Your Contributions at Work

Your contributions to the department are used to support activities that facilitate training, research, and teaching in anthropology. The most important of these are the awards that the department gives to undergraduate and graduate students.

Undergraduate Students

Each year we recognize the Best Undergraduate Honor's Thesis and Best Anthropology Essay with financial awards. A faculty committee selects the papers for each award. We give out three awards for Best Anthropology Essay - one each for archaeology, biocultural anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology.

Best Honors Thesis in Anthropology 2006-2007

Winner: Peter Nelson

Thesis Title: "Power and Place: The Dynamics of Non-Verbal Communication in the Human-Landscape Interrelationship at FortVancouver"

Advisor: Dr. Peter Lape

Best Anthropology Essay Awards 2006-2007

Sociocultural Winner

Lisa Skeen
"Asserting a New Sovereignty:Refugee Camps and the Creation of a New World Order"
Professor: Dr. Arzoo Osanloo

Biocultural Winner
This year there was a tie:

Erika Shattuck
"Conflict Resolution: Are Students As Mature As They Believe?"
Professor: Dr. Laura Newell

Lorin Dole
"Oh My God, I wish I was Spiderman!"
Professor: Dr. Laura Newell

Archaeology Winner

Leif Wefferling
"The Historical Role of Anthropogenic Fire and Fire Suppression in the Pacific Northwest Landscape"
Professor: Dr. Ben Fitzhugh

Graduate Students

The department helps to support pre-dissertation pilot research projects and travel to national academic conferences for graduate students. The awards provide graduate students with critical support that is not typically available from any other source of funding.

Each year we fund as many graduate students as possible to conduct pre-dissertation pilot research. This research is used to identify a field site, make important connections at the field site, and undertake preliminary data collection. These awards range from $500.00 to $2,000.00. The students and projects funded for the 2007-2008 academic year are:

1. Joyce LeCompte-Mastenbrook
   My dissertation research examines the historical and political ecologies of mid-elevation huckleberry species (primarily Vaccinium membranaceum and V. deliciosum) on the Pacific Northwest coast of western North America.  As a “first food”, huckleberries are considered an extremely important subsistence and ceremonial resource for many first peoples in the region.  Currently, over a century of fire suppression policies combined with a growing commercial demand for the berries has resulted in a decline in resource abundance and increasing conflicts between harvesters. 
   While my primary research site is located in the headwaters regions of the Green and White River watersheds, on the northwestern slopes of Mt.Rainier and the southernmost portions of the Mt. Baker Snoqualmie National Forest, I examine this issue at multiple spatial and temporal scales; including the historical fire regimes employed by first peoples to manage the resource, the role of treaty rights and obligations in settling conflicts over the resource, how different types of current management regimes, permitting policies and enforcement strategies across forests differentially effect the social and ecological landscape, and the historical and contemporary flow of harvesters and huckleberries, from the local to the global.
   
   
2. Emily Lynch
   A record number of U.S. residents are falling through the cracks of the country's health care system, living without adequate health insurance or without any at all. While this trend exemplifies how neoliberal policies shift responsibility for health away from the state and onto individuals, at the same time these neoliberal policy transformations have been mediated by people's involvement in institutions of collective action such as unions.  In order to better understand the role of institutions of collective action in neoliberal policy shifts, in this pilot research project I will be exploring a union-negotiated health insurance reform based on the idea of "personal responsibility" in King County, Washington.  My overall goal is to lay a foundation for dissertation fieldwork about social struggle over unwaged self-caring labor and social commons.
   

3. Emily Peterson
   My dissertation research will address the issue of how the development of long-distance trade systems in Insular Southeast Asia impacted local ecosystems, particularly tropical coral reef communities, and how these environmental changes may have influenced subsequent adaptive cultural responses. I hypothesize that the sandalwood trade in the Manatuto region of East Timor led to extensive landscape alteration causing a decline in coral reef productivity with declining abundances of reef-dwelling taxa. This research will involve analysis of marine faunal assemblages from both pre-trade and trade-period contexts to identify and explain changes in the reef ecosystem. In July 2007, I traveled to East Timor to conduct pilot research for this project with the goals of identifying potential archaeological sites for my analysis and building my reference collections of shell and fishbone.

