Alumni came from near and far to celebrate with the department the past, present, and exciting future of Princeton anthropology. Acting Chair and Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures Serguei Oushakine opened the event by sharing the department's exciting developments: a record-breaking number of anthropology majors and a new group of faculty joining the department.

Assistant Professor Hanna Garth presented her work with the Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project. This project is a collection of oral histories of the many people who have worked to preserve Black and Indigenous seed and foodways throughout the southeastern United States and Appalachia. The project is a collaboration between Princeton University, Spelman College, and the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance. Over two years, from 2023 to 2024, the team worked across six sites, training students from Princeton, Spelman, TCNJ, and Tuskegee in oral history ethics and methods. Within Ujamaa’s networks, they interviewed and archived the stories of over 140 farmers, gardeners, chefs, community organizers, local historians, and others actively sustaining rich farming, culinary, and medicinal traditions.

Alumnus Sam Gravitte ’17 discussed the similarities between his undergraduate anthropology education and his professional work in theater. He discussed concepts of embodiment, performativity, and cultural relativism and explained how anthropology provides a critical framework for crafting authentic, multidimensional stories on stage.

Nikita Taniparti, an anthropology graduate student, presented an overview of the Ethnographic Archivings workshops that took place in Fall 2024. Taniparti discussed the reasons for launching the series and the impact the workshops had on graduate students' research and writing. To give the audience a sense of what was  learned, Taniparti posed three pertinent questions about ethnographic archiving: (i) What is the archive? (ii) Why might anthropologists conduct archival research? (ii) Why might anthropologists conduct archival research? and (iii) How can we start, and where do we go from here?

Orla O’Sullivan, an anthropology graduate student, introduced fundamental concepts in digital security and privacy as they relate to unsettled questions in American jurisprudence and to social scientists' research. As field research is increasingly digitized across multiple spaces and scales of digitalization, this presentation offered audience members a brief account of the current privacy landscape and ways to increase one's digital privacy and security.

Jeffrey Himpele '96, the director of the department’s VizE Lab, screened a new scene from the second edition of his film, Ever Open: The Startling First Chapter of Anthropology at Princeton. He showed a revised and expanded segment on Alfonso Ortiz, the Tewa Native American professor who taught at Princeton between 1967-1974. (This 6-minute scene is the seed of a longer documentary on Ortiz's career, tentatively titled Ahead of Our Time.) Ever Open is the first ever film of an anthropology department that tells its own story and situates it within the discipline's shifting frameworks and wider social movements in the US. The film intertwines fascinating interviews with over ten faculty members and students who were in the department during its first decade. Their fascinating stories and the film's archival images bring the department's life in the past into the present. The full second edition of Ever Open will be screened in fall 2025. 

The event closed with a celebratory cake.