summer with

john whittaker and kathryn kamp

Kathy Kamp and John Whittaker ventured into Maya archaeology last summer. Funded by a grant from the Luce Foundation, we excavated a small housemound near the ceremonial center of El Pilar, Belize, where Anabel Ford of UC Santa Barbara has a long-term project. The grant provided support for 2 Grinnell students (Jennifer Thornton and Alex Woods) and two Belizean students (Melissa Badillo and Zerifeh Eiley) to work five weeks in Belize and five weeks in Grinnell.

                Chiik Nah (Coati House, named for a friendly visitor) was a small mound of rocks in an area of secondary forest growth (enough small trees to cut off the breeze but too small to provide shade). Temperatures ranged from hot to pressure cooker and humidity from muggy to stifling. Rains in the last week made backfilling an event suitable for the Iowa State Fair.

We had lab, living quarters, and kitchen in the Santa Familia Monastery in San Ignacio. The food was good, the rooms adequate, and we had no snake stories, although “doctor flies” and mosquitoes extracted a fair amount of nutrition from us, and I invented a new dance step when I found a scorpion in my pants. On days off we visited a number of other Maya sites in Belize and Tikal in Guatemala, swam in the rivers, and sampled barbequed chicken stands along the road in town.

Excavation of the mound revealed two plaster floors, suggesting a long use of the site. It would have been an oval or rectangular platform supporting a small house of wattle and daub with palm-thatched roof. The artifacts were those of simple folk, although a few bits of Guatemalan obsidian show that they could obtain some exotic trade goods.  Back at Grinnell we analyzed our collection of eroded plain ware sherds, which suggest occupation on the mound in both the Early and Late Classic periods, a span of several hundred years.  There were also lots of stone tools, mostly simple flake tools, including a lot of pointy “gravers” indicating a craft activity involving drilling or carving wood, shell, or some other hard material which naturally has perished. For comparison, we also analyzed stone tools from two other sites in the area.

                Grinnellians are infiltrating Belize. Two recent alums (Jenny Haggar and Sally Graver) have worked on archaeological projects there, and Sally returned last summer as the human osteologist for the Belize Valley project not far from us.  The current US Ambassador to Belize is Russell Freeman ’61, who visited the site with a massive ambassadorial vehicle and a welcome cooler of iced drinks, and subsequently entertained us with a fancy dinner at the Ambassadorial Residence in Belize City. While we were picnicking with him at El Pilar, two geologists arrived, and when we were introduced as from Grinnell, one turned out to be Mark Brenner ’73, now teaching geology at the University of Florida.

                In August, we spent 2 weeks in Flagstaff, surveying and recording sites in about 2.5 square km between our excavation sites at New Caves and Fortress Hills. Three of our summer students worked with us, as well as four other volunteers, and we located and recorded over 60 small prehistoric sites, ranging from small pueblo structures and pithouse villages to rock cairns, basalt quarries, and petroglyph panels.  One of the pleasures of working in archaeology is the way friends and students will slog through brush in the sun, climb rock piles, and stumble over snakes for almost nothing – the adventure of seeing a few tumbled stones and pot sherds, and three good meals (and even dusty egg salad tacos are a good lunch after a morning in the field).

***John Whittaker and Kathy Kamp are on sabbatical leave this year. We're spending much of our time in Flagstaff writing up old field school material and continuing survey work around our sites so Kathy can apply GIS analyses to the data. It's great when data collection means getting up in the nippy morning, and hiking back and forth under fragrant pines and a warm sun, chasing lizards and looking for archaeological sites. True, one does have to spend an hour with compass and maps and recording forms when you find one, but it beats sitting inside. The Anthro dept at NAU has hospitably given us a desk and computer and library access, and with some fast-talking, we convinced a few students to come survey with us. We'll be back in town for the end of the semester, and then return to Arizona.***

faculty   

     jonathan andelson

The summer saw me involved in a number of writing projects, teaching projects, civic projects, and house projects.  I was solicited to make contributions to two encyclopedias being developed by Berkshire Publishing Company.  One, The Encyclopedia of Community, will serve as a reference book on the general topic of community -- historical, contemporary, and international.  I was asked to contribute an article on the Amana Colonies, which by this time I was pretty much able to write "with my eyes closed."  For the other, The Encyclopedia of Religious Freedom, I was asked to contribute a longer essay on religious freedom and persecution in 19th century American utopian communities.  I'm still at work on this one (I got an extension; former students take note!), since it entailed reviewing a large body of literature.  At issue is the appeal of the United States to many intentional communities because of guarantees of religious freedom here, and whether the reality they faced matched their expectations.  The short answer is: there was not a great deal of overt religious persecution against intentional communities in the 19th century, but a lot of persecution and harassment that could be traced to people's discomfort (or worse) over different life styles.