4. ChungChing Shiung
   This summer I went to the Banda Islands to do my pilot research on pottery collection. Peter Lape excavated several sites in the Banda Islands nine years ago. His excavation aimed to explore the settlement pattern and social interactions in the proto-historic period. The sites yield a great amount of potsherds and are ideal for more intensive research on pottery production and distribution in the islands. Pilot research funds allowed for my transportation, housing, and field equipment costs. It also allowed me to hire local workers to help wash potsherds. The potsherds were covered by ash and dirt making it difficult to observe the decorations and tempers, so washing them become necessary to conduct a more thorough examination. Overall, the pilot research field work was productive. I have observed some interesting changes in decorations and tempers of the potsherds. I will use the information gathered through my pilot research of the pottery assemblages to write a proposal seeking additional funding for further research. I aim to complete a dissertation on more scientific analyses of the pottery assemblages on the Banda Islands.
   

5. Mia Siscawati
   I am interested in studying the complex and contradictory position of forestry scholars in Indonesia in order to understand their social, political, and scholarly framing of forests, how they mediate their political position and knowledge with the state, capital, and social movements, and how this positionality has affected the constitution of community-managed forests as an object of knowledge. Pilot research funds will help me to examine the cultural aspects of collaboration between social movements and forestry science within the community forestry movement in Indonesia. I will also study the adoption of gendered local knowledge promoted by and circulated within social movements into academic forestry science, the possible role of alternative forestry science in shaping social movements, and how gender relations contribute to this process.
   

6. Anusorn Unno
   Pilot research funds will help me look at how Malay Muslims in southern Thailand have been negotiating their ethnic identities and religious differences in various contexts – ranging from the context of everyday life to collective mobilization and political movements – amidst conflicts and violence that have been escalating over the past four years. The ability to do pilot research is related to my dissertation research in three respects. First and foremost, it is an exploration of the feasibility of the proposed dissertation research with particular focus on questions of safety, mine and those of the informants. Findings related to dealing with risk and danger situations for informants will significantly shape the dissertation topic, questions, methods, and sites. Second, pilot research will provide me with an opportunity to conduct individual and group interviews with Malay Muslim villagers and concerned persons, as well as archival research at the local academic institution. No matter how the dissertation topic, questions, and sites may alter, these research activities will provide data critical to my future dissertation research. Third, the pilot research will provide me with an opportunity to establish an affiliation with the College of Islamic Studies, the major local academic institution, which is crucial to the dissertation research in many respects. Apart from housing a wide range of relevant knowledge and leading scholars of Muslim and Islamic studies, the college offers Malay language courses that I plan to take while conducting dissertation research in the future.      

7. Kathy Wander
   My dissertation research will examine immune system development and allergy from the perspective of Evolutionary Medicine. Studies of the epidemiology of allergy have pointed to early life viral and bacterial infections as an important factor in immune system development. Childhood infections seem to have a lasting effect on the immune response to allergens. My dissertation research will examine whether childhood infections similarly affect the immune response to pathogens. I hypothesize that allergy and the recent allergy “epidemic” are byproducts of evolved mechanisms that bias the immune system toward the type of immune response used most frequently during development, “priming” the immune response for locally prevalent infections. While allergy and asthma (a related disorder) are reaching epidemic proportions in the Western world, infectious disease is a more substantial source of morbidity in the developing world. Thus, I choose to conduct my dissertation research in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, among a population experiencing substantial infectious disease stress. My pilot research project will accomplish two goals. First, it will provide a preliminary test of my hypothesis, based on cross-sectional data, to be followed by a more definitive test based on longitudinal data from the dissertation. Second, it will evaluate some proxy measures for immunocompetence (the ability to mount an appropriate and robust immune response), including immunological skin testing and morbidity histories. Without this information, I could not design a successful and valid dissertation project.