Express: Where have you traveled for work?
Tim McMillan:Everywhere I travel ends up being part of my research and my teaching. I've traveled to Haiti, Australia, Kenya, Canada, France, England, and many places in the U.S.

Express: What's the longest amount of time you've spent studying another culture?
Tim McMillan:In the U.S., most of my life. I've been working on a project that looks at the black history of UNC for six years. My longest international experience was five months in Kenya where I was working with the Kipsigis people who live in the mountains in the Western part of the country. I was supposed to stay a year but I got sick and had to leave early.

Express: How were you received while you were there?
Tim McMillan:When I was in Kenya, some people were as interested in learning about me as I was in learning about them. People wanted to know if all Americans were rich and lived in mansions like on TV. I tried to teach about my life and my culture while I learned about theirs. I went to some places where the children had never seen a white person before and would stare at me like I was an alien. … It was an interesting feeling for me, and made me understand something about being judged on your skin color and culture. In Haiti, there were very few white people as well, and groups of children would follow me around just to see what I might do. After a while, people stop noticing the differences and start treating you like any other person. … Being an anthropologist is different from being a tourist or a business person because you use a technique called participant observation to try to learn about how other people see the world by stepping into their shoes, but also keeping enough distance so that you can watch what is happening. Participant-observation is tricky because if you get too close you “go native” and lose your objectiveness, if you stay too far from the culture, you don’t get any insider’s perspectives.

Express: Does observing other cultures change your view of your own culture?
Tim McMillan:Yes, working in countries that were colonized by Europe made me think about race and power in the U.S. and has led to me teaching and researching American culture, particularly how Americans understand and use the concept of race. It is very useful to look around your own culture through the eyes of people who don’t belong to it, and you’ll see how strange some things we take for granted can look from the outside. For example, think about having a little statue of a woman on your table and pouring sweet syrup out of her head onto your food. We do it at breakfast, but looking from the outside it might look like a religious ritual. Look at fashion and how some of the clothes we wear make it harder to walk (or sit) but we do it to fit in and to “look good.”

Express: What can our readers learn from other cultures that will benefit them in their own culture?
Tim McMillan:That every culture has rules that make sense in that culture but that might seem silly outside it. Anthropology tries to make us understand people in terms of their values and beliefs and not ours so that we can see why they do what they do. Different doesn’t mean bad, it means different (but, different doesn’t always mean good or acceptable either.)

Express: Any changes to spot in today's society that our readers can observe themselves?
Tim McMillan:Language and fashion change every day. Words like "crunk," "phat" and "lol" come and go. ... Same thing with clothing. Food and eating habits are important markers of culture. Try to think of a food that is all American and you’ll come up with pizza, tacos and apple pie, none of which is truly American and none of which isn’t.

Express: What's the most unique thing you've encountered during your research? The most frightening?
Tim McMillan:In Haiti, the sanitation system (garbage collection and sewer) was made up of wild pigs that lived in the gullies and ditches. What you couldn’t eat or use you threw into the ditches and the pigs ate. And then you ate the pigs. That was pretty unusual. …The most frightening thing was getting Dengue Fever in Kenya and being so far away from my family and friends. But the hospital in Nairobi was very good and the doctors and nurses were great.

Express: While visiting foreign countries for work, have you had to eat strange things?
Tim McMillan:Offering and accepting hospitality is a central part of all cultures and much of that hospitality is food. It's very difficult to turn down food particularly when the people giving it to you are spending a lot of time and money (that they might not have) to give it to you. In the area of Kenya where I lived, people ate mostly boiled corn meal, greens and fermented milk. The fermented milk was hard for me to drink – it looks and tastes like a mixture of cottage cheese, skim milk and cigarette ashes (the milk is fermented in gourds that have had the inside burned.) One day I fell into a creek, cut my head on barbed wire, and then was offered a bowl of boiled goat intestines (which was a luxury item.) I said, “I have had an awful day, and I just can’t eat that, but thank you very much.” I did, however, have a glass of fermented milk.

Express: What's the most rewarding part of your job?
Tim McMillan:Meeting lots of people both as students and as community members and teaching them parts of their own history and culture that they don’t know. I am most excited when I hear that my former students take the information we learn in class and share it with their friends and families.

Express: Have you inspired any students to become anthropologists themselves?
Tim McMillan:Yes, but more importantly I think I’ve inspired students to use the methods of anthropology in their lives and careers even if they don’t become “official” anthropologists.

Express: Are there any traditions that you've learned from other cultures that you now use yourself?
Tim McMillan:Making sure to wash my hands before I eat – that was a tradition in every culture I’ve visited but is one that we don’t practice as much as we should. And in Hawaii, I learned to take my shoes off at the door instead of tracking dirt into the house from outside. I love to eat samosas (curry meat triangles), which I first had in Kenya. Indian samosas are good, but Kenyan ones are great. I don’t serve fermented milk in my house, however.

Express: What advice do you have for our readers who would like to become anthropologists?
Tim McMillan:People watch. Read anything and everything. Try to get to know people who aren’t like yourself, and try to figure out why you think they are not like you. Study difference to learn the similarities. Have fun.

Getting Started Want to read more about studying and working in anthropology? Check out these books at your local library or bookstore: Careers in Anthropology by W. Richard Stephens Great Jobs for Anthropology Majors by Blythe Camenson Anthropology Career Resources Handbook by Margaret A. Gwynne Understanding Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theory by Philip Carl Salzman