A lot of my summer was taken up with activities associated with my position as director of the Center for Prairie Studies.  I supervised two summer interns, kept track of three others, oversaw the production of two new Center publications (A Beginner's Field Guide to Grinnell and Its Environs, the basic work for which was done by Hilary Mertaugh, '01, and Directory of Local Food Producers Who market Locally, the basic work for which was done by Brian Turner, '02).  Both of these projects involved a good deal of time.  I read extensively on the topic of food systems, focusing on critiques of the industrial food system and arguments in favor of local food systems.  This, too, is related to efforts the Center has been involved in to create a Grinnell Area Local Food Alliance (GALFA), which last spring received a $17,500 grant to promote more buying of locally produced food by institutions in Grinnell (including the college dining services).

I also was involved this summer in the efforts of the newly formed Rock Creek Lake Alliance, whose mission it is to work with the Iowa DNR and others to restore Rock Creek Lake to ecological health.  My work in this direction is driven both by environmental concerns and by personal reasons, since my family enjoys biking, hiking, bird watching, prairie rambling, and canoeing at the lake, which is where I have lived since 1987.

            And a word to students who took Native North American Cultures from me in the distant past.  I haven't taught that course since some time in the 1980s, but I'm teaching it again now, partly spurred on by the need for the course in our curriculum, and partly by a curiosity about new literature in the field.  I'm using nearly all new books, several of which I would recommend: CHANGING ONES, by Will Roscoe, about third and fourth genders in native North America; THE HEARTLAND CHRONICLES, by Doug Foley, about the Meskwaki settlement near Tama, Iowa; THE ECOLOGICAL INDIAN, by Shepherd Krech.

     monty roper

Well, I don’t have much to report on what I did on my summer vacation that relates to my own research.  I was very fortunate to be a part of Grinnell College’s China Seminar.  Between May and June, I spent three weeks touring a number of cities in China along with 15 or so other faculty.  The trip was fantastic and I learned quite a lot.  David Campbell (Biology) and I took off from the group for a few days and traveled up the Yangtze River through the Three Gorges to see the area that is going to be flooded by the dam.  It is quite amazing.  There are sections of cities with millions of people that are being deconstructed block by block and moved to higher ground. 

Other than this, I spent most of the summer working in and around the house.  I also bought a piano at one of the local auctions and have been learning to play.  I have a number of things on cue concerning my Nicaragua and Bolivia research that I should be able to report on in the Spring.     

       maria tapias

As I look out my office window and see the remains of the first snowfall in Grinnell I  find myself wondering “wait!  where did the summer go?”  The summer (and this semester) in fact did go very quickly.  I spent a week in London in June attending and presenting a paper at a medical anthropology conference called “The Health of Populations”.  The conference was great,  I met many interesting scholars and heard some great papers.  Lisa Avalos from the sociology department was also presenting at the conference so we got to spend some time together in the city.  The rest of the summer was spent working on an article, doing some workshops and preparing a new course I am teaching this semester entitled Anthropological Perspectives on Gender.  Less related to work I also learned to roller blade and spent time organizing our wedding with Xavier.  We were married on October 27^th on a glorious fall day in New York.  His 84- and 83- year old grandmothers came to NY from Spain along with his parents, sister, cousins and an entourage of close childhood friends. We also got to catch up with some of my old college and grad school friends and had a really fun wedding. 

       timothy hare

During my first year at Grinnell College I worked toward making computer-based mapping systems or Geographical Information Systems (GIS) available on campus. Last Spring I taught the first GIS class at Grinnell in the new lab in Burling Library. Class participants had first-hand experience with the creation, analysis, and interpretation of spatial data and produced high-quality conference-style posters using the new GIS plotter. I was also able to take the class members to my research site in Mexico to learn how to conduct archaeological mapping. While in Mexico, we also took the opportunity to visit numerous Maya archaeological sites and explore the regions complex environment. This Fall I am working to make GIS software available in the ARH computer lab as well and make more GIS data available to the community.

