For nearly a week, the winter chill kept the mercury hovering around the freezing mark. And Pedro Soto, a Georgetown College junior and a native of Puerto Rico, was hungry for a taste of home. He had heard about a downtown restaurant that serves authentic Caribbean fare, and he set out to find it.

"What is it about our culture that associates food with who we are?" he asked. "Is it a way, in a city that's not yours, of feeling like you're at home? How do people see themselves in relation to food? Is it a part of their culture? Is it a way of reminding them of something else?"

Most students don't reflect so deeply on the source of their cravings when they're hungry and searching for food. But Soto doesn't think like most students -- at least not after taking two of Assistant Professor Melissa Fisher's anthropology courses.

Anthropology, Fisher suggests, can be more than just the study of ancient cultures and faraway places. Through unconventional courses on urban anthropology, class and culture, and the new economy, she pushes her students to explore the complex cultures and social networks they encounter in everyday interactions.

Fisher brought her brand of anthropology to Georgetown in 2005. She developed her innovative approach in the 1990s while performing field work that struck a personal chord in her life.

"I come from a family of women who have been working for several generations," Fisher said. "I had always heard about what it was like to be a woman working in a male dominated workforce, and I was interested in seeing how women fared."

Just miles from her childhood home on New York City's Upper West Side, she set off to explain how women ascended through the male-dominated corporate culture of Wall Street. Her fieldwork gained her entrance into some of the most iconic financial institutions in business.

From large corner offices overlooking the midtown skyline, Fisher interviewed some of the most successful women in finance. She met with their mentors and mapped out the social networks that helped the businesswomen succeed in the male-dominated environment. She conducted more than 80 interviews, gathering stories from as many perspectives as possible.

In an attempt to gain a first-hand perspective, Fisher also took the opportunity to shadow women at a firm that was expanding its global operations. She sat-in on meetings, attended "power lunches," and became a regular at corporate functions.

"I had to blend in," she said, recalling her experiences on Wall Street. "I even had to go out and buy some power suits."

Fisher's research led to a groundbreaking ethnographic study of power, gender and networking in New York's competitive financial industry. She published some of her research in "Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy" (Duke University Press 2006), a volume she co-edited with Greg Downey of Macquarie University in Australia. She plans to publish the complete findings of her work in a full-length book due out in 2009.

In the classroom, Fisher uses her work to inspire students to incorporate anthropological tools in their research, regardless of their area of study. Her classes are popular with students from a wide spectrum of majors.

Scott McCord, a sophomore in the McDonough School of Business and a student in Fisher's "Anthropology of Work in the New Economy" course, believes he can learn a lot from his professor's approach. Now in his second semester with Fisher, he sees an advantage to including anthropology in his business curriculum.

"A lot of marketing is doing background research on target audiences," McCord said. He believes the skills he is learning in her classes will prove invaluable for a career in marketing or public relations.

Soto also sees the benefit of incorporating anthropology into his curriculum. Now a student in Fisher's "Urban Anthropology" course, Soto has decided to complement his major in government with a second major in anthropology. He said it's given him a new way of understanding how laws and policies affect the people and cultures they are designed to protect.

"At first I was a little bit skeptical, coming from a more political science background," recounted Soto as he explained his rationale for double-majoring in government and anthropology. "But then when I started reading people's stories, I started to remember that culture is people, and people aren't theories, and they're not science. They’re dreams and desires."