Hallucinogenic healing

Brewing ayahuasca, Credit: Ayahuasca Pix, Creative Commons Licensed on Flickr — Brewing ayahuasca,
Credit: Ayahuasca Pix, Creative Commons Licensed on Flickr

Ayahuasca, a beverage brewed from the roots of an Amazonian plant and consumed under the guidance of a shaman, reportedly provides mind-opening experiences and relief from symptoms of stress, depression and other afflictions. Ayahuasca has long been used in healing rituals in the Amazon region of Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil.

Recently the Guardian carried an article about the use of ayahuasca by members of several Indie groups such as the Klaxons. Then the Washington Post described a healing tour company that connects Westerners to ayahuasca sessions.

To learn more: Marlene Dobkin de Rios is the main cultural anthro expert on ayahuasca. In the 1970s, she published several scholarly articles and an ethnography about its ritual healing use, Visionary Vine: Hallucinogenic Healing in the Peruvian Amazon. More recently, with Roger Rumrill, she published A Hallucinogenic Tea, Laced with Controversy: Ayahuasca in the Amazon and the United States which provides important updates.

Here are other anthropological sources on ayahuasca, healing, and ritual (with apologies, as they are not open access):

Arévalo Valera, Guillermo. 1986. Ayahuasca y El Curandero Shipibo-Conibo Del Ucayali (Perú). América Indígena 46(1):p.147-161.

Baer, G., and W. W. Snell. 1974. An Ayahuasca Ceremony among the Matsigenka (Eastern Peru). Zeitschrift Fur Ethnologie V 99(1/2):63-80.

Balzer, Carsten. 2005. Ayahuasca Rituals in Germany: The First Steps of the Brazilian Santo Daime Religion in Europe. Curare 28(1):53-66, 119.

Benjamin, Craig. 2000. Trademark on Traditional Knowledge: Slim Ayahuasca Win. Native Americas 17(1):30-33.

Callaway, J. C. 1995. Pharmahuasca and Contemporary Ethnopharmacology. Curare 18(2):395-398.

Desmarchelier, C., A. Gurni, G. Ciccia, and A. M. Giuletti. 1996. Ritual and Medicinal Plants of the Ese’Ejas of the Amazonian Rainforest (Madre De Dios, Perú). Journal of Ethnopharmacology 52(1):45-51.

Dobkin de Rios, Marlene. A Note on the use of Ayahuasca among Urban Mestizo Populations in the Peruvian Amazon. American Anthropologist 72(6):1419-1422.
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Death, Modernity, and Public Policy

A Blog on Current Events, Commentary, and Cultural Critique about Death/Dying/Policy/Representation from George Washington University anthropology and international affairs students

http://deathanddyingpolicy.wordpress.com/

We are a group of anthropology and international affairs students who are writing a blog for our course, Death, Modernity, and Public Policy for the Fall 2010 semester at George Washington University in Washington, DC.

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Cooking up a storm

Woman cooking on a clay stove in Nepal. Credit: Ah Zut, Creative Commons licensed on Flickr

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced this past week the launch of a new international alliance to supply improved cooking stoves to 100 million poor households by 2020. An article in the Economist describes how many programs to promote cleaner stoves throughout the world have failed: “Too much emphasis has gone on technology and talking to people at the top, too little to consulting the women who actually do the cooking.”

That statement, all told, is probably true. Nonetheless, a quick search in Google Scholar and my university library’s electronic databases reveals many relevant studies including some by cultural/social anthropologists. They address and document both the health risks especially for women and children of traditional cookstoves and perceptions of improved cookstoves.

The most fine-grained anthropology study that I have found is Patrice Engle and co-authors with some Maya people of Guatemala. She and her co-authors used observation and recall methods to learn about time spent over cooking fires. The results indicate that young mothers and young children (who are with the mother while she is cooking) spend the most time in the kitchen and are most at risk for smoke-related health problems. Women with co-resident husbands spend more time in the kitchen than women without husbands or whose husbands are away.

