Anthropology is devoted to the proposition that the diversity among humankind is comprehensible and enriching. In an increasingly interconnected world, the commitment to understanding all aspects of human diversity past and present becomes even more relevant as we prepare students for the challenges they will face beyond the university. Our faculty members are all actively engaged in research around the world. They bring their research into the classroom, but many also bring their classes to the field. Many courses include fieldwork that gives students training in the methods of anthropology and allows them to apply theory to the data they observe in the outside world.

Moving Out of the Classroom

Professor Lois Beck leads students in Writing Culture in fieldwork on topics ranging from observations at an animal clinic to interviews with immigrants. Students in this writing-intensive course write and revise their essays, honing their skills in observation and interviewing as well as their ability to write with clarity. They come away from this course with ethnographic experience and a writing portfolio.

Graduate student Rebecca Hodges, who studies religion, secularism, and national narratives in the Middle East, taught Cultures of the Near and Middle East at the University of Missouri in St. Louis in the 2011 spring semester and will teach it at Washington University in the spring of 2012 semester. The course covered one week each for Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and Iran. Since the students were from a range of backgrounds, Hodges hosted a show-and-tell day in which male and female American military veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan gave presentations along with male and female Arab Americans from Palestine and Saudi Arabia. She used Skype to build relationships between the U.S. students and a Sunni Muslim female friend from Alexandria, Egypt, who taught English at a Catholic school. Within a week of former President Hosni Mubarak's resignation, they were able to talk to a Muslim Egyptian about the revolution, her thoughts about the U.S., religious difference, and the future of her country. Each unit included a component like Skype, Twitter, YouTube, or other audiovisual or social media as well as a lecture on political history from independence to the present. Students came to understand individual lives in the Middle East within a broader historical context, and many said they realized for the first time that “they are just like us.”

Research at the Saint Louis Zoo

The proximity of the Saint Louis Zoo and collaborative research projects with zoo scientists allow our students to conduct animal observations without going to remote field sites.

Professor Fiona Marshall involves her students in laboratory and field research on the domestication of the donkey in Bones to Behavior: Undergraduate Research in the Lab and at the Zoo. As its name implies, the course moves from zooarchaeology lab to the Saint Louis Zoo, where teams observe and record the behavior of the Somali wild ass, ancestor of the domesticated donkey.

Behavioral Research at the Zoo, a course taught by Professor Robert Sussman, allows students to conduct independent research on any animal in the zoo. Each student in the class makes preliminary observations before picking an animal and a topic for collecting data and answering some basic questions, such as how the dominance hierarchy works or how the crowds or weather affect the animal's activities. After receiving instruction on how to design a research project, construct data sheets, and collect and analyze data, the students conduct their semester-long studies at the zoo. Each student then prepares a paper written and structured like a professional journal article, and makes a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation modeled after a presentation for a professional meeting. Student projects have led to honor projects, senior capstone projects, professional publications, and further research leading to master's and doctoral theses.

Anthropology Overseas

Anthropology summer programs get students out of American culture and into cultural settings novel to them.

For the past several years, Professor Glenn Stone has directed the Village India Program. Washington University students conduct research and teach English to high school students in rural Warangal District, Andhra Pradesh. For the Indian and the American students, this collaboration can be a life-changing experience. The Indian students receive training not otherwise available to them, while the American students gain a greater understanding of the issues confronting rural India.

Washington University undergraduates took part in archaeological excavations of a Bronze Age settlement complex (ca. 1800 BC) in the Dzhungar Mountains, Kazakhstan, as part of the summer program titled Archaeology and History of Central Asia, which is directed by Professor Michael Frachetti.

Students in the 2011 Pluralism, Politics and Religion Summer Program in Paris toured Versailles. Professor Carolyn Sargent directs this program, which was taught by Professors David Freidel and John Bowen.

