Faculty Teaching About Culture
Anthropology Faculty
Lynn Walter
Chair and Professor of Anthropology and Social Change and Development
Cultural anthropology and women’s studies. Teaches Family, Kin and Community and Varieties of World Culture in anthropology; Women, Race and Culture in women’s studies and the Social Change and Development area course on Denmark. Editor of Women’s Rights: A Global View (2000), and author of Ethnicity, Economy and the State in Ecuador (1981), and articles on indigenous communities in Ecuador, women’s concerns in Denmark, and feminist anthropology. Edited a six-volume series Women’s Issues Worldwide (2003), as well as writing and publishing articles about women and welfare, and the implied contradictions between being a culturally relativistic anthropologist and a politically concerned feminist. Significant international experiences in Denmark and Ecuador. (walterl@uwgb.edu, MAC B308, 465-2474)
Jaida Kim Samudra
Assistant Professor of Anthropology – Research Interests: patients’ articulations of illness/healing experiences; social and health issues arising from biological determinism; ethics training and ideology in sports; and peaceful association in pluralist societies. Study areas include Southeast and East Asia, with particular expertise in Indonesian cultures and Chinese diaspora. University of California Berkeley with a B.A. in Linguistics. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Teaches World Cultures, Medical Anthropology, Political Economy and Ecology. (samudraj@uwgb.edu, 465-2361)
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Human Development Teaches Cross Cultural Human Development, Myth, Symbol, Ritual and Religion, Introduction to Human Development, Middle Childhood & Adolescence, and Human Sexuality, Trained as a psychological anthropologist, but with grounding in political economy, she does research with Mexican teens in the US and in Mexico, and is interested in issues of immigration, education and identity. Dr. White offers students opportunities to be involved with various cultural communities in Wisconsin and to assist her with qualitative fieldwork. ( whiteji@uwgb.edu, MAC C315, 465-2569)
Karen Dalke
Lecturer of Anthropology and Social Change and Development Teaches Intro to Sociology, Varieties of World Culture, Medical Anthropology, Myth, Ritual, Symbol, and Religion, and Environmental, Political and Economic Anthropology. Currently completing research on gangs in the Fox Valley. Interested in globalization and its impact on culture, human-animal interactions cross-culturally, and subcultures. Completed dissertation entitled Real and the Imagined: An Ethnographic Analysis of the Wild Horse in the American Landscape focuses on what the wild horse symbolizes to American culture. ( dalkek@uwgb.edu, MAC B307, 465-2486)
Janet Speth
Instructor of Anthropology Teaches Introduction to Prehistoric Archaeology. My research interests center on Wisconsin archeology. Right now I am working on the use of freshwater mussels in northeastern Wisconsin, Late Woodland ceramics from the west side of Green Bay, a project for the Town of Scott which builds on my earlier research on Red Banks, and a site excavated this summer in Trempealeau County under the direction of Dr. Thomas Pleger of UW Colleges. Other research interests include the use of birds at archeological sites and fossil avifauna in general. ( spethj@uwgb.edu, MAC B327, 465-2979)
Jim White
Instructor of Anthropology Archaeological anthropology. Teaches Varieties of World Culture. Involved in cultural resource management projects around the Midwest prior to completing doctoral dissertation fieldwork in the desert of Nuevo Leon, Mexico. Research focus in Mexico and in Wisconsin is upon the early hunter-gatherers of the New World, particularly the earliest Americans who arrived on the continent more than 12,000 years ago. Generally interested in questions of major culture change such as the First Americans, but also including the development of agriculture and transformations into state-level political complexity. Also fascinated by the philosophical aspects of human cultures, particularly the role religion plays in human lives. (whitej@uwgb.edu, MAC B319, 465-2790)