In terms of how to provide improved cookstoves, the best publication I know is by Rob Bailis and co-authors. They assess subsidized versus market-based stove dissemination and compare several contexts in which clean cooking technologies were promoted.

Cultural anthropologists and others who take a grounded approach to learning about important issues: get cooking on cooking! This topic connects to social and gender disparities, environmental pollution and sustainability, and the future of all of us.

Related Reading:
Dherani, Mukesh et al. Indoor Air Pollution from Unprocessed Solid Fuel Use and Pneumonia Risk in Children Aged under Five Years: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 86(5):390-398, 2008.

Masera, Omar et al. Impact of Patsari Improved Cookstoves on Indoor Air Quality in Michiacán, Mexico. Energy for Sustainable Development 11(2):45-56, 2007.

Simon, Gregory. Mobilizing Cookstoves for Development: A Dual Adoption Framework Analysis of Collaborative Technology Innovations in Western India. Environment and Planning A42(8):2011-2030, 2010.

Troncoso, Karin et al. Social Perceptions about a Technological Innovation for Fuelwood Cooking: A Case Study in Rural Mexico. Energy Policy 35(5):2799-2810, 2007.

No Woman No Cry: Maternal mortality in the spotlight

From left: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nita Lowey, Suraya Dalil, Purnima Mane. Credit: World Bank Photo Collection, Creative Commons licensed on Flickr

Guest post by Erica Buckingham

The country is Tanzania. The scene is a woman, Janet, experiencing intense pregnancy pains. The hope is that the regional clinic will deliver Janet’s third baby. The reality is that hers is a “high-risk” pregnancy, and the clinic does not have the proper equipment. The tragedy is that Janet does not have enough money to rent a van (estimated at the equivalent of $30) to drive for one hour to Mt. Meru, the closest hospital.

This situation is, unfortunately, not uncommon. Motivated by her own complications during labor, Christy Turlington-Burns filmed the documentary, No Woman No Cry which powerfully exposes the hardships faced by at-risk pregnant women in Tanzania, Bangladesh, Guatemala, and the United States. Known for her career as a model and as a maternal health advocate, Burns now brings attention to the shocking statistics and stories surrounding maternal health and mortality.

Fortunately for Janet, Burns’ crew was able to provide the necessary funds for transportation to Mt. Meru. Arriving at the hospital exhausted and dehydrated, the staff worked to induce her, and, three days later, Janet gave birth to a healthy baby boy. While her story ends on an uplifting note, most women in the same predicament are less fortunate.

On September 16, a brief preview of the film screened at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC, and was followed by a panel discussion. The panelists included Suraya Dalil, Afghan Minister of Health, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, World Bank Managing Director, Purnima Mane, United Nations Population Fund Executive Director and Rep. Nita Lowey, Chair, Foreign Operations Subcommittee, U.S. House of Representatives.

Inspired by Burns’ work and the important issues the documentary addresses, the four panelists engaged in a lively discussion about the current status of maternal mortality, the improvements made in the last decade as well as the hope for continued progress in the future. The main message from these four prominent women leaders was the need for greater financial investment in maternal and child health.

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The floods in Pakistan

An interview by Maggie Ronkin with Fayyaz Baqir, Director of the Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Center, Islamabad, Pakistan

MR: What regions of Pakistan and sectors of the population are affected most by the tragic flooding?

FB: Vast swathes of land in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (previously the Northwest Frontier Province), Southern Punjab (the Siraiki region of the Punjab), Sindh, and Balochistan have been devastated by the recent floods. These floods are considered to be the worst in the entire world during the past hundred years. It is not an exaggeration that fifteen million families have been rendered homeless, and hundreds of thousands of homes have been wiped off the face of the earth. Hundreds of villages are no more. Standing crops over thousands of acres, cattle, infrastructure, and productive assets of millions of families have been lost due to flooding. A woman from a very well off and respected family of a rural district contacted by phone said “Everything is gone. We are beggars”. Scores of women from small farm and landless families burst into tears when asked about their plight. “There is no food, no water, no medicine, no help” most of them narrated. If they do not receive assistance soon, they may reach the point where they think that there is “no hope”. Such a situation will add another dimension to the crisis because desperate minds are fertile ground for militants. This is a great humanitarian crisis to which the world’s conscience needs to respond. The scale of this tragedy is so enormous that the country’s entire population is reeling in shock.

