The Big Easy, Kin in the Making, and Bisons at Fermilab

I was recently greeted by three young, friendly faces in the elevator. The chattiest of them compliments my outfit, to which I reply, “Ohhhhh, thank you!” Following my response, she asked the question I’ve heard most over the past six months, “Where do you come from?” I say, “Slovenia.” An unexpected response followed, “Oh, really? Your ‘ohhhhh’ sounded very midwestern.” I laughed musing over the idea that my English may have been mid-westernized in these short months in Chicago. However, my friendly observer’s “sample size” comprised only three spoken words.

A few days earlier, in Michigan, I received a variation of the same question: “Do you speak another language?” What a polite question to ask, I thought. Nevertheless, the remarkable encounter in the elevator during the SAA Annual Meeting 2024 remains memorable, and the Midwest—as I have experienced it—is a friendly, caring, and people-centric environment.

The Midwest is very different from the Big Apple or the Big Easy, also known as NOLA or New Orleans in Louisiana, where the SAA 2024 Annual Meeting took place. The Big Easy is a melting point of everything: languages, music, food, architecture, landscape design, you name it. It is a hotbed of creole languages, specifically the French-based Louisiana Creole vernacular language spoken by Cajuns. Slightly more than a decade ago, I was also enrolled in a Creole, European joint MA degree in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna. However, the MA Creole Network involves six other European universities: University of Lyon, University of Barcelona, University of Gdansk, University of Ljubljana, University of Maynooth, and University of Stockholm. The MA Creole: Cultural Differences and Transnational Processes carries the name for a reason. It offers a unique opportunity to study at two of those partner institutions while getting to know colleagues from all participating institutions over a two-week long intensive program. More than a decade and a half later, I finally got to experience what Creole really stands for and I now even better understand why culture is not a sum of its parts.

There were many “first times” on the visit to New Orleans. During my initial trip to the Big Easy, a moniker for New Orleans, job hunting was a breeze in the rapidly developing city at the beginning of the 20th century. As I visited a century too late, my first time at the SAA Annual Meeting did not instantly land me a job. However, getting approx. 4,500 archaeologists to NOLA felt appropriately big and easy. Or at least it struck me as easy enough to attract archaeologists to the city known for good music, delicious food, and a lot of opportunities to party.

A remarkable session at the annual meeting highlighted the importance of building trust among team members and across different generations. It centered around recognizing the longstanding work of Terence N. D'Altroy in Peru. The session, organized in chronological order, which Tim Earle even classified into phases (see below), was a wonderful showcase of how to establish archaeological fieldwork in remote areas. It appeared only possible with much support and close collaboration with local partners, the willingness of team members to share meals and occasionally perform feasting, as well as to change the “modus operandi” for the time in the field to being extremely egalitarian. Not being trained in archaeology, one of the most rewarding experiences were my earliest team-based fieldwork experiences in Alberobello, Italy and Podlehnik, Slovenia. There, out of communal boredom, I picked up a wonderful new habit I abandoned ten years later: smoking. Has anyone ever claimed that great teams only encourage great habits?

In my session, titled “New Research on Neolithic,” I presented my current X-KIN project, dealing with prehistoric kinship from socio-cultural anthropological perspectives. In my talk, I focused on the issue with depicting kinship on kinship diagrams. Those were the backbone of Lewis Henry Morgan’s new method to map kinship terms. Today, kinship diagrams represent the backbone of depicting archaeogenetic results. The aim to advancing archaeogenetic methods to 6th or 7th degree of genetic relatedness showcases the prime objective to map more individuals on the same kinship tree to trace their ancestry. However, much of what non-western societies would consider as kinship cannot be captured in kinship trees. Therefore, there is a need for integrated studies that include socio-cultural anthropology. If you wonder “Why kinship still needs anthropologists in the 21st century,” have a look at my recently published article in Anthropology Today.

Before my departure to New Orleans, I was able to participate in a very special kin-making event in Mississauga in Greater Toronto Area. At an invitation of an extended family member, I attended a unique wedding function. By looking at the outfits and setting in the photo below, you may think that the function was very traditional, involving women only, to accompany the bride on her path to marriage. However, the function has been recently invented among large diasporic communities in Toronto. As many of couple’s friends will not be able to participate at the “traditional” functions in South Asia, the community has invented a new function. Women gathered in wonderful traditional dresses in a community hall, specially decorated for the occasion. The bride, her mom, and her sisters, ordered custom-made dresses from Karachi, Pakistan. For me, it was a pleasure to join them as a princess for a day while experiencing how kin is being made in a “diasporic condition,” about which Ghassan Hage recently wrote about.

Back in Chicago area, where I have apparently picked-up the Midwest defining “ohhhh,” I added a new collection to the horned animals that define the city and/or the region. I am sure you must be thinking of Chicago Bulls. It is not them. I visited Fermilab’s iconic bison herd, with a hope to see baby bisons. Unfortunately, my visit was again too early. This time not for a century but just a matter of few days. Nevertheless, I had a chance to learn about the cutting-edge research on particle physics, in a 6,800-acre site just 40 miles west of Chicago. Robert Wilson, Fermilab’s fist director, chose bison as a symbol of the history of the Midwestern prairie and the laboratory’s pioneering research.

Out of 16 fundamental subatomic particles that are known so far, three have been discovered at Fermilab: the bottom quark (1977), the top quark (1995), and the tau neutrino (2000). At the Fermilab, I learned that properties of materials are not hard. They appear hard as they are held together with enormous forces. In analogy to human societies, kinship is one of those forces that holds societies together.

On a side note, do you remember the Chicago Rat Hole about which I wrote in my earlier blog? The block containing the Rat Hole was recently removed from the Rosco village and is now in possession of Chicago Department of Transportation. Is this how cultural heritage is being made bottom-up? Let’s wait and see where the new Chicago attraction will find its new home.

While some objects may be removed, new can be added. This week, Chicago announced its newest celebrity resident: the Field Museum’s newly announced Chicago Archaeopteryx. Archaeopteryx is the oldest fossil bird found on earth that proves all dinosaurs are birds. It is very special to display this fossil at the Field Museum as it is the only one on public display outside Europe. The specimen is special but at the same time, it feels very special to work alongside amazing curators such as Jingmai O'Connor and many others at the Field.