I presented a paper entitled "Mapping Mayapan" at the 2002 Annual Midwest Mesoamericanist Meeting in Madison, WI and another paper entitled "Surface Evidence of Mayapán’s Political Economy" with Marilyn Masson and Carlos Peraza, at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Denver.

This Summer was the first of a three year NSF-funded project at the archaeological site of Mayapan in the Yucatan Penninsula of Mexico. I directed the mapping of many new parts of the ancient city and the resulting data is the basis for my research into the transformation of political and economic systems prior to the Spanish conquest. I also spent a week teaching archaeological mapping at a field school in Belize.

                                                         nsf awards to

  anthropology faculty

Two members of the Anthropology Department, Doug Caulkins and Carol Trosset, have been awarded a National Science Foundation Research Grant to continue their ethnographic research on Welsh diaspora populations. This fall, Carol Trosset will be visiting the Welsh-speaking community in southern Argentina, accompanied by 2002 graduate Jennifer Thornton. In the summer of 2003 or 2004, Doug Caulkins and two students will do participant observation and interviewing in the strongly Welsh-American communities of south central Ohio. This project grows out of a 1993 NSF grant that funded summer research for Caulkins, Trosset, and six students in Wales and subsequent summer research among the Iowa Welsh community for Caulkins and five students.

     douglas caulkins

I spent my summer working on MAP projects with students and in traveling to a conference in Stockholm, Sweden, where I presented a paper on organizational culture.  Emily Zabor and I worked on a MAP project on heritage sites in Highland Scotland before she left for fieldwork in Inverness.  She is completing a senior thesis on the research during the fall semester and will be coauthoring a paper with Christina Hanson and me for the Society for Applied Anthropology meetings in Portland, Oregon in the spring of 2003. The main project for the summer was a study of narrative plot structures in West European ethnography, carried out with the Fabulous Four: Christina Doxsie, Illana Meltzer, Sarah Gossett and Helen Carey (see her accompanying article). 

A paper that Vickie Schlegel ('95), and MAP students Christina Hanson, Jane Cherry, and I presented at the meetings of the Society for the Study Marginal regions in Norway in the summer of 2000 has been accepted for collection of the proceedings of the conference.  The paper is entitled "The Politics of Authenticity and Identity in British Heritage Sites." The paper is based on work with Vickie Schlegel in Scotland in the summer of 2001 and with Christina Hanson in Wales in 2000.  Jane Cherry contributed with a study of a heritage site in England.

Terry Osborn, who was on a spring semester program in Wales, stayed in the field for some additional weeks to collect more information for a project on "Welsh Cultural Politics." 

In addition to my British research, my latest Norwegian research paper, on "Organizational Memberships and Cross-cutting Ties: A Cluster Analytic Approach to the Study of Social Capital" will be published in 2003 in a collection edited by Sanjeev Prakash and Per Selle Investigating Social Capital: Comparative Perspectives on Civil Society, Participation and Governance (New Delhi: Sage).  Also forthcoming in 2003 are essays on "Organizational Culture" and "Voluntary Organizations" in the Encyclopedia of Communities (Berkshire Publishing).

mentored advanced project – summer 2002

Politics of Identity in Western Europe: The Relationship Between Society, Social Theory, and Representation 

Helen Carey ‘04

As Professor Caulkins told our summer MAP research team, “Few topics have so occupied the attention of cultural anthropologists during the late 20^th century as our so-called ‘crisis of representation,’ the collapse of traditional modes of conveying or representing our ethnographic knowledge to our audience.”  Although the past few decades have brought scores of publications on ethnographers’ textual strategies and employment of personal narratives in ethnographic representation, none have published a comparative, historical study focusing on implicit plot structures in the ethnographies of Western Europe. Thus last summer Professor Caulkins and four anthropology students, including myself, Christina Doxsie, Sarah Gossett, and Ilana Meltzer, undertook a 10-week intensive MAP project, which mapped the changes, from the 1930s to the end of the 20^th century, in the forms and uses of narrative, primarily implicit narrative, in the ethnographic literature of a Western Europe. Our project culminated in a manuscript to be submitted to the anthropological journal, Anthropology and History, an academic poster  presented during Parent’s Weekend, and a panel at the meetings of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research in Charleston, South Carolina in February, 2003.

