Moira Gasior ’15

After completing two years at community college, I chose to transfer to SUNY Purchase because the Anthropology department was offering courses related to urban anthropology, class, informal economies, and neoliberalism. I was very interested in understanding how constructs of state, capital, power, and modernity shaped communities, locally and globally.

To be completely transparent, I had no career or academic aspirations in mind; I simply wanted to understand how to unravel the world around me and make it digestible. And of course, I found my experience at Purchase studying within the Anthropology Department to be intellectually rewarding and engaging. Under the guidance of Prof. Gaudio, I wrote my Senior Project on the topic of thrift stores and second-hand economies. I explored the meanings and aspirations projected onto second-hand objects, the “thrill of the hunt”, and experiential differences based on class (“conspicuous consumption”). Other tangents in my SP include clandestine immigration to the US and redlining in the suburbs of Long Island.

After graduating from Purchase, I moved to rural West Virginia where I served as an AmeriCorps member for three years supporting Appalachian heritage areas and preservation initiatives. This is where I discovered the field of Historic Preservation. But, rather than being interested in the facts of historical events, I was drawn to the construct of “historicalness” as a marker for nation, identity, and memory. After a brief stint with the National Park Service, I attended Pratt University and obtained a MS in Historic Preservation.

I view historical narratives, architectural and material preservation, and framework of policies supporting preservation law as not only “facts” of the past, but as markers of our collective (and hegemonic) values. I have learned cemeteries are my true passion because, in addition to forensic materials contained underground, they are also evidence of values, economy, community, ecology, immigration, disease, and social constructs. My thesis focused on the cemeteries of racially marginalized groups in the post-Civil War US: what conditions made these cemeteries separate from their white counterparts, how were they systemically neglected or intentionally erased over time, and what are communities doing today to recover them.

I credit my ability to hold both historical facts and the loaded meanings of those facts alongside one another to my educational foundation in Anthropology. To this day, I look for guidance in the works of David Graeber and Jason de Leon. I hold my anthropological education very dearly. The world needs more anthropologists.