An editorial in the Economic and Political Weekly asks: Is the opposition to a proposed new BSc degree in community health course in the interest of the rural population?
“A Parliamentary Committee on Health recently asked that the government abandon its proposal to introduce a new educational course that will train healthcare providers for rural areas. The committee’s suggestion appears in tune with the Indian Medical Association’s (IMA ) shrill cries that this new course, the BSc in community health, will create “half-baked doctors” and with the general response of the MBBS doctors’ lobby that the government would be playing with the lives of the rural population.”
A report on the status of women in Cuba, “Women’s Work: Gender Equality in Cuba and the Role of Women Building Cuba’s Future,” credits the leaders of the revolution with mandating and enforcing rules and laws guaranteeing gender equality and women’s rights, which have made Cuba among the highest-ranking nations in the advancement of women.
Report cover
An article in The New York Times discussing the report quotes María Ileana Faguaga Iglesias, a Cuban cultural anthropologist and historian who argues that the story of Cuba’s progress toward gender equality is overstated. She expressed the frustration of highly educated women: ”We have to distinguish that access to university studies does not necessarily give us power … What’s more, to be in positions that are supposedly positions of power does not necessarily permit the exercise of power.”
Still, Cuba ranks high in international surveys on women. The World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Cuba 19th among 135 countries, up one notch from 2011, one of only two Latin American nations in the top 20 (Nicaragua ranked ninth). By comparison, the United States fell to 22 from 17 in the survey, which measured the health, literacy, economic status and political participation of women.
• Women on Wall Street
In an interview on the Bill Moyers report, cultural anthropologist Melissa Fisher comments that women could not have entered the U.S. professional workforce in significant numbers without the liberal feminist movement’s insistence on the opening up of formerly male bastions, such as finance. In her book Wall Street Women, Fisher charts the evolution of the first generation of career women on Wall Street. She is a cultural anthropologist and visiting scholar in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.
Ever since hippies in the West discovered brown rice, those of us (speaking for myself at least) who remember books such as Diet for a Small Planet and Victory through Vegetables, have welcomed brown rice to our table.
For me, at least some of the time, a steaming bowl of white basmati or jasmine rice is still more enticing to me than its chewy brown counterpart. I think this is a personal failing rather than something to do with brown rice.
Brown rice. Flickr/miscdebris
How interesting, then, to stumble on an article published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association describing perceptions in South India about brown rice. It is written by S. Kumar, a social scientist and R. Mohanraj, a psychologist, both living in Chennai, India, and several other colleagues in India and at Harvard University in the United States.
The study is based on qualitative research — focus group interviews with 65 South Indian adults. The sample included men and women, people who were and were not overweight, and people who did and did not live in a slum situation in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The focus groups were homogeneous by gender.
Findings: overall, participants favor eating rice and rice-based foods. So far so good, but what about color preferences? In general, rice that is not white or long-grained is considered to be inferior.
Knowledge of brown rice and its nutritive properties was limited, though some people were aware of the health benefits of brown rice. The interviews suggest that old people with health problems might be more likely to accept brown rice than healthy, young people. So…it’s sort of medicinal and taste/quality are less important in that case.
Participants did have suggestions for promoting brown rice. They include: having the government and health officials endorse it and educate people about its benefits, advertize recipes with brown rice as an ingredient, have celebrity film actors endorse it, and give out free samples.
Notably, across “non-slum and slum groups,” women were more open to trying brown rice than men. But even the most open-minded women suggested that it would be a slow process to make brown rice an accepted part of the everyday diet.
• The trauma of war and rape
In the first of a two-part story, CNN highlights the work of cultural anthropologist Victoria Sanford, whose research has involved listening to victim narratives of Maya women in Guatemala since her doctoral studies at Stanford University in the early 1990s. A Spanish speaker who had worked with Central American refugees, she befriended the few Maya in the area. “I was moved by their stories, but even more so because they were intent on someone hearing them,” she said, “And no one was listening.” She joined the nonprofit Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology investigative team and went to Guatemala. Sanford talked to the women, who told other women about her, and soon she was recording their stories. Over time, and after hearing many stories, Sanford suffered from a kind of “secondary trauma” including paralysis.
