The University Libraries; Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences; Department of Environmental Science and Policy; and Department of Sociology and Anthropology present a screening of

THE ANTHROPOLOGIST, a documentary by Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller, and Jeremy Newberger.

Wednesday, February 24 | 3 to 5 pm | JC Cinema | Johnson Center | Fairfax Campus

Light refreshments will be provided

“Climate change forces us to have to learn the family business,” says Mary Catherine Bateson, the daughter of famed anthropologist Margaret Mead.

And so begins the story of Katie Yegorov-Crate, a thirteen-year-old girl from Fairfax, Virginia. She is carted around the globe by her mother, noted environmental anthropologist Susie Crate. Susie studies the effects of climate change on centuries-old indigenous communities.

Margaret Mead also analyzed how communities confront change, but that which results from war and modernity. Her daughter Mary Catherine Bateson, now 76 and a cultural anthropologist in her own right, provides extraordinary insight into what Susie and Katie discover.

Filmed over the course of five years, THE ANTHROPOLOGIST is a meditation on change, both individual and societal. Susie and Katie work with people in Siberia, the South Pacific, the Andes, and the nearby Chesapeake Bay, who struggle to reconfigure how and where they live.

In Siberia, where Susie met Katie’s father while doing research, Katie’s relatives can no longer farm on land they’ve occupied for generations. Katie’s roots are also threatened by the inhospitable soil.

“I don’t think we can change the world,” counsels Susie. “I think that we change, and that changes the world.” Katie’s plan as she sets out on her own will test her mother’s theory.

THE ANTHROPOLOGIST is directed by Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller, and Jeremy Newberger of Ironbound Films.

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A Q&A session hosted by Dr. Susie Crate will follow. Susie Crate is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in environmental and cognitive anthropology. She has worked with indigenous communities in Siberia since 1988 and specifically with the Viliui Sakha since 1991. Her current research focuses on understanding local perceptions, adaptations, and resilience of Viliui Sakha communities in the face of unprecedented climate change. Susie is author of numerous peer-reviewed articles, the 2006 monograph Cows, Kin and Globalization: An Ethnography of Sustainability, and senior editor of the 2009 volume Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions. She is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University.