- Good afternoon, everybody.
Looks like we have Hilliard, William,
Melissa, Garett,
I think that's it.
My name is Bill Roberts.
I'm a cultural anthropologist.
Geographically, I have done
a lot of work in West Africa
over the years and I'm
serving as the current Chair
of the Anthropology program
at St. Mary's College.
I joined the college in the Fall of 1991,
so I've been here for many years
and really looking forward to sharing some
conversation with you this afternoon
about the Anthropology
program at St. Mary's College
which I think is one of the
best undergraduate programs,
not just in the mid-Atlantic
region, but in the country
because of the opportunities
that you have here.
And it's a great pleasure for me
to introduce my friend and colleague
and the incoming Chair of
the Anthropology program,
Professor Julie King.
Julie, I'll let you go ahead.
I can be like a griot and
say lots of good things,
that's a praise singer,
say lots of great things
about Professor King.
Easy to do, but I'll let her tell
a little bit about herself
and then we'll get started.
- Well, thank you Bill
and thank you guys for joining us today.
I see Melissa, Garett,
William, and Gabriella.
And, as Bill said, my name is Julie King.
I am an anthropologist,
but my specialty has been archeology
although I do a lot of oral
histories and ethnographic work.
And I'm really looking
forward, today with Bill,
telling you more about
what our department does
and then hearing your questions
about what you're interested in
because we might not touch on those
and if we've got something to tell you,
we'd love to tell you.
So thank you all for joining today.
- Right, and just to follow up,
I'm gonna share a screen with you here.
Let's see.
Yeah, there we go.
Let me go ahead and put
this in a bigger thing here.
Hopefully you can see this.
I want to encourage you
that as you have questions,
you can either put it on the chat
and we'll ask Emily to stop us,
but you're welcome to speak up
and either say something or ask.
I titled this slide,
in the Department of Anthropology
we consider ourselves a
Community of Practice.
We learn anthropology
by doing anthropology,
and this is a long
tradition at the college,
experiential learning,
but the idea of a Community of Practice
is something that you might
not be too familiar with.
It actually is a term that
refers to a group of people
that regularly interact with one another,
they share a common passion,
a common love of something
like anthropology,
they learn from one another
and you, again, learn by doing.
So, if you join us at St. Mary's College
and you decide to do some anthropology,
you will get a chance
to do many, many things
and it starts, really, pretty early.
So we're ranked, I think it was last year,
the 6th best undergraduate
program in anthropology
in the nation by a group, schools.com.
And what you see here around the border
are pictures of many of our
students at conferences,
but I want to call your attention
to Professor King in the upper left.
That's a great picture of
her receiving an award,
a gift, on behalf of
the Piscataway people.
Professor King is one of those scholars
who not only recovers, through
archeological excavation,
artifacts, but works with the descendants
of the people who had made those
and used those artifacts today.
So she's working with
Piscataway peoples in Maryland
and Rappahannock peoples in Virginia.
And is really working to bring
the past and the present together
and help people regain
control over their narrative
of their histories and who they are.
It's challenging to get
two professors on a call
because we both have lots of
things that we want to say,
but let me just turn this
over to Professor King
for a minute and see, Julie, just tell me
when you'd like me to go on
to the next slide please,
but if there's anything
you'd like to add here.
- I'd just like to note
that a lot of our work
is actually in Maryland and Virginia
and I'm dying to know where
our guests today are from,
if you are from Maryland or
the middle Atlantic region.
But these images, they
have students in them,
but they also do have the
communities who we work with.
And if you look over in the
bottom left-hand corner,
you can see where students
are actually getting
hands-on experiences with making,
I think in this particular
case they were making cordage,
which is a way to make twine
if you're a Native person
back in the day.
Of course, Native people today live
just like everybody else does.
And you can see the
slides along the bottom,
the Piscataway people in the center.
I assume, Professor Roberts,
that that is from The Gambia,
one of our students teaching
a course in The Gambia?
- That's right, that's
one of the students.
