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National Association of Student Anthropologists

Jenny Chio, Contributing editor

Forthcoming from NASAAlthough the summer holidays are just within reach, for students of anthropology the next few months are when the real work begins. Between conducting fieldwork, catching up on readings and writing grant applications, the summer is a busy but productive time for students. We’re not taking a break either, and here’s a taste of what’s to come from NASA for the rest of 2008.

Launch of the NASA e-JournalWith the establishment of the new officer position of e-journal editor (currently Marc Hébert, U South Florida), NASA is formally launching an e-journal as a venue for the publication of student work. The goals of the NASA e-Journal are multivalent. We would like to use this as a chance to reflect, as anthropology students, on where our disci-pline is heading and how we would like to chart the course.

For us, continuing to view academic papers as the primary means for communicating with one another and the general public does not take into account how we use email, instant messaging, text messages and other technologies that compress time and space. The e-journal will encompass multiple forms of electronic expression, including (but certainly not limited to) video submissions, a blog section, photo essays and illustrations. Knowing that the publication of our ideas often takes years, we seek to shorten that time by taking full advantage of what new media technologies can offer us in order to keep

the dialogue timely and relevant to current student concerns.

Our first call for papers went out in the spring, but submissions are accepted on a rolling basis. This journal aims to be a rigor-ously peer reviewed platform for the work of the next generation of anthropologists. We seek scholarly submissions from under-graduate and graduate students worldwide regarding the application of anthropological theories and methods outside of academia or across disciplines for the purpose of exploring, problematizing or addressing social condi-tions. Scholarly articles should be 1,000 words in length and will be subject to a double blind review process. We also welcome inno-vative commentary submissions to the e-journal. Commentaries are opinion or avant-garde pieces that are the original work of the authors. We seek a plurality of voices and intend to raise awareness among both fellow students and established anthropolo-gists about the directions in which our disci-pline is heading. Please send submissions or inquiries to the e-journal editorial team at nasaejournal@gmail.com.

2008 Annual Meeting EventsNASA will have a strong, active presence at the annual meeting in San Francisco. Though it is still too early to finalize our program, we do know that NASA will have three invited sessions in addition to one roundtable. The roundtable will be on graduate student collab-orations in environmental change research. NASA will also sponsor a number of student focused panel and poster sessions, with the general program aims of reflecting the diver-sity in interests, approaches and research topics that characterize the anthropology student body today.

We are also planning another Student–Mentor Workshop, one of our more popular annual meeting activities, and a “Student Orientation to the Annual Meeting” event. Keep your eyes open for details on these in the fall.

Lastly, NASA offers two awards for under-graduate and graduate student members to help offset the cost of travel to the annual meeting. The Carrie Hunter Tate Award ($200) and the NASA Travel Award ($100) competi-tions will open in early fall. Details on these awards are available on our website.

New Web AddressFor more information on what NASA is and what we do, bookmark our homepage in your web browser: www.aaanet.org/sections/nasa. If you’re interested in making websites and not just reading them, we want you! NASA needs a new web editor to start in November 2008. Email our current web editor, Mel Marsh (melsmarsh@gmail.com), for more information.

All NASA announcements are first distrib-uted through our “Google Groups” listserv. Apply for membership at http://groups.google.

com/group/nasa-list. And a final pitch from the NASA news editor—we always welcome contributions from students for this column in AN.

CorrectionIn the November 2007 NASA section news, Lesley Green and David Green’s research was incorrectly described. Their paper explores the uses of a virtual reality environment to archive not Tokoloshe but Palikur (Arawak) narratives in relation to the landscape. For additional details, see their article in Critical Arts (21[2]). We apologize for the error.

If you’ve got an idea or an issue that you’d like to write about in this space, please contact Jenny Chio (jenny.t.chio@gmail.com).

Society for Anthropological Sciences Stephen Lyon, Contributing editor

For members of the AAA who have not yet joined SAS, please don’t forget to join up when you renew your membership this year.

SASci Annual MeetingThe New Orleans meeting of the Society for Anthropological Sciences (SASci)—an organi-zation outside the AAA but associated with our section—was a very successful gathering. Many SAS members joined with SASci and the Society for Cross Cultural Research (SCCR) on February 20–23 for the 4th annual meeting of SASci and the 37th annual meeting of SCCR. Since the founding SASci meeting in New Orleans in 2002, members have met with increasing regularity. Joining forces with SCCR and SASci has enabled SAS members to coop-erate with successful organizations sharing SAS’s commitment to systematic research that advances theory and understanding.

The New Orleans meeting featured presenta-tions and discussions on a wide range of inter-disciplinary themes including: the evolution of culture, cognitive anthropology, kinship terminology elicitation, humans as coopera-tive breeders, social network analysis and a

Adrienne S Mael, senior undergraduate anthropology student at Bloomsburg University, presents her research on the future of marriage at the 2007 annual meeting. Photo courtesy Marcy Hessling

President John Gatewood and SASci program organizer Victor de Munck soaking up local tradition in New Orleans. Photo courtesy Michael Fischer

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host of other topics. The two keynote sessions were jointly organized with SCCR. The first keynote session was titled, “Changing Cajun and Creole Cultures: Language, Community, and Identity,” a topic highly relevant for the setting. Speakers were Barry Jean Ancelet (U Lousiana), Carl L Bankston III (Tulane U), Ray Brassieur (U Lousiana) and Thomas Klingler (Tulane U). The second keynote session addressed a subject dear to section members’ hearts: “Cross-Cultural Research: Models and Methods for Understanding Others,” featuring Richard A Shweder (U Chicago), Michael J Stevens (Illinois State U) and Thomas S Weisner (UCLA). More details about the meeting can be found on the SCCR website (http://meeting.sccr.org) and SASci website (http://anthrosciences.org).

