All four members of this author team share overlapping research interests and a similar vision of what anthropology is (and should be) about. For example, all are true believers in the four-field approach to anthropology and all have some involvement in applied work.
WILLIAM A. HAVILAND is Professor Emeritus at the University of Vermont, where he founded the Department of Anthropology and taught for thirty-two years. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania.
He has carried out original research in archaeology in Guatemala and Vermont; ethnography in Maine and Vermont; and physical anthropology in Guatemala. This work has been the basis of numerous publications in various national and international books and journals, as well as in media intended for the general public. His books include The Original Vermonters, co-authored with Marjorie Power, and a technical monograph on ancient Maya settlement. He also served as consultant for the award-winning telecourse, Faces of Culture, and is co-editor of the series Tikal Reports, published by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Besides his teaching and writing, Dr. Haviland has lectured to numerous professional as well as non-professional audiences in Canada, Mexico, Lesotho, South Africa, and Spain, as well as in the United States. A staunch supporter of indigenous rights, he served as expert witness for the Missisquoi Abenakis of Vermont in an important court case over aboriginal fishing rights.
Awards received by Dr. Haviland include being named University Scholar by the Graduate School of the University of Vermont in 1990; a Certificate of Appreciation from the Sovereign Republic of the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi, St. Francis/Sokoki Band in 1996; and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for Research on Vermont in 2006. Now retired from teaching, he continues his research, writing, and lecturing from the coast of Maine. His most recent book is At the Place of the Lobsters and Crabs (2009).
Authors Bunny McBride, Dana Walrath, Harald Prins, and William Haviland.
DANA WALRATH is Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Vermont and a Women’s Studies-affiliated faculty member. She earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and is a medical and biological anthropologist with principal interests in biocultural aspects of reproduction, the cultural context of biomedicine, genetics, and evolutionary medicine. She founded and directed an innovative educational program at the University of Vermont’s College of Medicine that brings anthropological theory and practice to first-year medical students. Before joining the faculty at the University of Vermont in 2000, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Health Resources and Services Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Templeton Foundation. Dr. Walrath’s publications have appeared in Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and American Journal of Physical Anthropology. An active member of the Council on the Anthropology of Reproduction, she has also served on a national committee to develop women’s health-care learning objectives for medical education and works locally to improve health care for refugees and immigrants.
HARALD E. L. PRINS is a University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Kansas State University. Born in the Netherlands, he studied at universities in Europe and the United States. He has done extensive fieldwork among indigenous peoples in South and North America, published many dozens of articles in seven languages, authored The Mi’kmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Cultural Survival (1996), co-authored Indians in Eden (2009), and co-edited American Beginnings (1994) and other books. Also trained in film, he has made award-winning documentaries and served as president of the Society for
Visual Anthropology and visual anthropology editor of the American Anthropologist. Dr. Prins has won his university’s most prestigious undergraduate teaching awards, held the Coffman Chair for University Distinguished Teaching Scholars (2004-05), and was selected as Professor of the Year for the State of Kansas by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2008. Active in human rights, he served as expert witness in Native rights cases in the U. S. Senate and various Canadian courts, and was instrumental in the successful federal recognition and land claims of the Aroostook Band of Micmacs (1991). Dr. Prins was appointed Research Associate at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution (2008-11), and served as guest professor at Lund University in Sweden (2010).
BUNNY MCBRIDE is an award-winning author specializing in cultural anthropology, indigenous peoples, international tourism, and nature conservation issues. Published in dozens of national and international print media, she has reported from Africa, Europe, China, and the Indian Ocean. Highly rated as a teacher, she served as visiting anthropology faculty at Principia College, the Salt Institute for Documentary Field Studies, and since 1996 as adjunct lecturer of anthropology at Kansas State University. McBride’s many publications include Women of the Dawn (1999), Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot in Paris (1995), and Indians in Eden: Wabanakis and Rusticators on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, 1850s-1920s (co-authored, 2009). The Maine State legislature awarded her a special commendation for significant contributions to Native women’s history (1999). A community activist and researcher for the Aroostook Band of Micmacs (1981-91), McBride assisted this Maine Indian community in its successful efforts to reclaim lands, gain tribal status, and revitalize cultural traditions. She has curated various museum exhibits based on her research, most recently Journeys West: The David & Peggy Rockefeller American Indian Art Collection for the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine. Currently she is working on a new book co-authored with Harald Prins (From Indian Island to Omaha Beach: The Story of Charles Shay, Penobscot Indian War Hero, 2010) and a series of museum exhibitions based on a two-volume study co-authored with Harald Prins for the National Park Service (Asticou’s Island Domain, 2007). McBride also serves as oral history advisor for the Kansas Humanities Council and as board member and vice president of the Women’s World Summit Foundation, based in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Evolution & Prehistory
Challenge Issue It is a challenge to make sense of who we are. Where did we come from? Why are we so radically different from some animals and so surprisingly similar to others? Why do our bodies look the way they do? How do we explain so many different beliefs, languages, and customs? Why do we act in certain ways? What makes us tick? While some people answer these questions with biological mechanisms and others with social or spiritual explanations, scholars in the discipline of anthropology address them through a holistic, integrated approach. Anthropology considers human culture and biology, in all times and places, as inextricably intertwined, each affecting the other in important ways. This photograph, taken in a specialized maternity clinic in Gujarat, India, provides a case in point. Since commercial surrogacy—the practice of paying a woman to carry another’s fetus to term—was legalized in 2002, wealthy childless parents from all over the globe have traveled to India for this service. Chosen by foreigners because of their healthy drug-free lifestyle and lower fees, Indian women take on extra biological risk to make it possible for others to reproduce their genes. Global politics and local cultural practices interact with the seemingly purely biological process of birth. Understanding humanity in all its biological and cultural variety, past and present, is the fundamental contribution of anthropology. In the era of globalization, this contribution is all the more important. Indeed, the holistic and integrative anthropological perspective has become essential to human survival.
© New York Times/Stephanie Sinclair/VII Network
World History