We'll talk a little bit more about
international education opportunities
that you can get through
the Anthropology program,
but we had, for many, many years,
a great program in The Gambia, West Africa
and that's one of the
participants in a classroom
in The Gambia teaching math.
- So one of the things
that I was just gonna say,
we are very engaged.
I mean, we get out in the community.
We're not just textbook anthropologists.
And I think that's where
we separate from the pack
because we are a small school
and we're located in such a historic area
of the country, really,
and I mean that includes
Maryland and part of Virginia.
We have a real opportunity to go out there
and make a difference.
And because we have students
who help make that difference,
we do do that.
So go ahead, Bill,
I'm sure we have lots
of good slides to show.
- So, at the college
we cover all four fields of anthropology.
In American anthropology,
US-American anthropology,
probably the largest field
is cultural anthropology.
I'm a cultural anthropologist.
Professor Iris Ford is a
cultural anthropologist.
Archeology is cultural anthropology,
and Professor King is a
historical archeologist
and an ethnographer and an oral historian.
She's a lot of things.
And the incoming Chair,
I'll just say that one more time.
We also have Professor Liza Gijanto
who's a historical archeologist as well
and has done a lot of work in West Africa,
and some in the Caribbean,
and also works in the mid-Atlantic.
Biological anthropology,
we don't have a biological
anthropologist yet
on staff full-time,
but we have an anthropologist
from Jefferson Patterson Park Museum
who teaches biological
anthropology every Fall.
Nor do we have a linguist, but a colleague
in International Languages
and Cultures is a linguist.
I teach a class, and I'm
teaching a class, actually,
right now in Language and Culture.
So these are the four fields.
We give you a four-field introduction.
We have each of these
courses covered in more depth
at the 200-level.
But where we really excel, I guess,
is in the cultural
anthropology and archeology
and I will just say that
as far as a common theme
in much of the research and
professional development
that we do, we in Anthropology,
fits in with what you might
call Atlantic World Studies
or understanding the Atlantic World.
And I'll let Professor King
tell you a little bit more
about just what that means.
- So the Atlantic World,
some people like that term
and some people don't.
But the Atlantic World,
historians and anthropologists
put it at about 1492
which is an easy date to remember
if you remember what happened in 1492.
It's kind of the beginning
of the modern world.
This idea that people from
Africa and North America
and South America and Europe,
all these people before this time
had grown up in the same village
and knew everybody in their village
and interacted, married, had children,
socialized with people in their village,
that starts to change after 1492
where, all of a sudden,
people start to realize the world is big
and that there are a lot
of people in the world.
And, of course, it has a history
that we are the product of today.
Some good, some bad.
And so we use anthropology
to try to explore
how that history came to be.
How we are today is not
something that just happened
and appeared fully formed,
but it comes out of this
whole Atlantic world
and we have the resources to explore that
through archeology, through
cultural anthropology,
a little bit with linguistics,
and even a little bit with
biological anthropology
when we are working
with archeological sites
that might have cemeteries on them.
So back to you, Professor Roberts.
- Okay.
One of the questions
that a lot of students
and their families,
understandably, consider
or they at least think about
and maybe ask the question,
is what can I do with
an anthropology major.
I think the better question
is what can't you do
with an anthropology major.
Anthropology provides you with
just skills and resources,
or you might think of
them as competencies,
the ability to do things.
You gain a lot of confidence in yourself
and in your abilities coming to a college,
the National Public Honors
College like St. Mary's College.
So what you see here is based on a survey
of our alumni that I conducted
last year, Spring of 2019,
and up until 2007, so
that was 13 years ago,
anthropology and sociology
were in the same department.
It was a combined program.
We both, now, are separate programs.
And so we've had, if you
look between 2010 and 2019,
about 160-some alums
and about a third of them responded.
And so almost one in four and
working in the private sector
of those that responded.
One in ten with the government.
A number of them have gone on
and are actually working now
as archeologists professionally.
And, again, even probably the
largest sector is education,
that we have a lot of
our alums who are working
teaching, coaching, counseling,
but they're working in
the educational sector
or the non-profit sector.
And a growing percentage of our students
are going into work in health.
