Where are you from, and how did you become interested in anthropology?
I was born in England. I moved to the U.S. when I was 7, to Massachusetts, [where] I did all my schooling. For most of my life, I was sure that I wanted to be a pediatrician. I love kids, and I was a babysitter a lot in high school and a bit in college.
Did you go to Harvard thinking you were going to be a pediatrician?
I did. I did my premed requirements, but somebody recommended I take this famous undergrad class, colloquially called “Sex,” taught by Professor Irven DeVore, a famous primatologist and anthropologist. He was an amazing lecturer, and I kind of fell in love with anthropology and primates. So, it was an inspiring teacher who switched me from the premed track to anthropology.
How would you describe your research focus?
I’m a primatologist, but I’m a bit unusual in that I’m not especially interested in studying the behavior of primates. I’m more interested in ecological questions about how primates interact with their environments. I have a strong interest in the conservation of primates and tropical forests, and I think the questions most relevant for conservation are ecological questions.
For 20 years, I had a long-term project in southwestern Borneo. About five years ago, I stopped that project, [which] coincided with COVID, but I was also getting more interested in work more directly applicable to conservation. I think the future of conservation, at least in Indonesia, is outside of protected areas, because even if we protected every orangutan in every protected area, that’s not enough to ensure that they’ll not go extinct. We have to also be doing conservation outside protected areas. That’s entailed me traveling more around Borneo and other parts of Indonesia.
I’m also interested in capacity building. [During] the last five years of that long-term project, we ran Indonesian-language field courses for national park managers and conservationists. They got pretty popular; we had people coming from all over Borneo. My collaborator Endro Setiawan and I felt there was clearly an unmet need, so we’ve been taking our show on the road, going to national parks and doing standard training courses or whatever the parks need. We usually do a couple of training courses per year. We’ve led courses at most major protected areas in Kalimantan and others in Java and Maluku. A few summers ago, we spent a month traveling overland across Java, visiting six national parks and doing training in each of them. We focus on field botany, ecology, primates, computer programming, and statistical analysis, but we have also helped with projects on dugongs and rhinos.
What’s your pitch for anthropology as a major?
I think anthropologists try to understand people in a different way than any other discipline. Anthropology highlights the wonderful cultural diversity of peoples, but also their fundamental similarities. When it’s done well and in an integrative way, I don’t think there are other fields that pull on so many different strands to create such a complete understanding of people. Some fields focus only on our biology, or health, or how our bodies work. Others focus on institutions or beliefs, and others on history. But anthropology tries to pull all of those together. As a holistic department, I think that’s unusual. We have people using studies of wild primates and genetics to try to understand people, and people studying language and culture and the human past, all with different specific goals, but all shedding light on what it is to be human and why we came to be the way we are.
What is your favorite course to teach?
ANTHRBIO 463. It’s about statistical modeling and data visualization using the R programming language. I love programming and data visualization, so to share that with people is fun. [We also consider] philosophical issues like what counts as evidence and how to best assess the validity of claims. It started as a seminar with eight grad students, and now we’re up to 90 students with three GSIs. Students say it changes how they think about data analysis and evidence and leads them to question things they never questioned before, and that’s rewarding.
Is there a perspective shift with the transition from professor to professor and chair?
It is different, focusing on the whole department and not just my own discipline. [I’m] thinking about how we can maintain our strength, train our students, and make people feel welcome, supported, and able to do their best work. It’s not that I never cared about those things before, but now it’s my job to try to foster an environment in which that happens. I’m lucky to have taken over the department in a good situation, but there are always things to do to keep it on the right track.
I don’t spend as much time thinking about research as before, but it’s been interesting learning more about how the university works and why certain decisions are made. Each time I take a step toward more responsibility, I look back at choices made by leaders that I was skeptical of or questioned and now understand why they made the decisions they made. Once you’re in a leadership role, you understand better the things people have to weigh when they make decisions.
You will serve as chair for the next five years. What hopes or goals do you have for the department during that time?
To maintain the strength of our research and teaching, to support our students and faculty and help them be the best they can be, to continue advocating for the department to the administration and explaining why anthropology is important, and in general to be part of the solution.
This is a challenging time to be in academia and to be an anthropologist in particular. Nearly all the funding sources for fieldwork — which anthropologists need to do — have gone away, and we’re getting increasing pressure from the university to speed up time to degree while students don’t have access to the funds they had before for fieldwork. Trying to think creatively about what we can do to counteract those headwinds and ensure people have a positive experience and are able to do good research, I think that’s my primary goal in the short to medium term. The situation is difficult for everybody, but graduate students are especially hard hit, and I would like to make a positive impact by helping to address those complexities.
