This session was organized by the Society for Medical Anthropology.
Tom Leatherman (U S Carolina)
The Costs of Conflict: Uneven Effects of the Sendero Luminoso Revolution in Southern Peru
In the 1980s-1990s, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) waged war against the Peruvian state. Extreme levels of poverty, food insecurity, undernutrition, infant mortality and morbidity, as well as a failed agrarian reform, created at least part of the context of vulnerability within which the revolutionary movement grew and flourished. This paper outlines these contexts of vulnerability in one area of the southern Andes studied during the outset of the revolution, and discusses the real and potential costs of the revolution on food insecurity, nutrition, health, and social trauma.
Nicole Berry (Simon Fraser U)
Legacy of Violence: The Challenge of Safe Motherhood in Post-Civil War Guatemala
For almost a decade, the emphasis in the global Safe Motherhood campaign has been on improving state provision of biomedical care for birth. But what happens when the historical relationship between the state and a people has been marked by violent oppression? This paper explores this question through an examination of efforts to decrease soaring rates of maternal mortality among Mayan women in Solol, Guatemala. Mayan villagers’ current reluctance to use obstetric resources in the Solol state hospital is partly a legacy of over 20 years of violent civil war in Guatemala.
Carolyn Sargent (S Methodist U) (Audio portion not included in podcast due to poor audio quality – sorry!)
Maternité, Liberté, Egalité: Burning Cars and Health Costs in the Immigrant Suburbs of Paris
The November 2005 immigrant uprisings in France involving North and West Africans generated diverse explanations for this urban violence, including extremist Islam, unemployment, hopelessness, and failure of the “republican” model of integration. This paper will examine how state policies generate health risks, such as lead poisoning, street accidents, exhaustion, stress, and reproductive rivalries among Malian migrants in Paris, France. As migrants, wives, and mothers, Malian women confront and routinely negotiate structures of inequality, of which they and their families come to carry the physical marks. Accordingly, they epitomize the unresolved hardships of immigrant experience reflected in the recent riots.
Ellen Gruenbaum (Cal State-Fresno)
No Safety: The Destruction of Health in Darfur, Sudan
War and political violence in Darfur, Sudan, have destructively undermined health and security in the past five years, emerging from smoldering conflicts and unsolved problems of the past. The Alma-Ata goal of health as a fundamental human right and the Millennium Development Goals for demonstrable improvement in measures of health and social well-being seem worlds away from the conditions of terror, rape, torture, war, and displacement facing the people of Darfur. Based on historical, religious, and ethnographic perspectives, this paper offers an anthropological analysis of the causes and consequences of this violence, and considers the potential social dynamics for peace-making.
Marcia C. Inhorn (U Michigan)
The Public Health Costs of War in Iraq: Lessons from Post-War Lebanon
Since March 2003, the United States has been at war in Iraq, with tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi casualties. However, the casualties of war and the embodied suffering of the Iraqi people cannot be measured only by body counts. This paper will examine six major public health costs of war, examining how these have played out in two war-torn Middle Eastern nations. The paper uses the example of post-war Lebanon to examine the potential consequences of war in Iraq, including such controversial issues as the effects of depleted uranium (DU) on human health.
Diane E. King (U Kentucky)
Fieldwork and Fear in Iraqi Kurdistan
This paper offers stories of fear I experienced while doing fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan between 1995 and 2002. The experience of fear was a collective, mutual experience, and both an engenderer and a collapser of social distance. People demonstrated that they felt distance from me when they told me stories of violence as though my American-ness meant I could do something for them. They collapsed social distance by including me in their plans for escape should a hypothetical fear be realized. This paper analyses the experience of conducting fieldwork in a setting under ongoing threat from multiple sources of violence.
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Session took place in Memphis, TN at the 68th Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in March 2008.