And I'll just mention this,
that the incoming class next year
will have a chance to
participate in a new inquiry
to fulfill your general
education requirements
called the Public and
Environmental Health Core Inquiry.
And I have been actively working
with a colleague in biology
and other faculty to
set up this opportunity
to fulfill your core requirements
while you're also learning about
public and environmental health,
a topic that certainly has
a lot of current attention.
Professor King, anything you
want to add on this slide?
- I think you did a great job.
- Thanks, I'm gonna go on to the next one.
Professor King, why
don't you take this one.
- So, what you're seeing in the background
is an image of our
students working in a class
called Archeology Practicum.
This goes to our hands-on idea
that we want to give our
students an opportunity
not just to read about
what anthropology is
and what we do, but to do it.
And so the four classes,
or the three classes,
and then the upper-level
independent studies
and directed research
are classes where we expect our students
to get that hands-on experience.
Anthropology Toolkit is really,
it's almost like a incredible buffet
of learning all the different things
that anthropologists do.
Every week, there is
something new to learn about.
You might not become an expert,
but that's your introduction to it.
You can see it's a 200-level class,
so it'd be one of the first classes
if you chose to come to St. Mary's
that you would take and
to really give you a sense
of what anthropologists do.
Same for Archeology Practicum.
And then the Research Methods class
is one that all of our majors take
and you identify a project
and you work on it as a class together.
And there have been some
really interesting projects
that students have done.
Some have involved archeology,
some have involved learning
about diet among our students.
All sorts of really interesting things
that kinda turned upside down
what you think that you know.
And then, finally,
the Directed Research
and Independent Study,
they can be part of your
academic career as well, too.
If there's a topic you want to explore,
but it's not really offered in a class
and so you when you take
an independent study
or directed research,
you pull together the material
that you're going to read,
you get guidance from a faculty mentor,
and it allows you to explore that topic
in a little bit more depth
if that particular topic is
going to appear in a class.
We are a small school.
I mean, that's what
makes us really special
because we are small.
So there are only so many hours in the day
and we try to offer the gamut,
but sometimes there is a little bit
that students will want to
learn about that we don't offer.
So, Bill, I hope that explains what-
- Yeah, I think the only thing, perhaps,
that we would have also included here
would be internships.
So internships, also,
can carry academic credit
and, of course, that's very hands-on
and many of our students do internships
as early, really, as their Sophomore year
and we work with the
Career Development Center
on setting up those internships.
So here just, again, emphasizes
learning through experience.
Different people have
different ways of learning.
Some people are visual learners,
some people are more attuned
to what they hear in learning,
but we all learn by doing
and that's really, I think, the key.
So here, you have one of our
students on the left-hand side
who graduated a couple years back
who is actually in the
Native-American village
at Historic St. Mary's City
and doing some work there,
taking some measurements.
On the right-hand side,
you see one of our current seniors
who's looking at a really
interesting artifact
under a microscope.
We've got an anthropology lab
where a lot of archeology
is done at the college
with some really good tools.
So, I think it's Professor King
who was emphasizing in the previous slide
is that you've got these courses
that build you in the same way,
imagine a scaffold going up a building.
So that scaffolding is your
knowledge and your skills.
You learn how to use the tools.
You learn which tools are best
to answer which kind
of research questions.
And then, eventually, you learn to design
your own research project
and figure out which
tools are gonna help you
answer the research questions
on topics that you're most interested in.
The middle picture is a student
who went to The Gambia
about six years back
and is in the process
of doing a family tree,
a genealogy, in what we call a compound.
This is a residential unit,
multi-family, multi-generational
in The Gambia, West Africa.
Professor King, anything
you want to add to this
or can I just go on?
- You can go on.
- Okay.
Alright, Professor King I'll
let you go with this one
if you don't mind.
- Here we have some of our
distinguished, probably,
now alums who are digging.
I think this looks like
it was in The Gambia.
And they are excavating,
it looks like some of
kind of pit or feature
and then, of course, they'll
screen it for artifacts.
And on the left-hand side of the slide
you can see that we do work in Maryland,
we've done work in The Gambia,
we've done work in Maryland,
Virginia, and also St. Croix.
