Congratulations to graduating seniors!!!
Allison Birch Sarah Bruinooge Mustafa Aksel Casson Elizabeth Coffin
Joy Fishel Susannah Flicker Amy Goldmacher Jules Graybill
Matthew Hedman Benjamin Hodgdon Amy Elizabeth Jarnberg Nathan Kemperman
Rebecca Kresse Tammy McAlpine Lucinda Moore Kathleen Munley Sabrina Nash
Ian Natowsky Shara Powers Alexandra Ravitz Victoria Schlegel Holly Schmidt
Emily Shavers Marcia Strickland Lisa Stuehringer Liv Thorstensson Dacey Waldron
_ _ AWARDS GIVEN TO GRADUATING SENIORS _ _
This year Marcia Strickland (‘96) received the Fletcher Award, granted annually to a student or students exhibiting high standards of scholarship along with considerable depth and breadth of course work in Social Studies. In addition to her Anthropology major, Marcia has completed a concentration in Latin American Studies.
The Ralph Luebben Prize in Anthropology is awarded to the graduating senior who best exemplifies the ideal Anthropology student including meritorious scholarly work, breadth in the discipline, field experience, and an anthropological viewpoint on life. Jules Graybill (‘96), this year’s winner, maintained a high grade point average, participated in the archaeological field school, gave a paper at the Iowa Academy of Sciences on experimental archaeology, studied off-campus in Costa Rica and wrote a senior thesis on religious change in the Amana Colonies.
"Mesopotamian Ships and Local Exchange: The Spread of Ubaid Pottery in Arabia"by Matt Hedman (‘96) was designated the winner of the Rachael Asrelsky Anthropology Paper Prize. This award is given annually to the author of an outstanding paper written for an anthropology class in honor of Rachael Asrelsky (‘89) who died in the Lockerbie bombing while returning from an off-campus program.
TWO MAJORS PRESENT
ANTHROPOLOGY SENIOR THESES
Seniors Amy Goldmacher and Jules Graybill both wrote and presented senior theses this spring. Jule's thesis, entitled "Issues of Change in the present-day Amana Church" explored the processes of change in the Amana Church through a series of interviews with individual members of the church. Within the past decade, there has been a growing sentiment within the church that substantial structural and ritual alterations must be made if it is to remain relevant to its present-day adherents. In recent years, this sentiment has taken the form of a revitalization movement, striving to make the Amana church applicable to modern problems while grounding itself firmly in Amana's communal and pre-communal traditions.
Amy's thesis project, "Navigating an Education: Women's Approaches to Grinnell and Other Gendered Institutions," includes data gathered from the Grinnell campus this past semester. She surveyed Grinnell seniors and first-years to determine how academics and other activities played their roles in the lives of students, and compared the information to Holland and Eisenhart's 1981 study and 1990 discussion of women at two Southern universities.
POST GRADUATE AND
SUMMER PLANS
Ian Natowsky (‘96) will be moving to Korea in the fall to teach English, while learning Korean and earning money to attend culinary school.
Liv Thorsen (‘96) will be teaching English and courses in American Culture to older students at a "folk high school" in Mora, Sweden. In the future she plans to attend graduate school in the area of Peace and Global Studies or International Relations. Liv says she will welcome visitors.
Erin Conrad (‘98) plans to spend the summer in Jinotega, Ecuador teaching English, in association with two Peace Corps volunteers who will be doing agronomy.
Sara Shives (‘96) and Emily Hart (‘97) will attend the Ohio State Archaeological Field School at Ishmia, Greece this summer. They will spend six weeks excavating the ruins of a Roman bath and helping conserve a floor mosaic and an additional week traveling independently in Greece.
Vanessa Smith (‘97) will intern on the Kaibab National Forest with archaeologist Neil Weintraub (‘86?). She will be doing a variety of activities including documenting rock art and assisting at an archaeological field school.
Aksel Casson (‘96) will be staying in Grinnell this summer to do systematics research with Jackie Brown in the Biology Department.
Tina Popson (‘97) will be designing adult and children’s guides to the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame this summer. This is her sixth year working at the Hall of Fame. After graduation she hopes to complete a degree in museum studies.
