Cathy Small facts for kids

Cathy A. Small (born 1949) is a cultural anthropologist and a retired professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University. She studies how cultures change, how people move from one country to another, and how different countries are connected. She focuses on places in East Asia and the Pacific Ocean. In 2002, Small did a special study where she lived like a university student herself. She wrote about what she learned in a book using the name Rebekah Nathan.

Early Life and Education

Cathy Small was born in 1949 in New York City and grew up in Brooklyn. She went to Temple University. There, she earned her Ph.D. (a high-level degree) in anthropology in 1987. Her studies focused on how moving to new countries affected people from Tonga.

Career in Anthropology

Cathy Small started teaching anthropology at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in 1987. She became a full professor and helped guide students studying for advanced degrees. She studied how societies and cultures change over long periods. Her work looked at how social groups start, grow, and sometimes disappear. She also explored how culture changes over time.

Studying Tongan Islanders

One of Cathy Small's main projects was studying people from the island nation of Tonga. She focused on how Tongan islanders moved to the United States. She wanted to understand how this migration changed their society over many years. As part of her research, she lived in Tonga for three years. There, she worked with a group of women who made special cloth from Tapia tree bark.

Her book about this research, Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs, was published in 1997. Many universities in the South Pacific use this book as a textbook. A new edition came out in 2011. Small also created a computer model of Polynesian society called TongaSim.

Her "Freshman Year" Experiment

After teaching for fifteen years, Cathy Small felt she no longer understood her students very well. In 2002, she decided to use her anthropology skills to learn more. She planned a study where she would live like a university student. She said, "I knew the best way to understand a different culture was to go and live like them."

She took a break from teaching and enrolled as a freshman at Northern Arizona University. At the time, Small was 52 years old. For a year, she took regular first-year classes and did homework. She paid for her own tuition and living costs. To truly understand students' lives, she moved into a dorm. She also spent time in student lounges, ate in the dining hall, and joined student clubs. During this time, she stayed away from her own family and friends.

To gather information, Small asked her fellow students many questions. She watched how students interacted in the dining hall, like where different groups of students chose to sit. She also interviewed over fifty students who lived in the dorms. About half of these students eventually realized she was a professor from NAU. When asked, she first said she was a writer. If pressed, she would admit she was a professor and ask them to keep it a secret.

Her experience led to a book called My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. It was published in 2005. Small used the fake name Rebekah Nathan and called the university "AnyU." This was to protect the students and the university. Before publishing, she got permission from students she wanted to quote. She also did not use their real names in the book.

In her book, Small suggested that college campuses don't always feel like one big community. Instead, she found that students often form small groups of friends. They choose who they want to spend time with and plan their schedules around these friends. This meant that the university's efforts to create a campus-wide community often didn't work well. Small noticed that these small friend groups often changed or didn't last long.

My Freshman Year caused a lot of discussion about how much university students were actually learning. Small found that schoolwork was only a small part of a typical student's day. Most students said they learned more from their social interactions. Students also found it hard to get involved in university life if they didn't have enough money. Many students in Small's study worked while attending college. They often chose classes that would help them get jobs to pay off student loans, rather than classes about politics or philosophy.

A month before the book came out, a journalist guessed who Rebekah Nathan really was. The book became very popular in the news. Small and Northern Arizona University then confirmed their connection to the book.

My Freshman Year also started debates about whether it was right for a researcher to go "undercover." Some people questioned why Small wrote the book. Using fake names in anthropology research has happened before. However, Small was the first anthropologist to use fake names to protect her students while also talking about the ethics of secrecy in research. Small said she checked the American Anthropological Association's rules for ethics before her study. Even so, some critics felt her "covert ethnography" (secret study) went against the rules that ask for openness with participants.

Small said the experience helped her understand students better. It also changed how she taught her classes.

Studying Homelessness

In 2020, Small published another book called The Man in the Dog Park: Coming Up Close to Homelessness. She was inspired by her ten-year friendship with Ross Moore, a disabled veteran who had experienced homelessness. Moore is also listed as a co-author of the book. Small writes that society creates conditions that can lead people into homelessness. She believes that we often pretend these conditions have nothing to do with it.

Community Service

In 1993, Cathy Small helped the Hopi Arts & Crafts Coop Guild create a catalog. This allowed them to sell their crafts directly to customers.

Small also started Pipeline Northern Arizona University. She did this after learning that Arizona had a very high high school dropout rate. Pipeline NAU is a partnership between the university, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, and the local school district. It connects seventh-grade students with an NAU staff or faculty member. This person becomes their mentor for five years. The program started in the 1998–99 school year. Students who complete the program receive a full scholarship to Northern Arizona University for four years.

Awards and Honors

In 1997, Small received a grant to create computer models of Polynesian societies. She won an award for teaching anthropology to college students in 2008–09. She also received the Praxis Award for Excellence in Applied Anthropology.

For her work with Pipeline NAU, Small received several awards. These include the National Points of Light Award and the Arizona Governor's Special Recognition. She also won the Best Educational Practices in Post-Secondary Education in the State of Arizona Award.

Personal Life

Cathy Small is not married and does not have children. She practices Judaism. She has practiced a type of meditation called vipassana meditation for over twenty years. She has also taught meditation since 2010. She teaches meditation in Flagstaff, Arizona. Each semester, she also co-teaches a six-week mindfulness course at Northern Arizona University. This course is for faculty, staff, and community members.

Selected Publications

As Cathy A. Small

• "The Birth and Growth of a Polynesian Women's Exchange Network." Oceania, vol.65, no, 3 (1995) pp. 234–256.
• Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs (Cornell University Press, 1997) ISBN: 978-0801434129
• "Finding an Invisible History: A Computer Simulation Experiment in Virtual Polynesia." Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 2, no. 3 (October 31, 1999)
• TongaSim (built using C++).
• Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs 2nd edition (Cornell University Press, 2011) ISBN: 9780801477393
• The Man in the Dog Park: Coming Up Close to Homelessness. with Jason Kordosky and Ross Moore. Cornell University Press, 2020. ISBN: 978-1501748783

As Rebekah Nathan

• My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (Cornell University Press, 2005) ISBN: 978-0143037477