And I will point out to you
that Historic St. Mary's City
and some of you, if you are Marylanders,
then you may have been here.
I think the fourth- or fifth-graders come,
so you may have been here at one point.
But we have the resources
of Historic St. Mary's City.
They offer a field school.
And also, if you're into Museum Studies,
we have a Museum Studies program
and you can get a lot of
experience over there.
So here they are,
some students excavating some material
probably from a household where
we have little record of who lived there
but the record that we do have
is this artifactual record
and, you know, try to read it
and see what it tells us about the people
who lived in the past.
And by the way, The Gambia,
Maryland, the Caribbean,
these really all pull together
for our Atlantic world focus.
So go ahead, Bill.
- Right, yeah.
I was there when all these alumna.
The two top alumna had both graduated
and both served in the Peace Corps.
The one in the middle is working on
her Masters in Public
Health at Johns Hopkins,
and the one in the lower right-hand side
has worked at a couple of museums
and is working in a position
at a museum in the Chesapeake area now.
So, I think as Professor King mentioned,
anthropology, because
it is such a broad focus
and really was conceived as something
that integrates information,
it takes what we call this
holistic or all-encompassing
trying to put all of the pieces together
to better understand people.
And one of the things that
I had not mentioned yet
but we do have the major in anthropology
but we have a concentration in archeology
because our opportunities for students
to do archeological research
in the area in which we live
is just really lends it to that.
We've got great human resources,
but we've also got a
great geographic context
for archeology.
And so Museum Studies is a
cross-disciplinary studies minor.
And many of our students
that are doing archeology,
pursuing an archeology concentration,
also minor in Museum Studies.
Environmental Studies is a
cross-disciplinary studies major
and a number of students major in both
anthropology and environmental studies
because they compliment
each other so well.
Again, I think one of the great things,
one of the things that
I think is so powerful
about anthropology is
anthropology gives you
both the practical skills,
helps you to develop those social skills
to interact with people,
and the conceptual skills
to interact with people
in a very respectful way
in which you try to understand and value
human cultural diversity,
human linguistic diversity.
And then Women, Gender,
and Sexuality Studies
which is another
cross-disciplinary studies minor.
All of the faculty and the department
are active in these minor
programs or major programs
because they do draw on faculty
from many different disciplines.
Back to you, Professor King.
- We should probably move on.
This is just a group of our
Museum Studies students.
We had a group called
Museum Hack come down,
and Museum Hack takes
a great deal of pride
in upsetting your typical
expected museum experience.
So they were encouraging
our students to do things
like when you go to a museum
and you see a painting,
to reenact that painting,
to engage yourself in a way
as not just a spectator.
And so this happened to be
when Museum Hack was down
and encouraging all sorts of uprising
in the museum community.
It was actually a lot of fun.
- We've mentioned already that
the college is built on a
national historic landmark.
The anthropology program,
which I don't have a
picture of the building,
we're in what is the newest
building at the college.
Great resources as a facility.
Anthropology and Museum
Studies occupy that building
and then right next to us
is the archeology department
for Historic St. Mary's City.
And we have a number of our alums
working in that program
and they do an annual field school.
Their professionals
work as adjunct faculty
as do the professional anthropologists,
most of whom are archeologists
at Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum
which is the state museum of archeology
for the state of Maryland.
On the left, this is one
picture just to highlight
our work in
archeology-descendant communities
that include the Piscataway
and the Rappahannock.
Although the college has closed
its program in The Gambia,
I'm still very active.
I work with colleagues
at University of Maryland
Baltimore Medical School,
and we're still doing work
in The Gambia in West Africa.
And, as I say, we're
establishing a new partnership
with the St. Mary's
County Health Department.
And so anthropology is and our students
will have some opportunities there.
A way of thinking about this
is as a network of partners
and each of these partners
provides opportunities for
our faculty and students
to work together with other professionals.
This goes back to that idea
of a Community of Practice.
You learn by doing.
You learn from the others who
are more experienced than you,
gaining the confidence
that, when the time comes,
you're gonna be able
to do this on your own.
