1.1 Introduction

Vanessa’s Story

I am Latin@/x/e from a working class military family.  I was raised with the belief that education was the great “equalizer”, i.e. as long as you had an education you would be successful.  I was raised with a family that loved me y con un orgullo de ser Boricua. I am someone who wants to leave the world better than I found it.  Who I am helps to explain my motivation for creating open access educational resources and centering equity and students in my teaching.  I want students to access anthropology in various ways knowing what they learn can help them to be change makers in their own communities.  I want my anthropology class to be memorable in the best ways.

In my second year of college, I took my first anthropology class, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology taught by Dr. Sabine Hyland, an American anthropologist and ethnohistorian working in the Andes. It was challenging and exciting, and she was the first real academic mentor I ever had. Her research and teaching style allowed me to engage with topics and questions that I loved inside the college classroom. I wanted to know about our global world, the ways in which humans were similar and different, and I wanted to better understand why humans developed and changed the ways that we have.  The way she taught brought you into the stories and research of the communities she highlighted, giving a rich understanding of our

diverse world. I found that with anthropology, a discipline devoted to better understanding of humanity as a whole, I could investigate questions that I was curious about and develop solutions to real world problems by centering humanity as cooperative and creative. A class really can change the trajectory of your life. This class did. I fell in love with anthropology and wanted to merge it with my interest in health and wellbeing. It was this class, and this professor, that made me see that there were many options for careers, and that medical anthropology could be my path. Years later, while working on my PhD in medical anthropology, I even wrote a recommendation letter for Dr. Hyland to receive tenure, which she did. One class and one mentor can make a difference in the trajectory of your life.

Demetri’s Story

I come from a Greek immigrant family, with both of my parents having moved to the United States from Greece in the 1970s coming from small agricultural villages. I was born in New York City and was lucky to grow up in the incredibly diverse immigrant community of Flushing, Queens. I was always surrounded by friends, neighbors, and community members, who although may have come from very different places in the world, shared this first-generation experience with me. We learned from one-another, experienced each other’s cultures, and developed a shared sense of appreciation that prepared me for a career in anthropology before I even knew what the word meant. I have always been deeply influenced by the values and work ethic my parents brought from their homeland. Education was highly valued in our household; my parents hoped I would pursue a prestigious career as a doctor or lawyer, reflecting the perceptions they held from growing up in their respective villages. Despite these hopes, they gave me all the support they could to choose my own path even if they did not understand it, and I have always been grateful to them for that. At times, it can be difficult for first generation students whose families lived experience does not include the pursuit of academics. Certainly, for me, there was a lot of learning on my own, and even more mistakes made, being the first in my family to graduate from high school, attend college, and complete graduate school.

When I did come to the field of anthropology it was completely by accident. I entered college at Stony Brook University in New York as a biology major and was considering a pre-med pathway.  When I first met my R.A. during freshman orientation, I mentioned needing an elective course. He suggested taking cultural anthropology as the course would be fun and the professor was “a character”. Admittedly at the time, I had very little idea of what anthropology was, but the course description sounded interesting so I registered for it. This ended up being the very first college course I attended on the first day of my life as a college student. The professor, William Arens, was indeed eccentric. Although his somewhat controversial research on cannibalism (or lack thereof) in human societies has been met with almost universal criticism, he was one of the most vibrant and engaging professors I had as an undergraduate. The topics he discussed and the people he introduced us to were eye-opening. The way he casually discussed taboo topics and his use of narrative in the classroom really brought culture to life. Before I knew it, I was taking more anthropology courses on various topics, including: the anthropology of food, medical anthropology, physical anthropology, and many others.

When I took my first Archaeology course, and subsequently my archaeological field school in Pompeii, Italy, I knew I wanted to become an archaeologist. Being able to connect with past cultures through their material remains is the closest human beings can get to a time machine. Once I felt that connection, I was in love. I have to admit, explaining what Anthropology was to my parents when switching focus from a pre-med track was a challenge. My father’s first reaction to pictures of me digging in Turkey was, jokingly; ‘Λοιπόν, φύγαμε από την Ελλάδα για να μην σκάβουμε στα χωράφια, και εδώ εσυ σκάβεις στα χωράφια’ (Well, we left Greece so we wouldn’t have to toil in the fields and here you are toiling in the fields…).

Luckily for me, I was able to combine my training in biology with my interest in archaeology, through the interpretation of animal remains, leading to my doctoral research in zooarchaeology. I was also blessed to be taken under the wing of my undergraduate advisor, and one of the greatest archaeologists I have ever known, Elizabeth Stone of Stony Brook University. She would also eventually become one of my advisors for my doctoral thesis and I would join her for over a decade of work in Turkey and Iraq.