Dear friends of UW Anthropology,
Each spring, the Department of Anthropology and the UW celebrate the achievements of our students as many of them graduate and leave our immediate community. We have always accomplished this with joyous in-person commencements and the hugs and handshakes of family and friends. As with so many of our cherished traditions, the pandemic has forced us to conceive of different ways of celebrating the achievements of our amazing students and of maintaining our connections. With this newsletter, Anthropology hopes to share with you, our larger community, the accomplishments of the current members of the Department of Anthropology and our many and far-flung alumni. We also want to take the opportunity to introduce you to new members of our community as a way of maintaining the decades-long tradition of UW Anthropology. But mostly we want to connect, to tell you that we are surviving, and to express the hope that you and your loved ones are healthy and safe.
As many of you know, the campus moved to online learning toward the end of Winter Quarter and our offices and labs have been shuttered since early March. We have learned to make-do with Zoom meetings when all we really want to do is be physically present with our students. We have learned to cope with disappointments over research opportunities delayed or even lost forever, with long nights and longer days of screen-exhaustion, and with worry about … everything. But we are anthropologists, so we’ve also had tremendous opportunities to make a difference in our community and our world. We mention some of those in the stories included in this version of the AnthropoLog.
Our purpose as a department remains to create and disseminate knowledge about people — across diverse populations extant today, through the lens of deep time and evolutionary processes, in how we communicate, and what we make and leave behind. Toward that educational goal, the department continues to grow with over 650 undergraduate majors and minors. We graduate over 250 students this year! Our students accomplish remarkable things, and they go on from our courses to become physicians, activists, parents, leaders, and generally better-informed citizens of the world due to the education that they received here. We are happy to be able to share some of their achievements with you in the stories that follow.
I hope that you will enjoy reading about these and other activities and accomplishments of UW anthropologists. We are eager to stay in touch — from 6 feet away! — and the AnthropoLog e-newsletter is just one way we hope to do this. Our website features news stories about our community, and we welcome our community to share items that we might post. Thank you so much for your interest in Anthropology, your support of our students, and your friendship.
I hope for normalcy for all of us in the coming year and health and safety for all of you.
Sincerely,
Postscript ... It is the 3rd of June, barely three weeks since I wrote the text shown above, and the world has become even more difficult. So many of you and so many of us here in the department are hurting in ways that have become all too familiar, and yet the brutality of systemic racism has the power to wound us over and over again. We have lost, and continue to lose, so much from this pandemic, from institutionalized racism, from intolerance, injustice, and hatred that manifests in myriad ways and creates incalculable pain. Please take a moment to mourn.
And then, continue the hard work of making the world a better place one day, one step, one action at a time. Peace to you all. Patricia