Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Alumni:
Welcome to the inaugural issue of the U.Va. Anthropology Department Newsletter! With our students, faculty, and alumni pursuing research projects and adventures all over the world, we hope these bulletins will help us keep in touch with one another.
For our first issue I’ll start with a brief update on the department’s recent history. Since Anthropology split off from Sociology in 1973 we have become a thriving department of 29 faculty members, 65 grad students and 132 undergraduate majors. Our traditional strength has been in sociocultural anthropology, and over the last ten years we have also strengthened archaeology and linguistic anthropology; we are now one of the top anthropology departments in the U.S. Our faculty and students do research all over the world, from Japan to the Czech Republic, as well as here in the U.S.—on issues such as the diamond trade in South Africa, HIV-AIDS among rural African American women in Virginia, endangered languages of the Amazon and Papua New Guinea, the prehistory of the Monacan people of Virginia, and the mysteries of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.
Over the past five years we have added several new faculty members, who will be featured in this and future newsletters. Anthropology faculty also play an important role in the governance of the University: Steve Plog served two terms as Dean of Graduate Studies; Richard Handler is starting his second term as Dean of the College, and Gertrude Fraser has just completed her first semester as Associate Provost for Faculty Recruitment and Retention.
Our Ph.D.s are teaching at places like Duke, the University of California, NYU, Princeton, Lehigh, the London School of Economics, and at Virginia institutions such as James Madison U, Mary Washington, and the U of Richmond. We are equally proud of our BAs. Those of you who have pursued advance degrees in Anthropology have made their mark on the field in many different areas, and those who have moved in other directions still report how their studies in Anthropology have enriched their experience, whether that turned out to be in law, medicine, public service or entrepreneurship.
This past year we have seen both good and bad times. Many of you have heard the sad news of the death of our colleague Chris Crocker,a founding member of the department, whose teaching inspired many generations of students. (This newsletter includes a brief appreciation of Chris by George Mentore.) Other news includes our launching of a new interdisciplinary undergraduate minor in Global Culture and Commerce (see a description on the U.Va. website at http://www.virginia.edu/anthropology/minorcom.html), and the discovery of the original display cases from the Brooks Museum of Natural History—now known as Brooks Hall—in the attic of the former Miller Hall, just before Miller Hall was due to be demolished. Thanks to the efforts of Jeff Hantman, we salvaged the display cases and brought them back to their original home. (The picture on page 8 shows Jeff with the cases just after they had been hoisted through the roof of Miller Hall by crane.) Now the cases await the day when Brooks Hall can be restored to its former splendor. Meanwhile Brooks hasn’t lost its legendary spookiness: it hosted its first departmental Halloween party this year, decorated with 50 hand-carved Jack-o-lanterns.
I hope you will keep in touch with us and give us feedback about the newsletter: what you would like to see more, or less, of, and what you are doing. We plan to feature an alumnus/alumna in each issue, as we’ve done here. Please send feedback to anth-news@virginia.edu, or check out the department’s website at http://www.virginia.edu/anthropology.
With best wishes,
Ellen Contini-Morava, Chair