• Conflict in Uganda and a possible love complication
The New York Times quoted Mahmood Mamdani, professor anthropology and government at Columbia university, in an article about an ongoing bitter personal rivalry in Uganda that involves President Musaveni and his rival and former friend, Kizza Besigye. Things may be complicated, the article suggests, by a woman, Winnie Byanyima, who is married to the president’s rival but who may have had a romantic involvement earlier with the president. Other matters are likely part of the story as well. Mamdani comments that the government is “clueless” about how to deal with Besigye’s opposition movement. He didn’t comment on the love factor.
• Culture and asthma
Cultural context and behavior shape the diagnosis and treatment of asthma according to David Van Sickle, medical anthropologist and asthma epidemiologist of Reciprocal Labs in Madison, Wisc. Van Sickle’s fieldwork in India revealed that physicians were hesitant to diagnose patients with asthma because of social stigma.
• Treating autism: two cases in Croatia Drug Week covered findings from a study conducted in Osijek, Croatia, which discusses the treatment of autism in a boy and a girl with risperidone. K. Dodigcurkovic and colleagues published their study in Collegium Antropologicum.
• Profile of a forensic anthropologist
The Gainesville Sun carried a profile of Michael Warren, an associate professor of anthropology and director of the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida. He has conducted hundreds of forensic skeletal examinations for the state’s medical examiners and has participated in the identification of victims of mass disasters and ethnic cleansing, including the attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina and the recovery and identification of the victims found within the mass graves of the Balkans. He recently testified in the Casey Anthony murder trial.
• Medieval persecution
The remains of 17 bodies found at the bottom of a medieval well in England could have been victims of persecution, new evidence suggests. DNA analysis indicates that the victims were Jewish. They were likely murdered or forced to commit suicide. The skeletons date to the 12th-13th centuries, a time of persecution of Jewish people in Europe. Professor Sue Black leads the research team. She is a forensic anthropologist in the University of Dundee’s Centre for Anthropology and Human Identification. Continue reading “Anthro in the news 6/27/2011”→
Frank Korom, professor of anthropology and religion at Boston University, provides some background on the caste system in India and current plans to ask citizens to report their caste in the upcoming 2011 national census. India’s commitment to carrying out a census of its entire population involves a massive effort, one that is part of its British colonial heritage.
Cognitive anthropologist has a message for Obama about health care reform
Cognitive linguistic anthropologist George Lakoff lists nine things that the Obama administration should have done earlier on in the campaign to reform health care. He also offers specific advice for how to win the campaign through a more effective communications system, including a brilliant suggestion to rename the “public option” as the “American Plan,” which will remove any taint of “socialism” and instead invoke feelings of patriotism.
This blogger likes Lakoff’s idea very much but wonders about the chances of a label change in reminding Americans that patriotism and love of country can include compassion to fellow Americans who have less than they do.
Economic development can exacerbate gender inequality.
In many patriarchal situations (patriarchy is when men dominate most or all social domains including the economy, politics, family, and belief systems), sons are highly preferred to the extent that people opt to abort female fetuses or systematically neglect daughters in terms of food, health care, and affection.
Areas where such preferences are particularly include northern India’s richest states: Punjab and Haryana.
An article in a special issue of The New York Times Magazine (August 23, 2009, pp. 23- 25) devoted to women’s rights internationally highlights the field research of cultural anthropologist Monica Das Gupta in rural Punjab in the 1980s.
Her data revealed the double-edged sword of development: richer, more-educated people have fewer children than poorer, less-educated families, but they still want to have at least one son. So the pressure to avoid having a daughter is more extreme. Das Gupta is currently a senior social scientist in the World Bank’s Development Research Group.
The article offers no recommendations, just a faint note of hope that the “clash” between modernity and exacerbated masculine bias in infant and child sex ratios in highly patriarchal situations may be a problem of only “the short and medium terms” (p. 25). Whatever that means.
Note: For historical context on northern India’s extremely unbalanced sex ratios, see Chapter 2 of my book, The Endangered Sex: Neglect of Female Children in Rural North India, 2nd ed., Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997; originally published by Cornell University Press, 1981.
anthropologyworks 