MR: What does the devastation in Pakistan look like to you on the ground?

FB: Thousands of human settlements are under ten or fifteen-foot deep water. Dead cattle can be found everywhere. Innumerable people are stranded in areas surrounded by water. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, children, and elderly people who managed to move out of their houses leaving behind their assets accumulated over a life time have squatted along the roads. Tents are in extremely short supply, so the homeless sit under the burning sun without any shade to cover their heads. They often seem overwhelmed and unable to decide what to do. There are shortages of food, safe drinking water, and medicine. Whenever food arrives, scrambling for it leads to scuffles, and inevitably, the poor, weak, and households headed by women are hurt the most. There is no organized, visible, and dependable government assistance available.

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Paul Farmer in the news

Blogger’s note: I depend largely on my Google reader system to feed me the anthropology news every week for my weekly round-up of “Anthro in the news.” But a lot that is anthropological goes on under the covers, so to speak: it is just not named “anthropology.”

Out of curiosity, I went to Google news yesterday and typed in “Paul Farmer.” Farmer is probably the most famous living anthropologist who is not known primarily as an anthropologist. That’s why news items about him don’t pop up in my Google reader.

Here’s the catch of the past few days from Google news about Paul Farmer, cultural anthropologist, doctor, and humanitarian activist.

• Book review in JAMA
Partners in Health: The Paul Farmer Reader has been published by the University of California Press. It is what it says it is: a collection of Farmer’s writings. It was just reviewed in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Not many anthropology books get reviewed in JAMA.

• On cancer
The Times of India carried an article about a recent pronouncement by medical specialists in the United States that cancer is a global health issue of high priority. The article quotes Paul Farmer, via the Lancet, as saying “There are clearly effective interventions that can prevent or ease suffering due to many malignancies, and that is surely our duty as physicians or policy makers or health advocates.”

• On why care about Pakistan
An essay in the Huffington Post salutes Paul Farmer in a paragraph pointing to “troubling contrasts” between the amount of aid pledged and given to Haiti after the January earthquake compared to the “averting of eyes” from Pakistan’s tragedy. The author says: “Dr. Paul Farmer sums it up pithily in the title of his book, The Uses of Haiti. The uses of Pakistan are different. We need to move beyond the uses of both our countries and toward understanding them accurately and respectfully in their own terms. Our understanding of Haiti should be more political and of Pakistan less so, or differently so.”

• Pay back time
An open letter to French president Nicolas Sarkozy from 90 academics, authors, journalists, and human rights activists around the world urged the French government to repay the 90 million gold francs that Haiti was forced to pay for its independence. Paul Farmer says “there are powerful arguments in favour of the restitution of the French debt.”

• Staying alive is more than medical
Fonkoze, an NGO that provides micro-credit loans in Haiti, realized that its programs miss the most needy. Fonkoze talked with Paul Farmer who said that his organization, Partners in Health, would create Fonkoze branches at all their hospitals. This partnership sounds promising and could help with the following comment from Farmer: “I’m really tired of taking these people who are close to death and making them better again, and then I have to watch them starve to death because they have no way to make a living.”

Image: “Paul Farmer speaks at IDEO,” from flickr user GlobalX, licensed with Creative Commons.

Nuclear news, nuclear fears and the role of science

Guest post by Barbara Rose Johnston

I received last week copies of two very different publications reporting on outcomes from the scientific assessment of life in a nuclear warzone. These studies consider, first, the health experience of resident populations living in areas contaminated by nuclear weapons fallout, and, second, the health of people as affected by the low-level radiation that accompanies modern warfare.