What advice do you have for students?
To take seriously the need to take care of themselves. You’re here to do degrees, learn, conduct research, and teach — all exciting things, and it’s a privilege to be able to do them. But it’s also easy, when you’re a driven person who has been good at school your whole life, to have that completely take over, and people lose balance. Taking care of your whole self, your health, and your well-being is important, as is encouraging a culture where these things are understood to be important.
A more concrete thing I would suggest: the further along you get in your career, the harder it is to begin systems that make your life easier. I’m thinking about specific things like a citation manager, how you manage your calendar, and how you take notes — concrete systems that seem boring but are ultimately quite important. Creating good habits means that we can do a better job of living in a way that accords with our goals. For example, I block almost all my time on my calendar. Before I say yes to anything, I find a time on my calendar when I’m actually going to do that thing. Otherwise, it’s really easy to get in over your head. Like everyone, I have positive illusions about how much time certain things will take, but establishing good systems helps me keep my head above water, at least most of the time.
What is a question or topic in your field that you’re thinking about a lot these days?
Applied ones related to conservation, increasingly: how to take seriously the needs of disadvantaged people in the places where we work while at the same time working to protect the things we care about, like primates and forests. Right now, Borneo is literally burning. How do we protect forests in ways that support the livelihoods of people who have every right to use their natural resources but also meet our conservation objectives?
It’s easy to sit on the other side of the world and see people setting fire to the forest, hunting endangered species, or cutting down trees in national parks, and feel that they are the problem. But my experience living and working in Indonesia is that many of us would make the same decisions; people need money for school uniforms for their kids and medicine for their parents. They’re making rational decisions that we would make in their shoes. But allowing the environment to be totally destroyed is not in their long-term interests, either. That struggle is a complexity I think about a lot. People are almost always the problem when it comes to conservation, and they have to be part of the solution, too.
I’ve heard anthropology described as a nonjudgmental approach to human behavior, maybe more so than other ways of examining an issue. Would you agree?
Yes, I think that’s right. My opinions on that have changed a lot. I now spend time helping logging companies and oil palm plantation holders trying to do conservation on their lands. More of them than one might think want to go beyond mere compliance because they care and want to make positive impacts. When I was a long-haired, tree-hugging grad student, I never would have imagined sitting with logging companies to talk about conservation or spending days in an oil palm concession trying to figure out how to put in a corridor so orangutans can move through it. Back then, I saw such companies as the enemy and viewed their existence as antithetical to conservation. But if we don’t engage with those companies, they’re not going to go away — we just won’t have a seat at the table and will lose the opportunity to contribute positively.
Of course, I wish Borneo was largely covered in forest, as it was when I first arrived 30 years ago. The loss of so much wildness and beauty is heartbreaking. But I believe Indonesia has the right to develop their natural resources as we did. So, now I’m more understanding of the complexity of these issues and the need to engage with stakeholders that I might once not have been willing to talk to.
What are your interests outside of work?
I love riding my gravel bike and building with Lego with my son. I have a lot of guitars that I don’t play nearly as much as I would like to. I played in a metal band all through college. I also love camping and hiking with my family.
WHAT ARE YOU ...
...Reading? Two or three books: one the university gave me when I became chair about academic leadership and administration. I am also reading World Within: A Borneo Story, which is about the Kelabit people who lived in the remote interior of Sarawak (Malaysian Borneo) during World War II, told through the eyes of a young British soldier who parachutted in to organize local resistance against the Japanese occupation. I just finished The Light Eaters, which is about plants. (I did a two-year postdoc in botany, and I’m kind of a closeted botanist.) I also just finished The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, about lions in East Africa. I really like books about exploration. I went through a polar explorer phase. I’ve been reading about the tropics lately, but I love early expeditions, that kind of thing. And spy novels.
...Watching? We just finished a new show called Widow’s Bay and are now loving the latest season of Slow Horses. Whenever I can, I watch the New England Patriots, my football team. And with our son, we’ve just started the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the second time.
...Listening to? When I’m working, I listen an inordinately frequent number of times to the Monument Valley video game soundtracks, and sometimes jazz. But normally, I listen to podcasts: a Patriots football podcast, Ezra Klein, the Slate Political Gabfest. I just finished bingeing Against the Odds: True Stories of Survival. And with the election coming up, I have been listening to Nate Silver’s new politics podcast.
Read Andrew Marshall’s bio.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