Professor King, anything?
- No, but I'm wondering,
I was just looking at the time
and I wanted to ask, before we move on,
do any of our guests have any questions?
And you can either ask or you
can put the question in chat.
I mean, I'd love to
know more about you all.
Are you all from Maryland?
I see that you're just
as quiet as my students
are on online teaching.
Well let's go ahead forward, Bill.
Maybe we'll hear something
from our colleagues.
- So, I'm not gonna spend
a lot of time on this one
but I've talked about this
just a little bit already.
The Atlantic world is a way
of, again, thinking about
a network of transportation
and human migration
that connected Western Europe
with Africa with the Americas,
and by that I mean South
America, Central America,
North America and the Caribbean.
So we have a field study program,
I think it runs about four weeks,
in St. Croix.
It's led by one of our adjunct faculty
and one of our full-time faculty
and they have a proposal
to lead, take another Study Tour in 2021.
We did close The Gambia program,
but I've led three groups
of students to Senegal
over the last few years,
and that program will run again
and then we have another program
that is being offered for students
taught by one of our adjuncts in Brazil
for the Summer of 2021.
Many of these programs
take place in the Summer
and, again, provide
you with an opportunity
to work in some place that's
outside of the United States
and that's mirrored by opportunities
to study here in the United States
with field schools that we have here.
I think there are, maybe, some,
Julie, are you seeing those-
- I am seeing some chat.
Betsy, Howard County, represent!
And William is asking
about medical anthropology.
Ouu, Bill, you have to tell him about it.
- I'm really glad you asked about that.
We have offered courses
in medical anthropology.
I am studying up on medical anthropology.
I had studied that in graduate school.
And so there will be
opportunities for that
as well, again, as working with
the St. Mary's County
Health Department here.
One of the things, if you're following
and how could you not help but follow it,
but one of the things that's going on now
is, of course, the contract tracing
as part of the mitigation.
That's something that
certainly lends itself
to ethnographic methodology.
So that's a growing area.
That's probably one of
the fastest-growing areas
in cultural anthropology
and something that we're building up.
Julie, I'll turn this over to you
for the archeological field schools.
- Okay, so one of the things
if you are interested in
a career in archeology
and even if you aren't,
it's a great way to learn
how to do data collection
as an anthropologist,
just a different form of data.
And you can see on the right-hand side,
some of our students.
At the top, they were surveying
what looks like a quarry site.
That's actually in Price George's
County at Piscataway Park.
The middle slide is Historic
St. Mary's City's Field School
and the bottom slide in a
Rappahannock Indian House.
A lot of people think
Indians are no longer around
but that's so not true.
And this is actually a late-1800s
Rappahannock Indian House
that the students in my
Native-American History
and Culture class, we recorded it
with some members of the Rappahannock.
You can see in the text
that we have these field schools.
There's one that we are just starting,
it was supposed to start this Summer
but, of course, you know
everybody's plans are off
today, or this year, at least.
So next year will be
National Science Foundation
Colonial Maryland Field School,
especially for people
from under-represented
communities and schools.
Historic St. Mary's City
which is the museum on
top of the settlement,
the first European settlement.
And then the Archeological Survey Course
which takes students out
into the greater community
and tries to identify
archeological sites, and buildings
like you see down on the
lower right-hand side.
So, there you go.
- Alright.
So, in addition to doing research,
our students also present their research.
And so we have department
resources that support students.
Going to here, on the lower left-
- [Emily] Dr. Roberts?
- [Professor Roberts] Yes?
- [Emily] We have just
a few minutes remaining,
so if you want to put any
final remarks in there.
I don't want to have to cut you off short,
but I want to make sure you're
able to get in what you want.
We have about just a few
minutes remaining, okay?
- Alright, thanks.
So I'll just go.
Anyway, we had our students go
to graduate student conferences,
they go to the mid-Atlantic
archeological conferences
where they've done very well.
The American Anthropological Association,
Society for Applied Anthropology,
on average, we've averaged
about seven to eight students
presenting at professional
conferences a year,
I'd say, over the last
three or four years.