Amy Goldmacher (‘96) plans to move to Chicago immediately after graduation to seek a job in market research preparatory to applying for graduate school in Consumer or Organizational Behavior.
Sarah Koeman (‘98) will be excavating at the Bluff Great House site in Bluff, Utah as part of an archaeological field school run by the University of Colorado. At the beginning of August she will move on to Costa Rica to do a month of language study before starting the Institute for Central American Development Studies semester program abroad.
Andrea Evans (‘98) will be preparing for a future career as a primatologist by interning in New Mexico working with macaques and possibly chimps doing environmental enrichment and helping improve the psychological well-being of the primates. She will also be allowed some time to do her own research project with the macaques.
Amy Jarnberg (‘96) will be volunteering at Fort Laramie this summer doing museum interpretation. This follows an internship with the State Historical Society of Iowa this semester during which Amy wrote guidebooks for a number of State Historic sites. If you visit Toolesboro Indian Mounds, for example, look for her work.
Jennifer Prusak (‘97) will be an intern at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, California. The base, which currently employs about 11,000 people, will be closing soon and Jennifer will be compiling information on the educational and recreational facilities and employment opportunities that Sacramento offers to put on a www page for the workers who will be laid off.
Matt Hedman (‘96) will be attending Princeton University next year as a physics graduate student.
FACULTY NEWS
Vicki Bentley-Condit presented a talk entitled "Female-female competition and social manipulation in baboons (Papio cynocephalus cynocephalus) at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting in Durham this spring. The abstract for her talk was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Performing on "Camaraca", a trilingual album of children’s songs recorded by his wife, Karin Stein (‘84) and also featuring their daughter Maya, and Karin’s mother, is one of Jon Andelson’s latest accomplishments. The tape, which can be purchased through the bookstore, includes "duck talk" by Jon and a rendition of the "William Tell Theme" using only his cheeks and mouth.
Carol Trosset was named Director of Institutional Research at Grinnell this January. Her 1993 book, Welshness Performed:Welsh Concepts of Person and Society was named a 1995 Choice Outstanding Academic book. Recently, she has presented several talks about her research on community at Grinnell including " ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About Things I’m Unsure of ‘: Silence and Advocacy at Grinnell" at the ACM Conference on Personal Identity and the College Community and " ‘In Loco Parentis ‘ Revisited: Models of Faculty/Student Relations at Two Liberal Arts Colleges" at the American Anthropological Association Meetings.
Lithic Technology has published an article by John Whittaker. "Athkiajas: A modern Cypriot flintknapper and the threshing sledge industry" is based on fieldwork he conducted in Cyprus last summer.
Doug Caulkins presented four papers since the last newsletter: " Is there a Contemporary Celtic Culture? A Comparison of Cultural Values in Wales and Ireland "at the Iowa Academy of Science Meetings, "From Description to Comparison: Teaching a combined Ethnographic and Cross-Cultural Methods Course" and "Is there a Cultural Focus in the Celtic Fringe: Ethnographic and Cladist explanations of cultural similarities in Ireland and Wales" (with Carol Trosset and Annette Giangiacomo, ‘96) at the Society for Cross-Cultural Research, and "Images of Commercial Success and Failure in Scotland: Sectarian Resistance to the Thatcherite Enterprise Culture" at the American Anthropological Association Meetings.
Kiva:The Journal of Southwestern Anthropology and History published an article by Kathy Kamp on "A Use-Wear Analysis of the Function of Basalt Cylinders." Alums Jon Cook ‘94, Amy Johnston ‘93, Katya Ricketts ‘93, and Jon Van Hoose ‘92, as well as Kathy’s daughter April, were acknowledged for their help in producing different types of use-wear on the cylinders. Kathy also presented a paper, entitled "Production and Specialization: New Insights from Cyprus" at the Society for American Archaeology Meetings.
Katya Azoulay published "Outside Our Parents’ house: Race, Culture, and Identity" in Research in African Literatures.
Barry Brenton, who has taught here for two years, is moving on to a job at St. John’s University in Queens, New York.
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Faculty Profile
Brent Metz
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Ink'ajyer niturener tara! For those of you (like 99.99% of the world's population) who still haven't learned Maya-Chorti, this means "I'm happy to be here". I met many of you already last March, which is one of the reasons I'm glad to be joining Grinnell for a couple of years.