                                special topics course offering  

spring 2003

“making documentary films”

Kirsten Tretbar, ’89, will be offering a 3-week course on the process of making ethnographic and documentary films, from conception to completion and marketing.  Not a course in film theory, this course examines the practical aspects of find and researching a subject, making a budget, getting funding, and shooting, editing and marketing the film.  An Enterprise in the Arts short course sponsored by the Alumni Visitor program of the Wilson Program in Enterprise and Leadership. 

faculty publications

          vicki bentley-condit

Publications – Journal Articles:

Under Review  Bentley-Condit, V. Captive olive baboon (Papio anubis) infant behavioral sex differences during the first fourteen days of life.  International Journal of Primatology.

Publications – Book Chapters:

2002    Bentley-Condit, V. Hands-on exercises for a four-field introduction to anthropology. In

Strategies in Teaching Anthropology, 2^nd ed. Rice, P.; McCurdy, D. (eds.) Prentice Hall, NJ. Pp. 1-3.

Publications – Book Reviews:

2002    Bentley-Condit, V. Book Review: Gorillas Among Us: A Primate Ethnographer’s Book of Days.  Journal of Anthropological Research 58:414-415.

2002    Bentley-Condit, V. Book Review: The Nonhuman Primates. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 117:94-95.

2002    Bentley-Condit, V. Book Review: Primate Diversity. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 117:191-192.

Publications – Abstracts:

2002    Bentley-Condit, V. Workshop: Teaching the undergraduate primate course: Tips, techniques and strategies.  American Journal of Primatology 57 (Supplement 1):32-33.

Publications – Other:

2002    Bentley-Condit, V. Cross-cultural correlation study.  Human Relations Area Files web publication.  http://www.yale.edu/hraf/teaching.htm

Presentations:

2002    Bentley-Condit, V. Virtual Primates: Using Technology to Enhance the Learning Process. Presented at the American Society of Primatologists Meeting, Oklahoma City, OK, June 2002.

2002   Bentley-Condit, V. The Opposition of Monkeys and People: Preserving Primate Habitats vs Meeting Human Needs.  Global Partners Symposium,  Mombasa, Kenya.

Workshops Organized:

2002   Bentley-Condit, V. (Organizer, Moderator, & Presenter)  Teaching the Undergraduate Primate Course: Tips, Techniques, and Strategies.  American Society of Primatologists Meeting Workshop, Oklahoma City, OK, June 2002.  Other Participants:  Irwin Bernstein, Claud Bramblett, Matt Hoffman, Lynne Miller, Linda Taylor, & Russell Tuttle.

      alums news

Bill Green '74, reports: After working for 14 years at the University of Iowa, 13 of them as State Archaeologist, I was appointed director of the Logan Museum of Anthropology at Beloit College. I also serve as adjunct professor of anthropology and director of the Museum Studies Program at Beloit. My partner Linda Forman and I now live in Beloit, although Linda continues her job as managing editor of Medical Anthropology Quarterly (and, soon, American Ethnologist), requiring occasional trips back to Iowa City. I'm teaching courses and special projects at Beloit as well as learning how to run a museum, and am continuing research on several midwestern archaeological projects. I'm wrapping up a six-year stint as editor of the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology. I was very happy to make the move from a mega-campus and large research center to a small college with a big anthropology museum, although it takes a while to adjust to the change in scale. Please stop by and see us in Beloit or on the web (www.beloit.edu/~museum/logan) (email greenb@beloit.edu).

Amy Goldmacher ‘96 - I am very excited to tell you that I will be attending the graduate program in Anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI this fall! It took a lot of soul searching and research to come to this decision, but after being a college textbook sales representative in Los Angeles for the past 2 years, I felt I rediscovered the anthropologist within by being in the culture of academia and talking to, working with, and assessing the needs of college instructors. I chose WSU because of their Business Anthropology program and because I have always been fascinated by the study of corporate cultures.

