Four Field Symposium
The Department of Anthropology will host its annual Four Field Symposium on Friday, Oct. 30, 2026, from 1 to 4 p.m. in the Michigan Union Pendleton Room (second floor). Titled “The Work of Death,” the symposium will gather our four anthropology subfields for speaker presentations and discussion that bring multiple scholarly perspectives to bear on death and dying — universal human experiences with profound cultural, biological, social, and linguistic dimensions. Join us to explore death-related themes through time and across human societies.
Speakers
Archaeology: Assistant Professor Tiffany Fryer
Biological Anthropology: Professor Beverly Strassmann
Linguistic Anthropology: Professor Alaina Lemon
Sociocultural Anthropology: Associate Professor Scott Stonington
Reception to follow. This event is free and open to the public; please register to attend. If you need accommodations in order to attend, please email anthro.exec.secretary@umich.edu.
Tiffany Fryer
Tiffany C. Fryer is a U-M assistant professor of anthropology and an assistant curator of historical and contemporary archaeology and ethnology at UMMAA. She is also a co-founder of the Center for Community Archaeology & Heritage, a new joint venture between UMMAA and the Kelsey Museum. Her research is focused on three interconnected areas of interest: political violence and colonialism; cultural heritage, collective memory, and materiality; and historical archaeologies focused on the intersections of race, indigeneity, and gender. Fryer is currently co-leading field projects in Quintana Roo, Mexico, and Ypsilanti, Mich., both of which explore questions of race and violence in their respective contexts, and which center community-based research practices.
Unequal Even in Death: The Ongoing Journey to Reclaim and Restore a Black Cemetery in Ypsilanti, MI
Michigan during the early and mid-20th century saw a massive influx of Black folks fleeing the racial oppressions of the Jim Crow South. As southeast Michigan’s Black community grew, so too did the realization that the North was not the beacon of equality it purported to be. While formal discrimination laws tended to be absent from the books, de facto segregation practices were rampant. Death was not a haven from such practices. Rather, death and dying were key sites of racial discrimination in southeast Michigan that have left an enduring impact on descendent communities throughout the region. In this talk, I present the work of a recently launched, volunteer community effort to reclaim a Black cemetery in Ypsilanti, MI which after its founding in 1946 worked for the next two decades to provide a dignified burial place for the Black residents of Washtenaw County in a moment when they were often systematically barred from other options. The Woodlawn Cemetery Restoration Project seeks to document, protect, and restore this important burial ground, honoring its role as the only documented Black cemetery in Washtenaw County and the service it provided to Ypsilanti’s Black community members at a time when even death was insufficient to protect them from the injustices of local segregation practices.
Alaina Lemon
Alaina Lemon is a linguistic, sociocultural, and historical anthropologist. Her publications and film work, based on field and archival research in Russia and the Romani diaspora, contrast interactions in stage rehearsals, acting classes, sound studios, and on film sets with encounters in the markets, on the Metro, at kitchen tables, and around TVs. Much of this work focuses on divisions of access to communicative channels, and the ways those divisions shape knowledge and authority. With a focus on struggles over meta-communicative expertise and on fears and fantasies around the powers of communication to traverse social, temporal and spatial distances, her research traces seemingly minor threads of interaction through institutions and infrastructures and across borders.
Dead Channels
Contradictions cluster around “dead” channels. People animate channels with spirits and vibrations while de-animating many who labor to build or operate channels. We expect to resurrect a broken radio but declare entire living demographics impossible to engage. We associate channel breakdown with fatality, yet Cosmonauts and Astronauts are famously depicted as surviving not merely by resuscitating channels, but by interrupting their command chains. Kin channels are rendered dead ends, blanks in patrilineal records even as matrilineal connections perdure through families discounted as “broken.” These varied contradictions are partly afforded by channels’ peculiar assemblages: they link sentients with materials by which the former attend to each other. Channel death then is not wholly metaphoric, it can signal death of sentient parts and loss of relations, not just mechanical break-down. The semiotic affordances of channel assemblages, however, do not generate all the contradictions. To explore what does, this presentation engages anthropological discussions of political and social struggles to access and invigorate, or restrict and kill not only our own channels, but those of others.
Beverly Strassmann
Beverly Strassmann is a biological anthropologist who has conducted fieldwork among the Dogon of Mali since 1984. Her primary research design is a longitudinal cohort study that tracks the health of two generations of people from infancy and early childhood to adulthood. By studying epigenetic inheritance via genes in the placenta, she seeks to identify novel mechanisms that transmit adverse phenotypes from mothers to offspring in utero. Her research is guided by life history theory and human behavioral ecology, and emphasizes the ways in which culture often builds upon biology.
Death by Sibling Competition
Although family members are often close genetic relatives, they can also be major competitors for scarce resources. In research on the Dogon of Mali, I found that children were two times more likely to die if the paternal grandmother was alive. Elderly grandmothers were, on balance, net consumers rather than producers of resources. I also found that women faced a tradeoff between the number of offspring born and the number successfully reared. My talk will shed light on this finding by using longitudinal data on the survival of 5321 maternal siblings born to 837 mothers. The statistical methodology is proportional hazards regression, which made it possible to estimate the effect of sibling competition on offspring mortality. The results show that if a child had one additional younger maternal sibling, their hazard of death by age 5 years increased by 68% (P < 0.0001). As the number of older siblings increased by one, the hazard of death increased by 13% (P < 0.0001). Overall, relationships among siblings were competitive rather than cooperative.
Scott Stonington
Scott Stonington is a medical and cultural anthropologist and an internal medicine physician. His research addresses the globalization of biomedical ethics and expertise, including end-of-life decision-making in Thailand, and global debates over the use of opiates for pain management. Stonington accompanied patients in Northern Thailand as they navigated severe pain within a fraught ethical environment, from Thailand’s brutal drug war, to the Buddhist-based value for pain as a spiritual path, to a broader global ambivalence about how best to treat pain. His secondary research agenda addresses medical epistemology in the U.S., specifically how health practitioners decide what constitutes true and/or useful knowledge and how this affects patients.
Primed Conjuncture: How the Phenomenology of Pain Entangles the Work of Death in Thailand
Using Thailand as a case study, I combine theories of political conjuncture with theories of phenomenological linkage to understand why the politics of pain and death seem entangled everywhere but highly variable in specific manifestation. In Thailand in the 1990s, globalizing biomedical ideologies combined with Buddhist spiritual practices into a movement to find enlightenment by facing death. The 2000s brought a countermovement claiming that focusing on death without relieving symptoms was inhumane and anti-Buddhist, and that pain should be treated with opioids despite deep opioid stigma. This debate revealed opposing but entangled metaphors of death as brimming with inspiration and pain as morally dangerous. Out of this, cancer emerged as a détente, so forcefully entity-like that it justified both a facing and treatment without reservation. This “cancer exceptionalism” was the result of and solution to a “primed conjuncture” between death and pain – a political entanglement made by phenomenological linkage, but variable in its political manifestation.