It's been a long road getting back to the Midwest. I'm from the Midwest originally, Southwest Michigan to be exact. I left the University of Michigan with an M.A. in 1989 to complete my Ph.D. at SUNY-Albany, a school known for its Latin American concentration. I spent two years living among the Chorti for my doctoral fieldwork, and completed my dissertation in 1995 -- but only after some torturous months of sweating over my laptop, pounding it out in the tropical furnace of lowland Costa Rica.
Like Jon Andelson, during his sabbatical in 1994-5, I went to Costa Rica to write because my partner, Gwynne Jenkins, has an interest in the country. She's doing her doctoral fieldwork on the intersection of Costa Rican national ideology, public health, and Indian identity. Those of you taking advantage of Costa Rican foreign study will find her knowledge to be useful, and she is as eager to meet and work with Grinnell students and take part in Grinnell's anthropology community as I am.
My interest in Chorti life, especially its ethnicity, politics, and emotions, is not only academic, but personal. The cultural and mortal survival of the Chortis, like so many other of the world's indigenous groups, is under imminent threat. Some have begun struggling to re-invent a positive Chorti identity, a task in which Grinnell students and I can hopefully assist while we continue to investigate Chorti history and culture.
Besides the Chorti, I have an ongoing concern for Mexican migrant farm workers, for whom I served as a legal aid worker for five summers in Michigan. It seems that we can pursue this interest right here in Iowa, as some of you have mentioned that Mexican melon workers are employed along the Mississippi.
Another old interest of mine is Spain, where I took a semester as an undergrad, carried out research on Andalusian religious festivals, and continue to work with colleagues.
Now that I've introduced myself to you, I'd love to meet you all whenever you get a chance to drop by. One idea that came to me when I visited Grinnell in the spring was the organization of an anthropology student club for trips and invitation of speakers. So if any of you have any opinions, pro or con, I'd appreciate hearing them. In any event, I look forward to seeing you in my Masculinity, Latin America, Intro, and/or Theory courses over the coming academic year.
Prof Pursues Primate Project: Founding Fieldschool Future Focus
By Vicki K. Bentley-Condit
Due to the unusually low number of nonhuman primates in and around Grinnell, IA this year, I spent part of spring break (and will spend a portion of the summer) looking for a field site. My previous research has been in Kenya and while it's a wonderful location, costs and other logistics are somewhat prohibitive. I'm searching for a site where I can conduct long-term social behavior research and direct a summer fieldschool to train students in primatology. To this end, I spent a week of spring break in Costa Rica -- primarily at Curu Wildlife Refuge -- observing spider, howler, and capuchin monkeys and evaluating the locale as a potential site.
This summer, I will spend a month in Texas at a private primate breeding facility observing group-living rhesus macaques housed in 1/4 acre corrals. My goal is to determine whether the Texas site would be appropriate for both the research and fieldschool possibilities. I actually have high hopes for the Texas facility. While not quite as glamorous as Costa Rica, the Texas site offers the opportunity to study a group of primates in a permanent breeding colony with known histories and DNA paternity data at an easily accessible and affordable location.
The paternity data are particularly germane to my interests in female-infant-male interactions. If all goes as planned, I hope to return to Texas next summer and take along 1 or 2 students as research assistants with a tentative goal date for my first fieldschool of the summer of '98 or '99.
SAA MEETINGS
Many Grinnell Archaeologists
Attend Conference
When Kathy Kamp and John Whittaker attended the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in New Orleans, they found that at least six Grinnell alums were also present, including Karen Pohlson '84, who is doing contract archaeology in Chicago, and Bill Green '74, who is the State Archaeologist for Iowa, and presented "The Middle-Late Woodland Transition in Prairie Peninsula." Tom Berger '91 presented a paper on a Natufian cave site of Hilazon Tachtit in Israel that he is excavating for his dissertation at U. of New Mexico. He is also co-author of a recent article in the Journal of Archaeological Science comparing Neanderthal injuries to those of recent rodeo cowboys to show that Neanderthals were also dealing with large angry animals. Mike Galaty '91, doing dissertation research at U. Wisconsin, Madison, was co-author of a paper on Using Archaeological Survey Data to Determine "Palatial Control" of Mycenean Economy. Mike Neely's paper was on Lithic Raw Material Availability and the Organization of Technology in Jordan. Mike ('84) has co-authored two recent papers in Antiquity which have stirred up considerable debate on the nature of Mesolithic stone tools. Mike is finishing his dissertation at Arizona State U., and there is no better career strategy than writing papers that make people argue, even if they don't all like you. Steve Nash '86 presented "The Growth and Development of Tree-Ring Dating" which is part of his dissertation material at the U. of Arizona. Galaty, Berger, Nash, and Whittaker held a brief Field School reunion on Bourbon Street.
