Miki Chase // On Wednesday, October 7th, 2020, an unnamed Jain woman in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India, died on her 64th birthday. Local news reported that she had recently been discharged from a private hospital, having recovered from coronavirus and tested negative following treatment for Covid-19. A doctor at the hospital, however, who pointed out that she had…
Tag: Anthropology
Little House in the Hood: Save the Bees, call me Mel
Mel Maldonado-Salcedo // What’s in a Name? I was born in the 1980s, an era filled with excess. Perhaps this is the reason I have always struggled with moderation. My generation was defined by drugs, MTV, and Melissas. From grade school to high school, I was one of a few Melissas in each classroom. For this…
The Ethnographer’s Dilemma: A New World Shaped by COVID-19
Steven Rhue // We are all adjusting to the realities of the pandemic. Undoubtedly, it has become the topic of numerous personal and professional discussions, as we navigate newfound challenges in uncertain times. As a student of anthropology and an ethnographer, I find myself in a world where the very foundations of generating rich qualitative…
“Young people never are what they were in somebody else’s day.”: Sex Education, Margaret Mead, and History
John A. Carranza // On October 29, 2019, the Austin Independent School District’s Board of Trustees approved a new sex education curriculum that will teach students about gender identity and same-sex relationships, consent and interpersonal relationships, as well as abstinence-plus (abstinence is the best way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, but still conveys…
Write/Right About Your Body
Madeleine Mant // I teach Introduction to the Anthropology of Health to an exquisitely diverse group of second-year undergraduate students. The class is a gateway prerequisite to all upper-level health-stream courses, thus it necessitates a balance between the biological and sociocultural aspects of health anthropology. Students are exposed to the work of Gregor Mendel and…
Laughter Part 2: Is It Safe To Laugh Yet?
James Belarde // “It seems to me that you can know a man by his laughter, and if from the first encounter you like the laughter of some completely unknown person, you may boldly say that he is a good man.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Notes from A Dead House “A woolly mammoth and a saber-tooth…
Vague Ethnography and Healthcare Access
Liora O’Donnell Goldensher // In late 2017, I began full-time fieldwork towards a dissertation about contemporary professional non-nurse midwifery in the United States, joining the practices of several homebirth midwives. I organized my multi-sited approach with an eye to various of what those in my home discipline of sociology might refer to as “axes of…
Twilight Sleep to Push Playlists: (Re)Sounding U.S. Childbirth 1840-Present
Bennett Kuhn // A certain origin myth at the intersection of music and care is celebrated by ambient music composers and their critics. In 1975, Brian Eno slipped while crossing a London road and was struck by a car. Immobilized and on the mend in a hospital room, Eno was visited by a friend, who set…
My Graphic Medicine Journey (Part One)
The idea that life is a journey made up of different stages is one that has appeared across time, in different cultures and media. It is a concept that is ingrained in our collective psyches, and cannot be escaped, being present in the way we choose to live, think, and speak about our lives.
Special Event: “Fire, Water, Moon: Supplemental Seasons in a Time without Season”
For a special lecture bridging medical, environmental, and literary humanities within our Explorations in the Medical Humanities series, Professor Anne-Lise François (Associate Professor, Departments of English and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley) posed the question of how our thinking about human temporality can change when we avail ourselves to alternative modalities of seasonality and…
