Fall 2009
In October 2009, Prof. Murphy Halliburton's book, Mudpacks and Prozac: Experiencing Ayurvedic, Biomedical, and Religious Healing, an ethngraphic study of healing in India, was published by Left Coast Press. This book tells about people seeking psychiatric healing choose from an almost dizzying array of therapies-from the medicated mudpacks of Ayurveda, to the pharmacopeia of Western biomedicine, to the spiritual pathways of the world's religions. How do we choose, what do the treatments offer, and how do they cure? In Mudpacks and Prozac, Murphy Halliburton investigates the very different ways in which Western, Ayurvedic, and religious (Christian, Muslim, and Hindu) healing systems define psychiatric problems and cures. He describes people's embodied experiences of therapies that range from soothing to frightening, and explores how enduring pleasure or pain affects healing. And through evocative portraits of patients in Kerala, India-a place of incredible cultural diversity that has become a Mecca for alternative medicine-Halliburton shows how sociopolitical changes around the globe may be limiting the ways in which people seek and experience health care, with negative effects on our quality of health and quality of life.

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John Collins' "A razão barroca do patrimônio baiano: Contos de tesouro e histórias de ossadas no Centro Histórico de Salvador," ["Bahian Patrimony's Baroque Reason: Treasure Tales and Skeletal Histories in Salvador's Historical Center,"] has appeared in the Revista de Antropologia, 51(1): 29-73. Revista de Antropologia is one of Latin America's leading social scientific journals and Professor Collins' article was also presented at the First Annual Annual Brazilian-U.S. Anthropological Conference, University of São Paulo, Summmer 2008.

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Omri Elisha (Ph.D. NYU 2005) has joined the Department of Anthropology as an Assistant Professor starting Fall 2009. Omri Elisha is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include anthropology of religion, Evangelicalism/Christianity, urban anthropology, and North American ethnography.
In the fall of 2009 Professor Elisha was awarded the eighth annual Cultural Horizons Prize by Society for Cultural Anthropology for his article "Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism" published in Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1 (February 2008): 154-189.

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Tom Plummer's paper entitled "Oldest Evidence of Toolmaking Hominins in a Grassland-Dominated Ecosystem" has been published in September issue of PLoS ONE.In this paper Dr. Plummer and his colleagues demonstrate that grassland-dominated ecosystems did in fact exist during the Plio-Pleistocene, and that early Homo was active in open settings. Comparison with other Oldowan occurrences indicates that by 2.0 Ma hominins, almost certainly of the genus Homo, used a broad spectrum of habitats in East Africa, from open grassland to riparian forest. This strongly contrasts with the habitat usage of Australopithecus, and may signal an important shift in hominin landscape usage.
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Doreen Schmitt received a Presidential Adjunct Teaching Award this year.

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Timothy Pugh received a grant from the National Science Foundation supporting archaeological research at the site of Tayasal in Petén, Guatemala. His article Contagion and Alterity: Kowoj Maya Appropriations of European Objects appeared in American Anthropologist. He co-edited the book Maya Worldview at Conquest in which he wrote the Preface and a chapter entitled Maya Sacred Landscapes at Contact. His review of Sanctuaries of Earth, Stone, and Light: The Churches of Northern New Spain,1530–1821 appeared in Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.

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Jim Moore presented a paper "Too Much History for This Present: The Construction of Cultural Heritage" at Long Island Archaeology: A Public Symposium on Recent Research on September 26, 2009, 1-5pm in 301 Wang Center, Stony Brook University.

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On October 9, 2009, Kate Pechenkina spoke at Harvard University East Asian Archaeology Seminar about "Life in the Early Farming Communities of Northern China."

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Article by Professor Kevin Birth "Time and the Biological Consequences of Globalization" has been selected as an Honorable Mention for the 2009 General Anthropology Division Award for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship.

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On September 12 Timothy Pugh spoke at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology about “Spanish Things in Maya Worlds: the Archaeology of First Contact”. In July, he presented a paper Cosas Europeas en el Mundo Maya del Periodo Contacto at the XXIII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueologías en Guatemala. Dr. Pugh is now the director of Proyecto Arqueológico Tayasal.

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