Professor Michael Frachetti conducted a summer course, Archaeology and History of Central Asia, in Kazakhstan in the summer of 2011 and will offer it again in the summer of 2012. This intensive field-based course focused on the prehistory and recent history of Kazakhstan and Central Asia. It included an orientation session to familiarize students with the cultures and societies of Central Eurasia, with a specific focus on Kazakhstan; a six-week field practicum that included cultural events and excursions in the city of Almaty; and three to four weeks of archaeological excavation at a multi-period nomadic settlement in the high pasture regions of Eastern Kazakhstan. The aim of the program was to provide students with a rich, practical experience of contemporary life in former Soviet republics as well as a deeper exploration of the development of nomadic societies throughout antiquity. Training included Geographical Information Systems (GIS), paleobotany, ceramic analysis, topographic survey, faunal analysis, and rock-art studies.

Professor Carolyn Sargent directs the Pluralism, Politics, and Religion Summer Program in Paris with courses taught by Professor John Bowen (Politics and Religion in Contemporary Society) and Professor David Freidel (Politics, Religion, and Art in Antiquity: Representations in Paris).

Bowen tells why the course is taught in Paris. “France offers a fascinating laboratory for studying modern relationships among religion, politics, and immigration. France has developed its own ways of supporting religions yet separating them from politics, a very different set of ideas from those we know in the United States. For at least 100 years it also has been the European country with the highest levels of immigration. France is where issues of Islam and Europe have been most prominently on display. The course begins the study of religion and politics in modern France by having students map neighborhoods that have seen sharp shifts in immigration before moving on to visits to modern religious institutions. Students study modern Catholicism and spend a morning in one of France's best-known churches, learn about forms of Judaism by speaking with France's foremost authorities on the subject in Paris synagogues, and attend a Pentecostal service and visit the main Paris mosque.”

Freidel wrote from Paris about how the city supports his course on antiquities. “At the beginning of the course this year, standing in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, I described Paris to our students as a work of art in progress, a motto that took on a certain happy panache as the weeks passed and we progressed through the museums of the city. When the façade of the Cathedral is covered in scaffolding, as it has been periodically, the point is obvious. When the ornate sculpture is glowing in morning light, as it was this time, one has to imagine the desecration of the revolutionary mob decapitating the row of Kings of Judah, the grime of wood smoke from houses crowded close, the grotesque erosion patterns of acid rain before Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris inspired restoration by Violet le Duc. The lesson is relevant to the themes of politics, plurality, and religion shaping the program, for Paris celebrates the civic-religious fervor of France in conserving and constantly reshaping its cultural heritage in the public places of the city.

“But further, it is central to a larger goal of exercising imagination,” Freidel continued. “Imagining the cosmos, the divine, the world, humanity, individual human beings, the list of representations we encounter over four weeks is a long one, both inside the course and in all probability more memorably outside of it. As an archaeologist of complex ancient societies and as an iconographer of religion and politics, I take great pleasure introducing people to masterworks of ancient and modern art, with their manifold religious and political connotations, from my own changing perspectives.”

Community-Based Learning

Students made their final presentations in spring 2011 for the course titled Sexual Health and the City: A Community-Based Learning Course, taught by Professor Shanti Parikh.

Professor Shanti Parikh involves her students in research and community outreach in the city of St. Louis. Students have expressed a strong interest in community-based research courses, and the university has encouraged faculty to develop such courses by awarding grants to support them. In the spring 2011 semester, Parikh offered Sexual Health and the City, a community-based learning course to a class of 18 students. With funding from a Gephardt Institute for Public Service grant, Parikh developed the course for more hands-on learning opportunities and as follow-up to her lecture course, The AIDS Epidemic. The course aims to provide students with an opportunity to apply critical medical anthropology, social theories, and public health tools to real-life sexual health issues as faced by residents and sexual health agencies in the city.