The first is a set of eight papers published in the August 2010 issue of the journal Health Physics and reflects conclusions from US-government sponsored science about radiation and cancer risks.

The second, a study conducted by an international and independent team of scientists published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, is about the health effects of war on the local population of Fallujah, Iraq.

Appropriate reading, since much news in the past few days has focused on the ceremonies surrounding the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the human suffering associated with nuclear war.

Nuclear worries and concerns have been a major feature in world news for years, but especially so in this first decade of a new century.

A review of today’s global headlines finds reports of fear and accusations over the development of a nuclear weapon in Iran, as well as fears of nuclear war on the Korean peninsula and in Kashmir, the Himalayan territory that lies between Pakistan and India. Fidel Castro’s first address in four years to the Cuban Parliament warns of an imminent nuclear war if the US follows through on its threat of retaliation against Iran for not abiding nuclear-arms sanctions.

There are also hopeful reports on political promises and the potential progress in the struggle to further abolish nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, there are also reports on the lack of progress – for example, the news that the US Senate has again delayed its hearing on a new START Treaty.

The nuclear news also includes “peaceful uses” of atomic energy. The US is reportedly finalizing a nuclear cooperation agreement with Vietnam that would allow enrichment. There are reports of numerous proposals or approved plans for new nuclear power plants in Germany, Egypt, the US, Canada, the Philippines, India, Serbia, Bulgaria, and the UK.

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One Love vs. side dishes

Sylvia Tamale, a feminist sociologist and legal scholar who teaches at Uganda’s Makerere University, is quoted in a recent PlusNews article as saying that the “risky sexual practices” framework, as uncritically accepted in HIV policy circles in Uganda, is “racist, moralistic and paternalistic.” Instead of fighting people’s culture, she suggests that raising people’s awareness about safe sex is more likely to be effective in reducing sexually transmitted diseases.

Having concurrent sexual partnerships, she feels, is deeply ingrained in Ugandan culture. Furthermore, concurrent sexual partnerships have not been definitively proven as a factor underlying high rates of HIV/AIDS.

Yet, since the 1980s in Uganda, HIV prevention campaigns have pushed for fidelity to one sexual partner. The recent “One Love” campaign urges people to abandon “side dishes.” But they also promote condom use for those who don’t.

Don’t let the sun catch you crying

Journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger says that he wanted to make you feel like you are actually there in a remote combat outpost in Afghanistan in Restrepo. He and his partner Tim Hetherington, succeeded. After the documentary’s powerful 90 minutes, people in the packed AFI theater in Silver Spring, Md., on Friday June 28 were in shock and awe and tears.

Junger (right) and Tim Hetherington (left). Creative Commons Licensed

Restrepo will remain embedded in my heart and mind for the rest of my life.

The film chronicles the daily lives, and sometimes deaths, of a small platoon of American soldiers tasked with pushing against Taliban control of the Korangal Valley. The soldiers, all men, are very young — 19 years old, many of them, pimply some of them, and proud to be serving their country in fighting “the enemy.” Also, over time, bored, thrilled, scared and sad.

Occasionally, the film provides footage of local villagers. They appear to be mostly scared by what is happening in their valley as they experience the counter-pressures of the Americans and the Taliban. But sometimes proud and dignified as male elders attempt to gain compensation for a cow who died as a result of entanglement with wire fencing surrounding the outpost.

The film brilliantly and effectively interweaves footage from the combat zone with tight-shot interviews with eight soldiers conducted in Italy four months after they had left Afghanistan. So one minute you are in the outpost Restrepo, named after a fallen comrade, with all the noise and smoke from artillery and helicopters. The next minute you are up close and personal listening as a young soldier quietly talks about what it was like to be in the combat zone and what it is like to be dealing with not being there. One says that he doesn’t want to go to sleep because of the nightmares. He has tried five different kinds of sleeping pills, but none works to allow him a peaceful night’s sleep.

