial aspects of medicine. rick@uanr.org. Bittker, Thomas E (MA 71) Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at U Nevada School of Medicines Teaching Faculty at National Judicial College. Private practice of forensic psychiatry. Interests: biological correlates of legal insanity, investigations into the decision making process in capital crimes. Bond, Carolyn (AB 71) Freelance Developmental Editor for creative nonfiction, Ashland, OR. Clark-Gamble, Carolyn (BA 71) Professor and Head of the Communication Dept at Salt Lake Community College. Training teachers of High School Advance Placement communication classes. Developing online communication classes for SLCC and writing Instructor Manuals for college communication texts. Kelsey, Mary (BA 71) Currently independent artist and consultant. Illustration commissions in sustainable land use, 1995 to present. Consultant for planning family land preservation in NE Ohio. Business owner, rural guest and vacation home, NE Ohio: Masse, W Bruce (BA 71) Archaeologist Ecology Group, Los Alamos National Laboratory. Upcoming Publications: The Archaeology and Anthropology of Quaternary Period Cosmic Impacts, Comet/Asteroid Impacts and Human Society (Ed Peter Bobrowsky & Hans Rickman, Springer Press, Berlin ca. July 2006)- from a 2004 workshop sponsored by the International Council for Science. Special publication of Geological Society of London- Myth & Geology co-edited with Italian structural geologist Luigi Piccardi, late fall Reynolds, Nancy (BA 71) MD, OB/GYN/hospitalist. Putting mullticultural interests and perspective into action by working with women and their families on birth/reproductive health in Northern California. Mainly works with Hispanic communities, and also has the opportunity to work in many other cultures at the MCal facilities she serves. Rompf, William James (BS 71) Director of Tennis, International Tennis Hall of Fame Vallila, Martti (BS 71) President of Virtual Pro Inc., enterpreneur focused on bridging gap between Russian science and western markets. Launching company based on Dr. Vladimir Poponin s discoveries: biosensor capable of directly detecting DNA through optical fingerprints in low frequency range of Raman spectrum. Investment being solicitated for this project, which hopes to revolutionize biotechnology. Witzel, Christine (AB 71) Research & Training Consultant, Palo Alto, CA. Focuses on Needs Assessments, Program Evaluations, and Customer loyalty research. Moles, Jerry A (PhD 72) 19

20 Working for establishment of sustainable resource management in the New River Basin of VA and ecological restoration in Sri Lanka. Director of Land Stewardship for New River Land Trust, Chair of Board of Directors for NeoSynthesis Research Centre in Sri Lanka, and Chair of Certificiation Program Int l Analog Forestry Network. Saroyan, Lia [Wangenheim] (BA 72) Attorney; Assistant Disciplinary Counsel, Oregon State Bar Association. Currently enjoys gardening, Labradors, twin grandaughters and public service. DeBernardi, Jean (BA 73) Professor, Dept of Anthropology, U Alberta. The Way that Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia (Stanford U Press, 2006). Current research focuses on modernization of Daoism in Singapore and Malaysia and religious and cultural pilgrimage to Wudang Mountain, Hubei Province, PRC. Fox Myers, Blayney (BA 73) Landscape architect in New Orleans, LA. Mahone, William (BA 73) General Counsel/Managing Director of Berkley Capital LLC, a private equity firm based in Greenwich, CT. Wrote/produced: Ordinary Sinner, feature film released in McNoble, Dorothy J (BA 73) General Surgeon, Millbrae, CA. Single payor health care. Dreaming the Family, under contract with U Chicago. Otudeko, Adebisi O (PhD 75) Professor at Washburn U, estab. Inst of Yoruba Language & Culture. Kosakowsky, Laura J (BA 76) Visiting Scholar, Dept of Anthropology, U of Arizona Archaeologogical