Annie Evans '97 - has just completed her MS at U of New Mexico and successfully completed her comps.  She has been invited to return there for her PhD and plans to start on it in the fall.

Laurie Kaufman '99 - has been accepted into the anthro PhD program at U of FL and will be starting there in the fall.  She'll be working with Sue Boinski.

Jodie LaPoint '00 - is just completing a 2-year stint as a field assistant on Cayo Santiago.  She will be working as a field assistant for a grad student at SUNY in Madagascar starting later this summer on a sifaka project.

Rebecca Peters'00 - is currently hiking the entire length of the Appalachian Trail with her husband.  She plans to end-up in Atlanta in August where she will be beginning the MPH program at Emory.

Matt Trager ‘02 writes: This is the first fall in the past 17 years that I have not returned to school and recently I have been wondering about life at Grinnell. I am more or less happy and satisfied where I am, but Grinnell really is a special place and in a lot of ways life there was pretty good. I imagine that a certain amount of withdrawal and sentimentality is par for the course after graduation. Life here is good too. This week marks the beginning of my fifth month as an intern in the plant ecology lab at Archbold Biological Station near Lake Placid FL. No, it's not the Lake Placid of horror movie renown, although the alligators here are rather large. As one would expect in central Florida, it's hot, and humid, buggy, and generally uncomfortable to be outside for long periods of time but the work (mostly monitoring populations of rare plants, with some land management and restoration work) is varied and fairly rewarding. One of the perks is that I get to spend half of my time working on an independent project; for my project I'm looking at the breeding system and reproductive ecology of one of the Federally endangered plants endemic to the Lake Wales Ridge. The fieldwork amounted to helping plants have sex then stealing their babies for a germination trial that I am now running. So far the results are not very interesting, but such is field research. I originally planned to leave last Friday, but I extended my internship until December and then I will be returning Jan.-July as a full-time research assistant--my first "real" job with "real" pay. Hopefully I will start grad school next fall, but I'm not sure yet where I will be or what exactly I will be doing.

Stephanie Schmidt Moon ‘95 works in exhibits for the Mesa Southwest Museum in Mesa, Arizona.

Jennifer Nugent ‘89 in the group planning manager for Berstein-Rein Advertising in Kansas City, MO.

McKenzie L. Morse ’98 is pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology at Texas A and M and is also working through the university as a pollen processor.

Rachel Taylor ’98 is a development associate with the Venice Family Clinic in Venice, CA.

Lesley Kadish ’99 is associate curator at the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices in Minneapolis.

Meredith Ibey ’00 is enrolled in the Master of Arts program in social sciences at the University of Chicago.

Catherine Dean ’01 is working at the Woodrow Wilson House, Washington, D.C.

Sarah Reinhard ‘01 is a service leader for City Year, an Americorps program in Chicago, designing and implementing after-school service learning programs and community projects for public high school students.

Sarah Koeman ‘98 married Aron Racho ‘98 in May, and writes: I got a job teaching ESL and Spanish literacy in Portland, Oregon (Beaverton School District) where Aron and I will be living.  I have two classes left to take this summer in DC and then I will be moving to Oregon at the end of July. For those of you who are interested, I created an electronic portfolio that I used to help land the job.  It is located at http://home.gwu.edu/~srkoeman.  Check it out.  I must say that I look very snazzy in a business suit.” srkoeman@hotmail.com

Courtney Birkett ‘99 pursuing a degree in the archaeology program at William and Mary, spent the summer excavating in the town of Hopewell. The project made the local news, and Courtney writes: We're in the Hopewell News today.  I'm kind of annoyed that they called us students.  It's become one of my pet peeves, because everyone assumes that, because we're affiliated with William and Mary, we're doing this for a class or something.  We had a person tell us, after we'd just explained that this was our real job, that she hoped we'd get an A.  When the reporters were out, I said to my coworker, "I wonder if they'll take the picture looking up through the screen like everyone does."  If you look at the article you'll see a picture of that very coworker.

