Dr. Jeffery Deal, a physician, surgeon, ethnographer and anthropologist, will give a talk titled, "An Accidental Anthropologist" as part of the Explorations Lecture Series on Tuesday, Feb 12, at 5.30 p.m. in the James J. Johnson Auditorium of Coastal Carolina University's E. Craig Wall Sr. College of Business Administration. It is free and open to the public.

Deal, a South Carolina native based in Charleston, serves as the director of health studies for Water Missions International and is a fellow in the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. He lived and worked with the people of South Sudan and Uganda, learning their languages and culture. He devoted himself as a doctor in helping the Sudanese people obtain clean drinking water to avoid crippling disease and illness. During his time in the Sudanese bush, he led teams of volunteers and donors in an effort to build the largest medical facility in the region.

In his lecture, Deal will share his personal and professional experiences of living in the Dinka villages of South Sudan, and of the complexities involved in working within another culture. He will describe some "painfully difficult" experiences where he has had to balance his perspective between two points of view. As an academic, he reconciled why the Dinka demand certain cultural events like physical punishment. While as a doctor of medicine with a modern concept of human rights, he struggled to accept the flogging or torture of innocent people.

The Explorations Lecture Series is sponsored by the Center for Archaeology and Anthropology. For more information, contact Cheryl Ward, director of the center, at 843-349-6657 or cward@coastal.edu.