Grinnellians dominated the Anthropology section of the Iowa Academy of Sciences annual meeting in Indianola on April 27, presenting 7 out of the 14 papers. Aimee Bebeau, ‘95, presented "prehistoric skeletal materials from Hamilton Co. Site," results of an internship at the Office of the State Archaeologist under Shirley Shirmer and Bill green, ‘74. "Fingerprints and age in archaeology" by Jules Graybill and Ian Natowsky, and "Multiple task use-wear analysis" by Matt Hedman reported on experiments begun in Kathy Kamp and John Whittaker’s Experimental Archaeology course in the Fall. Susannah Flicker presented "Casinos to Clinics: Gambling on the future of Native American health" with Barry Brenton. Doug Caulkins was involved in three papers: "Is there a contemporary Celtic culture?" A comparison of cultural values in Wales and Ireland", "Measuring Celtic cultural values: If it is Irish, is it necessarily good" (presented by Annette Giangiacomo who spent 3 months in Ireland last Fall collecting the data), and "Identity, generational depth, and stereotypes among Irish and German Americans" (presented by Tanya Hedges, who did local fieldwork). Much of this work was funded by Faculty Grant Board grants to Caulkins and Brenton.
*Pit Opening Reveals--CORN*
Under cloudy skies a cadre of hearty souls from Archaeological Field Methods class opened up three of the four corn storage pits dug by last fall’s Experimental Archaeology and Ethnoarchaeology class. These pits attempted to replicate prehistoric storage techniques, variants of which were used throughout the Midwest.
Over the winter thermocouples deep inside the pits showed temperatures consistently well above freezing, despite frequent sub-zero temperatures outside.. Carbon dioxide levels reached about 10%, high enough to kill any potential animal pests. Although germination and mycotoxin tests are currently underway and no results are yet available, initial information suggests a fairly successful corn storage.
The farmer from whom the corn was initially purchased dropped by the pit excavation and was impressed by the appearance of the corn and the low moisture levels (about 14%, within the range of corn stored in commercial elevators). A thin layer of moldy corn had developed along the very top and sides of the pit, but corn in the interior was dry and appeared to be mold-free.
CAREER REFLECTIONS:
ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION
By Byron Johnson ‘93
As the western sky flamed in oranges and reds the twelve eighth grade students feverishly piled sand into long curving lines stretching across the beach. "Finish the whale in the next couple of minutes," the instructor called out over the crashing waves, "We don't want to miss the sunset." Quickly the last piles of sand were patted into place and the life-sized form of an endangered right whale was complete. The students rushed from the sandy canvas to a platform twenty feet above their creation. "Wow! It's big, " exclaimed James. "The tail's a little lopsided, but otherwise it looks good....and gigantic!" stated La Shonda. "Good work on the whale, " the instructor said, "Do change your focus, though, from the beach to the sky. Incredible things are happening. Oh!? Who has ever seen a sunset before?"Half of the student's hands went up, barely breaking the observational silence which filled the air. "Enjoy. I hope you all see many more....."
In the three years since I graduated from Grinnell with an anthropology degree I have been an environmental educator. Most of this time has been spent working as a naturalist at various residential environmental education centers throughout the United States. Primarily these centers serve public and private school children in the grades 4 - 8. Students stay for three to five days and have a wide variety of experiences. I also have had as students senior citizens, families, teachers, at-risk youth, and numerous other populations. Each center differs with its emphasis. Whoever and wherever I teach I am the facilitator of sunsets, scientific discoveries, historic recreations, the group process, and numerous other eye-opening events.
