Anthropology Department

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Dr. Deana Weibel

Associate Professor

Office: 1149 ASH
Phone: 331-3346

Deana Weibel received her doctorate in 2001 from the University of California at San Diego based on research into the contested use of Catholic shrines in France and New Mexico. Her work generally covers the anthropology of religion, looking at pilgrimage, ritual, and religious schemas. Recent research has expanded the notion of religious travel and sacred places to manned spaceflight, spaceflown objects, and the religious understandings of astronauts and cosmonauts. New areas of professional interest include the way a nascent anthropology conceived of the “Other” in ethnographic displays at expositions and amusement parks, such as the Igorot "villages" organized by Weibel’s great-grandfather, the showman Richard Schneidewind. Classes taught at GVSU include Comparative Religions, Language and Culture, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Culture and Disease, and Death, Burial and Culture.

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