Projects in Belize: Blue Creek Regional Political Ecology Project (2000-present); Chan Project, Belize Valley (beginning 2006). Maya Ceramic Studies. McDowell Burton, Margie (BA 76) Research Director, San Diego Archaeological Center. Co-ed book based in part on dissertation research: Levy, T. E., Y. M. Rowan, and M. M. Burton (eds). In prep. Desert Chiefdom: Dimensions of Subterranean Settlement and Society in Israel s Negev Desert (ca BC) Based on New Data from Shiqmim. (Equinox) Bruno, Frederic (BA 77) An attorney in Minneapolis, MN. Howell, Julia Day (PhD 77) Associate Professor, Asian Studies, Griffith U, Nathan, Australia. Recent publications: Sufism and the Modern in Islam, (Eds Julia Day Howell & Martin van Bruinessen, I.B. Tauris, 2005); Muslims, the New Age and Marginal Religions in Indonesia: Changing Meanings of Religious Pluralism. Social Compass, published by Sage for Société Internationale de Sociologie des Religions, Leuve. Werner, Laurie [Nelson] (BA 73) MD, Chief of Clinical Services Section, Dept of Health Services, Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health/Office of Family Planning, Granite Bay, CA. Also working with Family Pact Program: statewide program including family planning and STI treatment for low income adolescents and adults. Bilmes, Jack (Jacob) (PhD 74) Professor of Anthropology, Dept of Anthropology, U of Hawaii at Manoa. Works with microanalysis of verbal interaction (especially, argument, debate, negotiation). Interested in free market ideology. James, Arthur E. (BA 77) Works in Oregon Dept of Transportation on Public/Private Partnerships. Sanchez, Alberto (Rudi) (all but Ph.D. Dissertation 77) VP, Student Affairs, Glendale Community College, Glendale, Arizona. Looking forward to retirement and possible completion of PhD. Broussarel, Marsha (AB 78) At LS State U, School of Public Health researching social determinants of public health. 20 Martyn, Rhonda K (BS 74) Faculty at Cabrillo College, in the Dance and E.C.E. Departments. Currently creating La Totura/La Tortuga. Full Stop. a new evening long choreography/theater work to reggaeton. The themes of the work are domestic abuse and mass marketing. Robbins, Lindsay S (BA 74) Received VMD from the U of PA in Now a Mobile Large Animal Veterinarian. Vaska, Anthony (MA 74) Living in Bethel, Alaska. Gerritsen, Terry (Tom) (BA 75) Camden, MA, writes thrillers under name Tess Gerritsen. Next one: The Mephisto Club (Ballantine) on sale September 12. Love of Anthropology continues to inspire Terry s writing and travel! Lewin, Ellen (PhD 75) Professor of Women s Studies and Anthropology at U of Iowa. Volume of classic essays, Feminist Anthropology: A Reader, was recently published by Blackwell. Working on two book projects: volume of essays in lesbian/gay anthropology, co-ed with William L. Leap, Out in Public; & ethnography of gay fathers in the US, CASA 2005 / 2006 NEWSLETTER. VOLUME 6 Burns, Janifer (AB 78) Managing Director, Debt Capital Makets, BBVA, NY, NY Dalby, Liza [Crihfield] (PhD 78) Independent scholar and writer, Berkeley, CA. New book from U Cal Press out in Spring 2007: East Wind Melts the Ice - An Almanac Memoir. Currently writing a novel entitled, The Hidden Buddhas. Parent, Elizabeth A (MA 78) Professor Emeriti SF State U. Projects: Literacy, Women s Studies, History of Education, Native Education Curriculum Development. Reid, Janice (MA, PhD 78) Vice-Chancellor and President at U of Western Sydney Thornton, Robert (PhD 78) Professor of Anthropology at the U of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. New book on the anthropology of HIV/ AIDS and sex, Unimagined Community: Anthropological Essays on Sex, Networks and AIDS, (U of California PRess, forthcoming). Also continuing work on traditional healers and ethnography of the South African lowveld, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Callahan, Daniel, (BA 79)