A guided bus tour of the city began the semester so students could see firsthand how risk is geographically constructed and determined. For students, the most revealing aspects of the tour were the homeless community downtown, Tent City; the dearth of health care facilities and accessible grocery stores in the economically marginalized north side; and the location of East St. Louis strip clubs in residential areas that lacked the power to influence zoning. According to one student, “The tour was incredible and eye-opening. It’s amazing how much we don't know about the extreme poverty that’s around the corner from Washington University.”

An internship with a sexual and reproductive health agency was a large part of the course.

With guidance from Sean Marz, community liaison for the course, and Parikh, students partnered with an agency and worked on semester-long projects in groups of two to four students. Projects included developing a guerrilla marketing campaign for men who have sex with men in public spaces, creating a sexual health curriculum for residents of a home for teenage mothers, revising and conducting HIV education for high-risk women, and working with a teen sexual health advocacy group. Students were extremely positive about the value they gained from the practicum embedded in the course.

“The practicum was the heart of the course. Discussion and guest speakers were good, but the internship was the best part.”

“This course provided an opportunity to apply academic, classroom concepts and theories to the ‘real world’ through internships at local sexual and reproductive health agencies. Thus, personal and professional experiences in the work field were created through the semester-long internships.”

The semester culminated in a student-run breakfast workshop attended by the partner agencies, including Planned Parenthood, the Contraceptive CHOICE Project, Almost Home, St. Louis Effort for AIDS, and Project Ark. The students not only decided on and delivered the content of the workshop, but also cooked the tasty breakfast food, including scones, quiches, and Italian breakfast bread. Comments from internship supervisors at the agencies underscored the value of the collaboration.

“I support this internship and love the fact that it gives the students a unique opportunity and gives us skilled hours/personnel to accomplish work we might not have time to do.”

“The event was an excellent opportunity to wrap up the relationships with the interns. I loved seeing them present their information and felt proud at all they'd learned. … it was touching that the students made breakfast. I've never had such a nice wrap-up to an internship before.”

Parikh plans to continue her involvement in community-based teaching. She and Associate Professor Vetta Thompson in the Institute of Public Health at the Brown School have been awarded a Washington University Cross-School Interdisciplinary Teaching Grant to develop a new course, Interrogating Health, Race, and Inequalities: Public Health, Medical Anthropology, and History. This course will focus on racial/ethnic disparities in health outcomes and how race and health intersect with social determinants such as sex and gender, poverty, disability, language, literacy, migration, and occupation.

Larger Lessons

Students and faculty who take part in field courses view them as personal journeys as well as intellectual endeavors. Professor Michael Frachetti explains that “studying and participating in field-based research such as an archaeological dig in Kazakhstan provides so much more than an intellectual or academic experience. Fieldwork provides a chance for smart students to be challenged by life in the most organic sense. Things like gale-force winds, rainstorms, and poisonous snakes, combined with the realization that every action has real life consequences for your team, introduce students to an intense situational form of learning that translates directly into lessons of social participation and community responsibility. Fieldwork brings learning to life, and students leave as changed young leaders.”

Professor David Freidel sums up the value of participation in the Paris program. “… I take even greater pleasure in reading the journals participants in the course write, documenting the unique journey each person takes here. And everyone, in her or his own way, comes to discern that seeing and the other sensory experiences of Paris are just the beginning of knowing how the public place is where everyone expresses themselves and their participation in cosmopolitan citizenship. The French intellectual Paul Valéry said, ‘La memoire est l'avenir du passé’ or ‘Memory is the future of the past.’ What people remember of their experience in Paris, guided by the journals they write and can subsequently read, shapes not only their conception of where they, humanity, and the French, have been, but also where they are going.”

Students find that anthropology provides an unrivaled preparation for professional study and a springboard to careers in wide-ranging fields. A tour through the Alumni Connections section of this newsletter provides a glimpse of the diverse paths an anthropologist might take after leaving the university. Whatever their field—medicine, law, public health, education, social work, or business—our alumni are also social entrepreneurs, working to solve some of the most challenging problems facing humans today.