AnthropoLog — Spring 2020

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… Read more
by Melanie Martin Anthropology faculty Melanie Martin and Dan Eisenberg, along with Eleanor Brindle (Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, CSDE) are collaborating with researchers at the University of Idaho and Washington State University to study maternal-infant… Read more
The Landscape, Encounters and Identity project (LEIAp) is an interdisciplinary landscape archaeology project that seeks to recover the history of occupation in the region of Son Servera (Mallorca, Spain) from the Bronze Age (1900 BCE) until the end of the Islamic occupation (13th century CE).  The Son Servera landscape is rich in prehistoric sites and monuments, including several Early Iron Age stone-walled villages, isolated stone towers (or Taules),… Read more
by Holly Barker and Alvin Logan For the past three years, Dr. Alvin Logan, II, has been teaching the very popular Anthropology of Sport (ANTH 213) course in the Department of Anthropology. Dr. Logan brings experiences in sport and research to his teaching, along with a passion for making research accessible to all students.  As an undergraduate at UW, Dr. Logan played on the UW football team, and after receiving his BA entered into an MA program in the UW College of Education. During… Read more
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Dear Dr. Kramer, The coronavirus uprooted everyone’s lives and caused major disruptions around the world. But it failed to keep this public announcement under its grip. After a mere 30-day delay, I am proud to announce that I have been selected as a 2020 University of Washington Husky 100. I want to honor Dr. Holly Barker, Lorna Hamill, Kai Wise, Jon Olivera, Tami Hohn and countless other folks who have helped and shaped me throughout my undergraduate education at UW. First Nations at UW,… Read more
by Sven Haakanson Ethnoarchaeology is a sub-field within archaeology that uses sociocultural and archaeological research methods to understand how archaeological sites are created by living people. I had the privilege to conduct ethnoarchaeological research from 1994-98 with the Nenet Reindeer Herders from the Yamal Peninsula, Russia, where I documented how they created, occupied, and abandoned their sites. This experience taught me to see the complexities involved in interpreting… Read more
The last two years have been a productive and exciting time for several anthropology UW PhD alumni. Congratulations to the following alumni who have published books in the last two years. We are very proud of your contributions to the field of anthropology. Lisa Meierotto (PhD 2009), Assistant Professor in the School of Public Service at Boise State University, is the most recently published… Read more
by Hollis Miller I am an archaeology PhD candidate interested in Indigenous archaeology, the study of colonialism and community-based research methods. My dissertation research is a community-oriented project based in Old Harbor, Alaska, a Sugpiaq village in the Kodiak Archipelago. With my research partners in Old Harbor, I am exploring how Indigenous Sugpiaq communities negotiated Russian colonialism through their daily lives. Russian fur traders began traveling through Sugpiaq… Read more
Goodreau has been in the news twice in recent months, both times related to COVID-19. The first case stemmed from his winter quarter course, Plagues and Peoples, profiled in a previous AnthropoLog. This year’s course coincided with the emergence of the COVID-19 outbreak, first in Wuhan, and then around the world. As the weeks went by, the many topics covered in the course… Read more
by Joss Whittaker Stumbling on things I hadn’t planned to investigate is one of my favorite parts of field work. My archaeological research, in the remote Aru Islands of eastern Indonesia, is about old settlements. But while doing this work I also became fascinated with the development in the present, particularly in the archipelago’s capital Dobo. Building houses there relies on a cottage industry of coral breakers. Men and women pry coral from the mudflats flanking the harbor,… Read more
by Rachel Chapman, Muna Osman, Hodan Rage, Sumaya Mohamed A Project with Deep Roots The Mama Amaan Project (safe motherhood in Somali), emerged from a series of community organizing relationships and advocacy partnership efforts, culminating in the implementation of an innovative perinatal education and doula care model in the Somali community. Our project received a UW Royalty Research Fund (RRF) grant for ethnographic study partnering with the Somali Health Board, Health… Read more
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Associate Professor Sareeta Amrute won the IBP 2019 Book Prize for the Social Sciences for her book, Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin. The prize, which drew over 400 nominations in 2019, is sponsored by the International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS). Associate Professor of Anthropology Dan Eisenberg joined the editorial board of the new Cambridge University Press journal "… Read more
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GRADUATE STUDENTS Baishakhi Basu, a PhD student in biological anthropology, was awarded a 2019-20 Wadsworth Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to complete her dissertation entitled, The effect of famine on ovarian aging in Bangladeshi women. The Middle East Center awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship to study Arabic to Delaney Glass for the 2020-21 academic year. Alexandra G. Hammerberg, a PhD student in biological anthropology, received an Honorable Mention in… Read more
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We would like to take this opportunity to thank those generous donors who contributed to our efforts this past year. We believe that anthropology makes a world of difference and we want you to know that you make a world of difference to us! Dr. David AgoadaProfessor Ann Anagnost & Mr. John BurgeMs. Susan BaldwinDrs. G. Carter Bentley & Lynda EmelProfessors Laada Bilaniuk & J. Benjamin FitzhughDr. Robert BoydDrs. Richard Pelman & Sally BrowningMs. Marion BurnsChiang… Read more
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