Member Gives Congressional TestimonyOn March 12, 2008, Scott Atran (John Jay C, U Michigan and CNRS, Paris) testified before the US Congress about his ongoing research on terrorists and “wannabes.” He argued that field-based scientific research is necessary to deal effectively with radical-ization processes that lead to violence and terrorism. The following day he briefed the White House on the same issues. Ironically, while he was briefing the White House, a letter from him appeared in The New York Times in which he criticized George Bush’s veto of a bill that would have prohibited the CIA from using interrogation methods such as waterboarding. The testimony to Congress is included in the Congressional record and the full text is available online (http://sitemaker.umich.edu/satran/files/atran_congress_12march08.pdf).

New ResourcesDoug White (UC Irvine) was awarded the 2007 Viviana Zelizer Distinguished Scholarship Award for a jointly authored paper, “Network Dynamics and Field Evolution: The Growth of Interorganizational Collaboration in the Life Sciences” in the American Journal of Sociology. White has created a wiki with online anthro-pological courses, seminars, resources, tuto-rials in contemporary software and other resources (http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/). The purpose of the wiki is to support inter-disciplinary research across a range of disci-plines. Users of Wikipedia will be familiar with the format of the wiki and White invites users to contribute in the spirit of an open community.

The online journal launched in 2006, Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Science, has published four issues in its first volume (2006) and three in its second volume (2007) for a total of 33 articles with 47 authors, or nearly 1000 pages. There is a forthcoming special issue on Anthropological Formalization as a Tool for Empirical Research. The journal is published at http://repositories.cdlib.org/imbs/socdyn by Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) and UC eRepository Peer Review

journals. The editors are Doug White, Murray Leaf, Duran Bell and Robert Manlove.

Please send your comments, questions and news to Stephen Lyon at s.m.lyon@durham.ac.uk

Society for Anthropology in Community CollegesLLoyd MiLLer, Contributing editor

SACC Fest 2009Tucson, AZ is the site for next year’s annual conference. Co-Presidents-elect and confer-ence organizers Mary Kay Gilliland and Maren Wilson say that it will again take place in mid-March. Consult SACC’s website (http://webs.anokaramsey.edu/sacc) and the SACC-L listserv, as well as this column, for further developments.

2008—Great Meetings!Many cheers and much praise to President Ann Kaupp for organizing and chairing an extraordinary conference this year! The meet-ings were held in honor of Leonard Lieberman (1926–2007), president of SACC in 2000–01 and a beloved colleague and friend to many of us. In a session titled Teaching Race, dedi-cated to Len, Phil Naftaly, Mark Lewine and Tony Balzano gave presentations on his contri-butions and their significance for students and for teaching anthropology.

As a member of the Smithsonian Institution’s (SI) Anthropology Outreach Office and editor of AnthroNotes, a publication for educators, Ann was able to provide some excellent guest speakers from SI as well as a behind-the-scenes look at the Natural History Museum. SI histo-rian Pamela Henson detailed the Smithsonian’s development throughout the nineteenth century, including its founding in 1846 and the establishment of the Bureau of American

Ethnology in 1879. She showed how the personal characteristics of founder James Smithson and those of such distinguished directors as John Wesley Powell shaped the SI’s evolu-tionary path. She noted that anthropology was first included as “foreign and curious research,” a moniker we haven’t entirely shaken today.

In the Natural History Museum’s anthro-pology seminar room, archaeology curator Dennis Stanford presented evidence for his hypothesis that the Americas’ earliest inhab-itants migrated west from Northern Europe (rather than across the Bering Strait from Siberia). Much of his evidence included striking similarities between American Clovis and European Solutrean spear points. This will most certainly provide scholarly excite-ment and controversy for some time to come. Physical anthropology curator Douglas Owsley and his assistant, Kari Bruwelheide, spoke about their forensic research on human skel-etal remains from the seventeenth century Chesapeake. Owsley, whose experience has included work with Jeffrey Dahmer’s first victim, Waco Branch Davidians and the Pentagon plane crash, revealed some causes of youthful deaths in the 1600s as relating to use of lead coffins and practices of baby swaddling and teeth whitening. Bruwelheide explained some techniques of facial reconstruction and distinguished the science from the art that’s sometimes practiced on TV dramas. Both are preparing an exhibit titled Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th Century Chesapeake, which is scheduled to open early next year.

We also visited the National Museum of the American Indian and were treated to a presen-tation by its curator, Gabrielle Tayac. I must confess to arriving with a bias, having read commentaries by some anthropologists and others that criticized it as disorganized and generally unconventional. However, Tayac and my subsequent viewing convinced me otherwise. She explained that unlike traditional museums of indigenous peoples, the NMAI’s philosophy is to present an institutional indigenous voice, a Native American emic perspective. Exhibits are thematic rather than lineal. Some display a few objects behind glass and offer accompa-nying drawers with additional objects to view if desired, giving the museum a feeling of sparse-ness rather than clutter. Also, the museum’s cafeteria-style Mitsitam café features a variety of indigenous foods from the Americas that are not to miss, including planked Northwest Coast salmon and buffalo ribeye steaks.

Our final guest speaker was AAA Director of Public Affairs Damon Dozier, a former legisla-tive assistant for MA Senator John Kerry. Dozier said that one of his duties is to be an advocate for sections like ours both within and outside of AAA. With the aid of PowerPoint (when it worked), he offered a step-by-step guide to lobbying on Capital Hill, with practical advice that one could apply to many situations requiring tact and diplomacy. One memorable statement he made, worth pondering, was that

National Museum of the American Indian. Photo courtesy Lloyd Miller