Opening eyes to new experiences, ideas, concepts, or lifestyles is the mission of environmental education. We attempt to foster an awareness and appreciation of our environment. The basic concept is that in order to protect, or conserve, our environment we must first understand it. For this reason we do not force feed our students environmental propaganda. Instead, we allow the students to explore their environment and discover it for themselves. Exploration comes through hands-on, experientially based classes. Lecture is kept to a minimum and time spent "doing" is emphasized. A student hopefully leaves one of these centers saying, "Wow! Nature is cool!" This appreciation then can be a seed from which environmental action will blossom.
In environmental education we teach classes in three major curriculum areas: natural history, cultural history, and adventure education. As I said before, most of the learning is experiential. For a natural history class we may spend our time collecting organisms, observing them, and then releasing them. We transform our students into role playing apprentice blacksmiths while teaching a cultural history class. Rock climbing, low ropes courses, and snowshoeing can provide for ample personal growth in our adventure education curriculum.
My area of interest, naturally, has been cultural history but I have become a generalist and taught many new things over the past three years. This is just one of the many benefits of this career. I spend my entire work day outside, everyday. I meet many interesting people who come to visit these centers. The job has enough flexibility to allow ample traveling. Each center I have spent time at has a staff that lives on site, creating wonderful communities of people. Most rewarding of all is the knowledge that I am planting the seed of environmental stewardship in at least a few minds and I certainly would not miss the shared sunsets for anything in the world.
_ ALUMNI NETWORKING _
One of the reasons for our newsletter is to promote communication, contacts, and networks among our alums. Besides friendly meetings, Grinnell contacts can be important sources of career advice and connections. For instance, we have had several successful internships under Bill Green, ‘74, at the Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist, and this summer, Vanessa Smith will be interning at the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona under archaeologist Neil Weintraub, ‘84.
The College’s Career Development Office even has an official mechanism, the Career Referral Network, which refers students to volunteers for advice, job hunting, internships, housing, and other help. Volunteers can be as involved as they wish, and get to meet and help upcoming Grinnellians. We urge all our alums to volunteer for this useful service - to find out more, contact the Career Development Office, 515-269-4349, or e-mail Langerud@admin.grin.edu.
***ALUMNI NEWS***
Peggy Bartlett (‘69) recently wrote a book on U.S. farmers and the 1980's farm crisis.
Kimberly Chandler (‘81) and her husband, Tom, direct their own Innerlight Center for Yoga and Meditation in Newport, Rhode Island.
Karl Koch (‘81) is the lighting director for film and video production at Koch Creative Enterprises.
Sydney McQouid (‘73) is regional vice president for Lifetime, TV for Women.
Megan Miller (‘94) is working full-time as a reproductive health counselor at a women’s health clinic.
Jay Newman (‘76) will be receiving his Ph.D. in Anthropology from SMU, December 1996.
Lilah Pengra Morton (‘69) is writing a book on anthropology and developmental disabilities, which is scheduled for release in November, 1996. She also works for the Girl Scouts as a grant writer.
Dana Robson (‘90) is the Parent Involvement Coordinator for Head Start in Vermont’s Lake Champlain Valley.
Carol Severin (‘78) runs a non-profit housing corporation that builds, owns, and manages low income housing and services for elderly, disabled, HIV, homeless, and others.
Nicola Tannenbaum (‘73) is an associate professor of anthropology in the sociology and anthropology departments at Lihigh University in Bethlehem, PA. Research work focused on Shan, a minority ethnic group in Thailand.
James Becker (‘84) earned his MA in anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Currently head of a non-profit organization that studies and develops human service delivery systems.
Karin Bellomy (‘93) works as an intern at The Malubu Times. She’s also coordinator of children’s programs at the local Methodist Church.
Anita Myerson (‘72) is an attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland. She specializes in unemployment compensation, especially policy and system issues.
Karen Pohlson (‘84) is doing contract archaeology in Chicago.
Cameron Hay (‘88) is a graduate student in anthropology at Emory.
Cindy Rybolt (‘90) works as a staff attorney at Legal Services Corporation of Iowa’s Waterloo Regional Office. The corporation serves low-income people in an 8 county area of northeastern Iowa.
Elaine Weiner (‘90) finished an M.A. in Anthropology at the University of Florida and will enter the Ph.D. program in Sociology at the University of Michigan this fall.
