Keli Fisher ’26
I should begin with what anthropology is since it’s the question I receive most (understandably) when I mention my major. My general answer is “The study of humans and cultures—past and present—around the world,” but I believe illustrating how my understanding of anthropology has changed will simultaneously explain what anthropology is as well as what it means to me as a perspective, a discipline, and a study.
I transferred to Pomona College from Saddleback Community College in fall 2023 with a set graduation date of fall 2025. At Saddleback, I primarily took introductory anthropology courses—lecture-based courses that introduced me to the fundamentals of sociocultural, linguistic, archaeological, and biological anthropology. When I transferred, anthropology courses at Pomona College engaged me in seminars, theory, and application—and in many ways challenged my ideas of what anthropology was.
One of the first questions that many an introductory (sociocultural) anthropology course challenges their students to answer is: What is culture? The answer is that most any possible idea can be challenged, contradicted, and interrogated. For me, that’s it. Anthropology both contains and interrogates sets of contradictions and entanglements in the world. It is a negotiation between certainties: accentuating the localized to understand and even challenge the global; reconciling the individual experience with the culture to which it belongs, balancing the role of the anthropologist as a researcher and a human participant, and understanding anthropology as the study of ‘culture’ even if there isn’t always a firm or even consistent definition of it.
More specifically, it was Professor Omer Shah’s class, “The Unseen and the Unknown,” that particularly challenged me about what anthropology could study. It engaged us in the ‘invisible,’ the ‘incomprehensible,’ and even the ‘magical.’ It touched on the subjects traditionally associated with the ‘unknown,’ such as witchcraft, ghosts, astrology, and conspiracy, but it also called into question subjects that carry a framework of certainty and yet possess something “unseen” that is worth exploring how we negotiate with it, such as biomedical psychoanalysis, illness, and even the banal everyday absurdities of suburban America. It expanded both my traditional idea of ‘culture’ and my assumptions of what anthropology could be—a study of “culture” but also a lens to examine, deconstruct, and reinterpret the world.
The famous motivating phrase of anthropology is to “make the familiar strange and the strange familiar.” Initially, I understood it to be this abstract driving philosophy of anthropology: to make the strangeness of Others familiar and render our familiarity strange to us. But now, I also think it’s about finding resonances of the familiar and strange in everything. The boundary between “us” and “Other” is as clear as it is continuously shifting—and it is not always drawn across traditional notions of “culture.” Even among “us,” there are resonances of something that feels “Other” and vice versa. I think that has become clearer to me ever since learning that anthropology truly concerns everything and how everything is entangled with everything else.
I see anthropology as an interdisciplinary knowledge basis, method, and lens that I aim to bring to my upcoming senior thesis research, which will be funded by the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP). I will be performing ethnographic research about Shintō shrines, communities, and traditions across the Hawaiian Islands and their relations caught between Japanese, American, and Hawaiian cultures, histories, and religiosities. Grounded in an examination and deconstruction of American religiosity and secularity, I hope to research Shintō shrines and how they are caught between the imaginaries of religion, secularity, modernity, and tradition that they inherited from their histories as a migratory religion and tradition, but also how they may play a role in perpetuating these imaginaries by re-interpreting and re-creating them through their interactions and connections with Japan and America and beyond.
That is what anthropology has consistently been for me: a discipline through which to investigate and understand not only the world and people around us but also how we come to produce that understanding and knowledge about the world around us. It’s a field I feel that the variety of insightful faculty and classes at Pomona has helped prepare me for—to study anthropology in its theory and application, and to apply it as an academic discipline, but also in how I view everyday life. I see anthropology as a lens and a field that I hope to continue pursuing through my senior thesis and eventually through an Anthropology doctorate program, where I hope to study to be an anthropological researcher in academia and continue investigating peoples and cultures, and the world that we create.
Dania Anabtawi ’26
I had applied to colleges as a chemistry major, but a realization that I loved learning about people and a scroll through Pomona’s website landed me in the Anthropology department.
I enrolled in Professor Alexandra Lippman’s Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology during my first semester of college, and from that moment I never looked back. I found quickly that anthropology was the missing piece I needed to connect my love of science and my interest in people, and Pomona has been the perfect place to explore it as a double major in anthropology and biology.
In the many semesters since then, I have been able to dive into anthropology more than I could have ever imagined. From discovering the foundations of the discipline in my Theory and Methods classes to learning about the world in electives such as Medical Anthropology with Professor Cristina Bejarano, Anthropology of Digital Culture with Professor Lippman, and The Unseen and The Unknown with Professor Omer Shah, I have learned about an incredible variety of topics. I have also been able to build strong relationships with my professors and peers while working as an Anthropology Department liaison.
I am often asked: Why major in anthropology if I am also studying biology? To me, the answer is clear: anthropology has taught me how to think critically and with purpose. My professors have instilled in me a deep intellectual curiosity, and it is this spirit of collaboration and intentionality that I hope to embody as I leave Pomona.
I hold the belief that without a foundation of knowledge in anthropology, I would not be successful in my endeavors, regardless of the discipline. Even as I prepare for a career in biomedical research, I reflect back on my decision to study anthropology as one that has forever changed the way I think for the better.