Associate Professor of Anthropology Ann M. Kakaliouras has received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Mid-Career Fellowship entitled "Thinking the Humanities in the 21st Century" at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University for the 2015-2016 academic year.
According to Yale University, the fellowship is directed toward faculty at four-year liberal arts colleges who have received tenure within the last five years. It will welcome three outstanding scholars in each of the academic years 2015–2018 to the Whitney Humanities Center, where they will pursue research programs in any area of the humanities and related fields and enter into intellectual exchanges with faculty, fellows, and other visitors to the Center.
While in residence at Yale, Dr. Kakaliouras will draft the bulk of her current book project: People in Pieces: The Making of Anthropology's "American Indian." In People in Pieces, Kakaliouras examines how scientific anthropology fragmented Native American people to create its own form of disciplinary knowledge. Physical anthropology did not just study, collect, and objectify Indians; rather, the field discursively created its own Indian, using the category to gain authority as a nomothetic science.
The project traces the rise of five distinct methodologies in 20th century physical anthropology: anthropometry, archeology, blood group analysis, craniometry, and genetics. In each chapter, Kakaliouras demonstrates how physical anthropologists constructed a different kind of Indian depending on the bodily material on which they focused, an Indian they then promoted as more authentic than living Native American people. She shows how the increasingly reductive methods scientists employed nevertheless produced generalized and lasting cultural impressions for scholars and laypeople alike of entire American Indian peoples.
Part history of anthropology, part science studies, and part cultural analysis, People in Pieces neither valorizes nor rejects science, but shows how a particular scientific field accomplished powerful cultural work in the 20th century.