Lisa Berdinger (‘90) is working at a mental health association in New York State.
Daniel Reboussin (‘83) earned his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Florida. He’s done research on (particularly women’s) migration and the resulting changes in local voluntary associations among the Diola (an ethnic group in SW Senegal). Assists the university library’s African Bibliographer in collection management.
Caleb Sullivan (‘80) plans to enroll in International Law Program, with emphasis on Chinese affairs, in 1997.
Kristen Brown (‘90) is working at an abortion clinic. She is planning on applying to medical school.
Tom Berger (‘91) is writing on a Natufian cave site of Hilazon Tachtit in Israel that he is excavating for this dissertation at the University of New Mexico.
DUE TO THE LARGE NUMBER OF SUBMISSIONS WE RECEIVED FROM THE LAST NEWSLETTER, NOT ALL THE ALUMNI NEWS IS PRINTED HERE. IT WILL APPEAR INTHE FALL 1996 NEWSLETTER.
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Faculty Profile
Katya Gibel Azoulay
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I have procrastinated in writing about myself in these columns ever since Kathy first invited a contribution. It is more than laziness at the end of an exciting, intellectually challenging yet nevertheless exhausting semester -- here's an opportunity to selectively and briefly project one's self as both subject and object. There is a certain comfort in having people wonder who one is -- although, I confess, the delight in seeing one's name in print. They used to say in Hollywood, "I don't care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right." So for those of you who have not met me yet, I offer a glimpse into my thoughts and my background.
This space affords, first of all, an opportunity to articulate a deep appreciation to my colleagues in the Anthropology and American Studies Departments for the autonomy and support which has been extended to me. The main incentive the Scholar-in-Residence position offered me has been a licence to introduce to the curriculum two independent core courses for what has been an African-American Concentration based on courses cross-listed from different departments. In order to demonstrate the link between my courses in Anthropology/American Studies and the Concentration which would complement, rather than intrude, on student interests, students from AAS 195 and ANT 235 have viewed the same films as part of their syllabi. In the beginning I wondered whether when students registered for one course and not the other, they anticipated the extent to which they would encounter common themes although with different implications depending on the foci of each course.
The organization of texts, the dynamics of the classroom, and the guiding principle behind the courses which I have designed, are rooted in my political and intellectual concerns about the production of knowledge and its impact on the public sphere. In the post-Holocaust world, I believe, one strategy for interrogating questions of culture and race, identity and nationalism (local and at the level of the state) needs to focus on what it says about "us" as social scientists, public intellectuals and people who can and are called upon to affect public policies. The shelter of academic institutions should provide a safe place to politicize the consciousness of students by opening up a world of ideas, introducing complexity and explicitly encouraging the maximization of objectivity while tenaciously avoiding truth claims underlying popular paradigms. In terms of the establishment of an African-American canon, my ambitions are not modest. I seek an insurance against marginalization: questioning the politics behind "the politics of race," the meaning of Blackness and the construction of "communities of meaning" in the African Diaspora cannot be done in isolation from the corollary imagination and construction of whiteness as something taken for granted and therefore not only normalized but also artificially standardized.
My students have been the recipients, if not the beneficiaries, of this orientation. This column, therefore, also allows me to sincerely thank you -- collectively -- for cooperating with my teaching methods and requirements which demanded a constant questioning of received knowledge.
Okay, let me shift gears and tone -- in order to satisfy curiosity, without satiating interest, the following is a sketch of some recent herstory. I am a native New Yorker -- the real New York -- which is to say, Manhattan. I grew up in Morningside Gardens, a co-op that extends from Broadway to Amsterdam Avenues at one end, and from 123st to LaSalle St; attended P.S. 125 and in seventh grade entered the Brearley School for Girls graduating in June 1970. As a teenager I belonged to the Marxist Zionist youth movement, HaShomer Hatzair and was the founder of the Black Students Council at school. (So my academic interests do, strategically and deliberately, arise out of my Jewish and Jamaican heritage).