Each of the eight men gets very close to tears.

An excellent panel discussion following the film was skillfully moderated by Lara Logan, chief foreign correspondent with CBS News, and included Sebastian Junger as well as one of the film participants, Major Dan Kearney, who made it possible for the film team to work with his combat team.

In the discussion, Sebastian Junger commented that the interviews really “make” the film. What you don’t see, he pointed out, is that the person interviewing the soldiers — Junger — is also fighting back the tears. Junger noted that soldiers cannot show emotion, especially in a combat zone. Instead, when death happens, especially the death of your buddy, you mourn for a minute or two and then get back out there and kill the enemy who took his life.

Once they leave combat, the men have to try to process all that they have been through in the previous 15 months. Many do not succeed in readjusting to civilian life. Junger hopes that the film will help with the re-integration process by promoting understanding of the challenges they face. He said that many of the men will end up going back into combat, leaving behind their wives who feel rejected. They go back, he thinks, because for many 19-year-old men in the United States civilian life does not offer a satisfying role, identity or sense of belonging. The combat zone does that in spades. Many soldiers, he says, become addicted to the male bonding, the brotherhood that is forged in the daily routine of a harsh life and possible death. It is an intoxicating form of solidarity, stronger than friendship, that trumps all differences and disagreements and provides an emotional security that overrides concerns about physical security.

Combat, says Junger, is a small, closed, male world. His film offers a peek through a keyhole into that world. Restrepo is an ethnographic film of the highest order. (Junger has a B.A. in cultural anthropology and it shows). Although Junger wasn’t with the troop for the entire 15 months — he visited five times — he and his camera were not obviously intrusive. But they must have created an extra layer of life and death?

In the question and answer period, no one asked Junger how he is dealing with re-entry to the civilian world. It can’t be easy for him, either. I believe I saw tears in his eyes at several points during the panel discussion.

Update: Tim Hetherington tragically was killed April 20th, 2011 while on assignment in Libia.

Who you gonna call?

The major source of health information for South Asians in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area is not the family doctor: it’s the internet. In this respect, South Asians probably resemble most Americans. In other respects they do not.

The Washington, D.C., metropolitan area has the fifth largest South Asian population in the United States. To learn about their perceived health status, health needs and health-related practices, several faculty, students, and alumni of The George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services collaborated on project SAHNA (South Asian Health Needs Assessment).

The SAHNA team conducted a survey on the web and by paper from which a total of 709 questionnaires was collected. The results are described in a report that was issued in May to mark Asian American month in the United States.

Selected findings: South Asians with higher incomes are more likely to have had a physical exam and to have seen a dentist in the past year. The same holds true for South Asians who speak English and those who are citizens. While the majority do not get much exercise, they also do not eat fast food regularly.

Project SAHNA has established a useful baseline for the Washington, D.C.-area’s South Asian population. It points the way to more qualitative follow-up research among the population. Even more importantly, it raises questions about what is distinct about the culture(s) of South Asian populations in the United States compared to that of other recently-arrived population and to longstanding residents.

Of the billions served at McDonald’s, not many of them are South Asians based in the District, according to a recent study. Image credit: Flickr user Road Side Pictures, creative commons licensed content.

I am intrigued by the 77 percent of the respondents who say that they never or rarely eat fast food. They are adults. What about their children?

When I did research with members of the North Indian immigrant community in Pittsburgh, Penn., in the early 1990s, food was sometimes a zone of contestation between parents and children. Parents wanted children to eat Indian food. A major compromise food was vegetarian pizza served at home. Children often lobbied for fast food from the major chains for special events like a birthday party or graduation. Concessions to children’s desires were made so that vegetarian pizza was served, for children, at communal meals following temple rituals.

According to the report’s findings, Jamie Oliver doesn’t need to do a site visit to South Asia, D.C. Not yet.