Erin Marie Williams ‘00 visited Grinnell with the hiphop band Switchstance, for which she is “impresario.” That means she can arrange bookings for them in places she wants to visit, like Grinnell, where they were so well received that they plan to return in March.  She has been working for Princeton Review “basically teaching rich kids not to choke on their silver spoons when they have to take the GRE,” and is looking forward to leaving that job for graduate school in archaeology next year.

Portia Sabin ’93 - Presenting a paper entitled "Making and Breaking Boundaries: Friendship and Dating in College" at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, November 2002. Co-chair of the Council on Anthropology & Education-sponsored session entitled "Intersections and Interactions: Negotiating the Boundaries of Belonging on Campus".  See her website at http://www.columbia.edu/~pcs16

 current students

Emily Zabor '03 - I participated in a MAP this summer on the topic of Heritage and Development in Highland Scotland.  After five weeks of preparation and literature research in Grinnell, I traveled to Inverness, Scotland where I spent six weeks conducting interviews and collecting data at several heritage sites in the area.  Study sites included Culloden Battlefield, the Calanais Standing Stones, and the Highland Folk Museum.  This fall, I will use the results of my fieldwork to write a senior  thesis.                                                       

Rebekah Merrill ’05 spent the summer working 5 different jobs in various areas.  She taught swimming lessons, coached a high school swim team, was a sales clerk in a clothing store, a receptionist for a massage/chiropractic office, and taught cake decoration as part of a children's summer program. She also took a family vacation to Nova Scotia with her family, as well as attending various soccer games for her sister, including USA Soccer Cup and a game of the US Women vs. Norway. 

margaret clark award

  iog award competition

Matt Kaler ’02 - 2002 Margaret Clark Award -  "Body Image and Old Age: Exploring the Morality on Vitality", was nominated as an Honorable Mention in the Undergraduate Category.  The annual MARGARET CLARK AWARD with cash prize of $500 for graduate and $250 for undergraduate students is given to the outstanding paper in anthropology and gerontology. An extended summary of winning manuscript will be published in the Association for Anthropology and Gerontology (AAGE) Newsletter. The jurors may select papers for Honorable Mention with a free membership in AAGE.

The competition aims to support the continued pursuit of the insights and practice ideals demonstrated by Margaret Clark, a pioneer in the multidisciplinary study of sociocultural gerontology and medical anthropology, and a scholar committed to mentoring younger colleagues.

"The World’s Best Books"

Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library

Jay Satterfield ‘86
(University of Massachusetts Press)

An insightful examination of a respected American publishing institution

In October 1930, Macy's department store in New York City used the inexpensive book series "The Modern Library of the World's Best Books" as a loss-leader to draw customers into the store. Selling for only nine cents a copy, the small-format, modern classics attracted crowds of buyers. Businessmen, housewives, students, bohemian intellectuals, and others waited in long lines to purchase affordable hard-bound copies of works by the likes of Tolstoy, Wilde, Joyce, and Woolf. It was a significant moment in American cultural history, demonstrating that a series of books respected and praised by the nation's self-appointed arbiters of taste could attract a throng of middle-class consumers without damaging its reputation as a vehicle of "serious culture."

The Modern Library's reputation stands in sharp contrast to that of similar publishing ventures dismissed by critics as agents of "middlebrow culture," such as the Book of-the-Month Club. Writers for the New Republic, the Nation, and the Bookman expressed their fears that mass-production and new distribution schemes would commodify literature and deny the promise of American culture. Yet although the Modern Library offered the public a uniformly packaged, preselected set of "the World's Best Books," it earned the praise of these self-consciously intellectual critics.

Focusing on the Modern Library's marketing strategies, editorial decisions, and close attention to book design, Jay Satterfield explores the interwar cultural dynamics that allowed the publisher of the series to exploit the forces of mass production and treat books as commodities while still positioning the series as a revered cultural entity. So successful was this approach that the modern publishing colossus Random House was built on the reputation, methods, and profits of the Modern Library.

***Jay Satterfield is Head of Reader Services at the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. He received a B.A. (1986) from Grinnell College, an M.A. in Library and Information Science (1993) and an M.A. (1996) and a Ph.D. in American Studies (1999) from the University of Iowa.***