Our commencement was held in the somber shadow of the killing of four students at Kent State, shooting of black students at Jackson State and the murder of a black youth in a Georgia jailhouse. These were troubling times and my commencement address to the assembly, gathered to celebrate our transition from one stage of life to another, gave me the opportunity to articulate an individual concern, shared by some - not most - of my peers that the country was not then, nor had it ever been, the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Brearley, under the magnificent wing of our headmistress, Jean Mitchell, nurtured self-confidence and instilled an intellectual foundation which provided young women with a sense of confidence and skills as well as purpose: each of us has a role to play in making the world a better place. Two months after I had given the commencement address, I emigrated to Israel for reasons which were partially informed by American imperialism, anti-Semitism in the New Left and white radical paternalism that is often more burdensome than blatant racism as I discovered when I returned twenty one years later.
During my years in Israel, I attended Hebrew University, where I earned my B.A. and M.A. in African Studies with a focus on South Africa. Between 1985 and 1990, I published several articles critiquing the bilateral relations between the South African and Israeli governments as well as essays on the critical distinctions between the PLO and the ANC and the lack of parallel between the two situations despite persistent attempts to draw analogies. On several occasions, Israel Radio invited my comments which was a flattering recognition of expertise. From 1988, I became more involved in the burgeoning women's peace movement and began to address more publicly the challenge of ethnic chauvinism and elitism which pervaded the ranks of the Israeli Left in general and the peace movement in particular. Initially, with the decision to return to the U.S. to pursue a doctorate, my intended dissertation was a focus on the intersection of gender, class and ethnic prejudice within the Israeli feminist movement.
It was my immersion in Israeli everyday life -- as a citizen and an active participant -- that fostered a sceptism toward the gap between theory, representation and lived experience. This perception seemed confirmed by my studies of African politics and the development crisis in Africa in the 1980s. At that time, scholars were beginning to address and reformulate questions on the relation of state-civil society. Thus the conflicting interpretations of political processes in Africa complimented my own concerns of how people -- their attitudes, beliefs and actions as well as the motivations behind what they do -- were objectified in research. I believe in the importance of acknowledging the link between academic work and politics which speaks directly to the politics of knowledge and claims to expertise. Parenthetically, it is therefore critical that we learn to recognize the significance of grasping the location from which a subjectivity is constituted and in which identities are constructed; hence the necessity to name "the ground we're coming from."
On a sunny autumn morning in Durham, 8 September 1995, I defended my thesis entitled: "Black, Jewish and Interracial: Its Not the Color of Your Skin but the Race of Your Kin." The issues of definitions and interpretations of identity/ies as a troubling theoretical construct on the one hand, and the vacillation and desire for political resolutions to the tensions (along a volatile continuum), on the other hand, remain significant themes which underline my research, pedagogical goals and politics. Through an inter-disciplinary approach which fused Anthropology, Philosophy (Jewish and phenomenology) and History the dissertation explicitly addressed the contingency of race, the politics of memory/erasure and the contested nature of experience. These topics are directly related to modernism and nationalism as it relates to collaboration and discord (coalition, competition and dissonance). The rhetorical subtitle suggests the necessity of transcending the persistent presumption that questions of identity speak to a crisis of alienation or that racial/religious identities are articulations of confusion and confrontation. Subjectively, as one who embodies "microdiversity," I draw on this multi-faceted resource to challenge deeply ingrained monocultural presuppositions that regulate and discipline thinking about identity/ies. Anyone intrigued by these threads of my life may turn to my article in Research in African Literatures published soon after I arrived, "Outside Our Parents' House: Race, Culture and Identity," 27, 1 (1996).
Again, at the end of this first semester, I thank all of you for having made my sojourn to a place I could not, unfortunately, locate on a map, an irresistible comfort zone.
The Anthropology Department sponsored two talks this semester. On April 4 Ron Casson, Professor of Anthropology at Oberlin College discussed his current research on secondary color terminology, comparing patterns in English and Turkish. Dr. Casson is the father of two Grinnell students, Ayse (‘97) and Aksel (‘96). The talk, "Where Do Colors Come From?", was co-sponsored by the Linguistics Concentration.
On May 1, Scott Chaffee, visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Grinnell, explained his research dating pictographs using Accelerator Mass Spectrophotometry. This recently-developed methodology is providing a means for obtaining absolute dates for painted rock art.
Parties were also in evidence. A spring picnic at Merrill Park introduced some of the over 70 current anthropology majors to one another.