Katy Lindquist, Anthropology graduate, received a 3-year Postdoctoral Associate position in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University starting fall following her PhD completion here at Emory University in the Department of Anthropology. The Klarman Fellowship in the College of Arts & Sciences provide postdoctoral opportunities to early-career scholars conducting researching in any discipline. Recipients may conduct research in any discipline and are offered independence and enabled to devote themselves to innovative research without being constrained to specific outcomes or teaching responsibilities.
Katy Lindquist is featured on Cornell University’s website under the Current Fellows. Congratulations Katy!
Professor Peter D. Little, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and Director of Global Development Studies, recently published a book titled, Advanced Introduction to Economic Anthropology.
The book illustrates how an anthropological perspective can deepen understandings of customary and global markets; different types of money; diversified livelihoods of the poor; gendered and racialized labor; climate change and other global issues. By questioning common dichotomies, such as the informal versus formal sectors and customary versus modern institutions, the book uncovers those hidden connections, power relations, and economic actors and processes that underpin real economies throughout the world.
On December 7th, Dr. Peggy F. Barlett, Goodrich C. White Professor Emerita of Anthropology, received the AASHE Lifetime Achievement Award for her dedication to sustainability in higher education. Dr. Barlett was instrumental in the founding of Emory’s Piedmont Project, training over 640 faculty members from 350+ institutions, and catalyzing a widespread adoption of sustainability-focused curriculum across these institutions.
Her impact extends beyond academia, shaping Emory’s sustainable food initiatives and achieving significant milestones in campus dining sustainability. As a respected author and leader in sustainable education, Dr. Barlett’s contributions span many influential publications and articles.
Emory University anthropologist, Professor Debra Vidali is awarded first place in the 2023 Ethnographic Poetry Competition of the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Vidali, a sociocultural anthropologist whose work centers on experimental ethnography and ethnographic theater, won for a set of two experimental poems, “Two Row Repair II” and “Two Row Repair III.” The titles refer to the Two Row Wampum belt that encodes the first treaty between Europeans and Haudenosaunee, or the Iroquois Confederacy. The judges praised the connections, saying Vidali’s work “not only speaks about, but embodies, decolonial praxis in a historically anchored way.” Vidali accepted the award in person and read the poetry last month at the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s annual award ceremony in Toronto.
She says she was motivated to write the poems after a 2022 research journey to find the original location where the Two Row agreement occurred in 1613 between Dutch and Mohawk, near the port of present-day Albany, New York. “The Two Row Wampum is a foundational treaty extending into the present. It conveys expected relations between Haudenosaunee and people of European descent to co-exist in peace, respect and friendship, and in common stewardship for all orders of life, including rivers, plants, animals and earth itself,” Vidali says.
“As a non-Indigenous person who was born and raised on Haudenosaunee lands, and whose ancestors go back to Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley in the 1630s, I strive to honor this treaty and to communicate to others about it,” she adds. “With the set of poems, I activate and inscribe a journey of ancestral reckoning using the unique affordances of experimental ethnographic writing. It was a deep honor to receive the award, and to have it conferred on Haudenosaunee lands in Tkaronto (Toronto).”
Professor Debra Vidali presented her ethnographic theater project at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Toronto recently in November 2023 and has been featured in a blog by Dr. Mitra Emad, the Associate Dean at the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Dr. Emad at this to say about Professor Vidali’s project:
“Recently at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, I attended a follow-up event to a workshop in which anthropologists explored theater making initiatives by clearing a room of furniture and embodying/acting out the text of on ethnographer’s fieldnotes. Many of them had never met before this experiment and the workshop organizer, Debra Vidali (Emory University) functioned as the group’s choreographer. Vidali managed to choreograph a quick (“moving at the speed of light”) and profound sense of belonging in a context (academic conferences) that rarely attend to the body or the flow of resilience that moves between and among the participants. Watching the re-enact and comment upon their experience at a roundtable event the next day, I was struck by how working in and through their bodies to explicate the fieldnotes quickly created a powerful and productive sense of belonging for the impromptu group.”
What began as the brainchild of Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi and Robert Paul was formalized as the Emory-Tibet Partnership in 1998 and renewed Monday at the beginning of Tibet Week.
Celebrating 25 years, the renewal of the partnership between Emory University and the Drepung Loseling Monastery included senior leadership from the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Institute of Buddhist Dialects, and Emory University leaders President Gregory L. Fenves, Provost Ravi V. Bellamkonda and Emory College Dean Barbara Krauthamer who reviewed the Memorandum of Understanding, signed in 1998 in the presence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with the current abbot of Drepung Loseling.