We have an Anthropology Club
as well as the Lambda Alpha
National Anthropology Honors Society.
That's the club working on,
I think they're doing some mapping,
making some stone tools in the back.
And that's open to more than
just anthropology students.
These are just some examples
of what our alums are doing.
Maddie Roth is working for
the National Oceanographic
and Atmospheric Association.
She graduated in '13, does
underwater archeology.
Ben Baker is a social worker.
Beth Macinka graduated 10 years ago,
she's out West doing
environmental education.
And Sarah Platt, in the
upper right--hand side,
is working on her PhD from Syracuse.
Everybody ends up with a capstone project.
In two weeks time, we are going to be
having our students present
their capstone projects.
If any of you are interested
in watching some of
those student projects,
please contact the admissions
office at the college
and we will make arrangements to admit you
so you can see the kind of work
that our seniors are capable of doing.
And now we have time for questions.
Julie, Professor King,
I am sorry that I didn't give you time.
I was just trying to
respond to the fact that,
as is often the case, professors talk and-
- Don't worry.
Let's hear, how 'bout our guests?
Do you all have any questions for us?
You can chat or ask out loud.
- [Gabriella] Hi, can you guys hear me?
- Yeah.
- Yes.
- Hi, I'm Gabriella.
I'm from Montgomery County,
but I actually had a
question about internships.
I was wondering if you
could give me some examples,
'cause that sounds really interesting,
of some internships that
some students have done
or been a part of.
- What did I do?
Did I stop sharing?
Yeah, so we have students
that are doing internships,
anthropology students.
I told you about the Museum Studies minor,
and they actually receive funding
to pursue internships
through the Sullivan Scholars
and they work with different museums.
We've had students working at Smithsonian,
students working locally at
Historic St. Mary's City Museum.
So a lot of students have
done work in museums.
We've had students that have
done internships abroad.
We had a student working
in Senegal last Summer
working with an organization
that was teaching American English.
Julie, can you think of some internships
that you might want to mention?
- I mean, really, it's wide open.
If you can find a place
that you would like to intern at
and something can be worked out,
I mean, we have sent
students to the Smithsonian.
I've had interns.
I mean, the places that
Professor Roberts has mentioned.
Really, the sky is the limit.
And these are credit-bearing internships.
In a few cases, they might
also come with a stipend.
They're really great for
giving you that experience
out in the real word and, in fact,
if you complete an internship
you get what's called ELAW credit,
Experiencing Liberal Arts in the World.
You can get that credit
in other ways, too,
but one of the ways is
through these internships
where you really go out
and you are modeling what it's like
to be out in the real world.
Did you have any ideas?
What are your interests?
- So, Gabriella, just to
piggyback off of that,
I receive, as Department Chair,
Professor King will get the same thing,
announcements about internships,
and I just forward those
to a distribution list
of anthropology majors and minors.
But we also have the
Career Development Center,
and so we work together with them
so that students have some direction
with regard to identifying
internships and field schools
and other kinds of
experiential opportunities.
I hope that answers your question.
- [Gabriella] Yes it does, thank you.
- Oh, you're welcome.
By the way, I really
like the name Gabriella.
My youngest son's named Gabriel, so.
Any other questions?
Well, I mean, I hope that you all
have enjoyed the time
that we've spent together.
Professor King and I, as you could see,
we could talk quite a bit about this.
The other thing that
I'd like to just mention
is that if any of you would like to talk
with a current anthropology major,
please let the admissions office know
or contact myself or
Professor King directly
and we will set you up
so that you can hear it from
the student's perspective.
Not just from us, but
hear it from your peers
who are a little bit older than you.
Emily, I think we're probably,
thank you all very much for coming today.
Really enjoyed talking with you
and hope to see you here next year.
Emily, we're gonna put this back to you.
- Alright, well thank you all very much.
I hope you enjoyed this.
I hope it was very informative for you.
That is all that we have for you.
Again, if you have any questions,
please email myself or the
anthropology professors
and we will be happy to help you out.
Enjoy the rest of your day and your week.
- Bye.
