Allison Mickel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in Lehigh’s Department of Sociology & Anthropology, and a faculty member in Global Studies since 2018. She is an archaeologist and an anthropologist who works in the Middle East, studying how archaeology has affected the communities who live on and around archaeological sites.
Her first book, Archaeologists as Authors and the Stories of Sites: A Defense of Fiction in Archaeological Writing, argues that archaeologists would be better served by writing in more creative ways, borrowing writing tropes from fiction. This would result in more accessible archaeological writing, more honest reporting, and for more voices to be involved in the process of publication. Her second (forthcoming) book, entitled Why Those Who Shovel are Silent: The Unknown Experts of Archaeological Excavation, picks up on these themes of exclusion and representation. In it, she examines 7 years of ethnographic research in Jordan and Turkey and shows that community members hired to work on archaeological sites have long been encouraged to downplay the expertise they have about these sites, instead performing the role of the docile and submissive worker. Mickel argues that under these circumstances, archaeologists lose out, and that more equitable and inclusive labor management structures would results in better quality science.
Mickel teaches several courses in the Global Studies program, including Cultural Studies and Globalization and Middle Eastern Archaeology. One of her favorite courses to teach is GS 108: Not-so-Lonely Planet: The Anthropology of Tourism, which takes students (virtually) all around the world and (physically) around Bethlehem to understand why tourists travel and how their behavior affects the host communities. Students read about everything from medical tourism in India to sex tourism in Brazil to Disneyworld; they learn about how travel warnings are used as a political negotiating tool by nation-states and how tourism often exacerbates economic inequalities in communities of the Global South. And at the end, students produce a multimedia presentation of an imagined journey to a destination of their choice.
Mickel also encourages critical, engaged travel by bringing students abroad! In the summer of 2019, she brought five Lehigh students to Jordan to conduct original research, train in conservation, and develop plans for sustainable community engagement. Students enjoyed Jordanian hospitality as they joined families in Hesban, Umm el-Jimal, and Petra for home-cooked meals and even learned enough Arabic to play Uno! The experience fostered the kind of appreciation for human difference and simultaneous recognition of cross-cultural similarities that both Anthropology & Global Studies encourage—and the students brought the research and analysis skills they’ve developed at Lehigh to support a new Jordanian startup called Sela. The founders of Sela have said that they can’t wait to work with Lehigh students again next year… will you be one of them?