Dr. Peter Little, along with two other authors, recently published Reconsidering Resilience in African Pastoralism: Towards a Relational and Contextual Approach earlier this summer.
What does resilience mean? This is a question frequently asked and one that this book challenges and turns on its head. This book interrogates the increasingly overused concept of resilience by examining its application to a series of case studies focused on pastoralists in Africa. Through anthropological approaches, the book prioritises the localisation of resilience in context and practice; how to promote ‘thinking resilience’ in place of the typical ‘resilience thinking’ approach. Anthropology has the power to raise the vantage point of people and places, make them speak, breath, and live. And this gives to resilience more grounded and quotidian framings: local, relational, political and ever evolving. The authors ask whether development assistance and government intervention enhance the resilience of African pastoralists, while discussing critical topics, such as political power, land privatization, gender, human-animal identities, local networks, farmer-pastoralist relations, and norms and values. The epilogue, in turn, highlights important theoretical and empirical connections between the different case studies and shows how they provide a much more nuanced, culturally and politically meaningful approach to resilience than its common definition of ‘bounce back.’ By approaching resilience from relational and contextual perspectives, the book showcases a counter-narrative to guide more effective humanitarian and development framing and shed light on new avenues of understanding and practicing resilience in this uncertain world.
Dr. Elizabeth Lonsdorf has been elected as a 2023 Fellow of the Animal Behavior Society. The Animal Behavior Society (ABS) is a non-partisan, non-profit, professional organization dedicated to promoting and advancing the scientific study of animal behavior, and to creating an inclusive scientific environment that supports a diverse membership. Fellows are members who have engaged in research in animal behavior for at least ten years and who in the opinion of the elected officers and current Fellows of the society have made distinguished contributions to the field.
Chikako Ozawa-de Silva was honored with the 2023 Stirling Book Prize from the Society for Psychological Anthropology for her most recent book, The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan during the Biennial Society for Psychological Anthropology Conference in San Diego. This is her third book prize this academic year for The Anatomy of Loneliness.
One of the two nominators for this book referred to it aptly as a “beautiful and haunting look at the human need for connection, purpose and the consequences of living in a society that increasingly silos us from each other.” The committee found her book theoretically and empirically rich, carefully analyzed, and beautifully written. The contribution to psychological anthropology is clear and profound, and it also touches on a highly relevant subject of our time with cross-disciplinary implications and implications for society at large: namely, young adults’ experiences of loneliness. Professor Ozawa-De Silva explores the concept of the “lonely society” to analyze and convey the power that societies can have in making “people feel uncared for, unseen, and unimportant” – an issue of global relevance and an innovative contribution to contemporary studies in psychological anthropology on the loss of self and suicide.
Despite the book’s focus on a particular field and particular actors (young adults in Japan), the book’s major asset is to link the analysis of this particular case to wider discourses about the interconnections between inter/subjectivity, empathy, and society. The book thus has a huge potential to help us think through interlinkages between societies in general and the phenomenon of loneliness. The last chapter “What loneliness can teach us” is masterful: the author uses her ethnographic knowledge in a critical and socially committed way to shows what might be taken from this study to improve the well-being of people in general who severely suffer from the current and rising “lonely society”.
Congratulations to Chikako for this outstanding contribution!
Obtain your copy of The Anatomy of Lonelinesshere!
The Lindo lab specializes in mapping little-explored human lineages of the Americas.
Previously published research found evidence of the tuberculosis bacterium in the skeletal material of 1,400-year-old Andean mummies, contradicting some theories that TB did not exist in South America until the arrival of Europeans 500 years ago.
The current paper provides the first evidence for a human immune-system response to TB in ancient Andeans and gives clues to when and how their genomes may have adapted to that exposure.
Among the strongest signals detected were for biomarkers that are switched on in modern humans during an active TB infection. The researchers modeled the timing of selection for several of the genes involved in the TB-response pathways. Although they were not as strong as for exposure to TB, some signals were also detected for biomarkers related to adaptation to hypoxia, or low levels of oxygen in the blood that result from living at high altitude.
“Human-pathogen co-evolution is an understudied area that has a huge bearing on modern-day public health,” Sophie Joseph says. “Understanding how pathogens and humans have been linked and affecting each other over time may give insights into novel treatments for any number of infectious diseases.”
EMORY ANTHROPOLOGY 