MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
AT UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Department of
Anthropology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor is the top-ranked
department in the country, according to the U.S.
News and World Report. Thus, medical
anthropology at UM-Ann Arbor exists within a premiere anthropology training
program featuring a four-fields approach. More than a dozen UM-Ann Arbor faculty
members have primary or secondary research and teaching interests in medical
anthropology. Most are situated within
the field of cultural anthropology (ethnology); however, several faculty
members in physical anthropology maintain biocultural
medical anthropology interests. Several
of the medical anthropology faculty members have joint appointments in other
departments and schools, including Women’s Studies, History, Sociology, Public
Health, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Center for Human Growth and Development,
Natural Resources, Center for Afro-American and African Studies, Center for
Middle Eastern and North African Studies, and Science and Technology
Studies. Furthermore, these faculty
members offer particularly strong area studies training in health and illness
issues in Africa and the Middle East (Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Lebanon, Madagascar,
Mali, Nigeria, Sudan, and Syria), in addition to the U.S., Europe, Asia, and
Latin America. Together, UM-Ann Arbor
faculty members offer coursework and training in six distinct areas of medical
anthropology as follows:
1) Critical Studies of Culture, Illness, and Medicine: In various fieldsites—from the U.S. to the Middle East and Japan, from
Africa to Europe—the medical anthropologists at the University of Michigan
analyze the relations among health, illness, social institutions and cultural
representations. In particular, they
examine the intersection of health, culture and political-economic power,
combining biomedical perspectives with those that join personal with social
problems. Their work points to the
differences in the ways bodies count:
who falls ill and why; who has access to resources, not just in terms of
biological vulnerability, but of culture and power. Faculty members have contributed to the study
of the production of medical knowledge in the field of breast cancer,
reproduction, and infectious disease; have examined questions of stigma and the
relationship between health, illness, race and citizenship; and have probed
critical issues of biopolitics, immigration,
marginality, and the body. They also
look at new infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, and the intersection of
disease, environment and the inequities brought by processes of globalization
and global capitalism. In this field,
medical anthropology students are encouraged to examine intersections and
consequences of global disparities in wealth and the relationship between
health and structural violence. They are
also encouraged to examine the construction of illness categories, the
narratives used to articulate these, and the social and political hierarchies
such categories may produce or maintain.
2) Gender and Health: Through ethnographic engagement in women’s
lives, the medical anthropologists at UM-Ann Arbor have contributed
considerably to theoretical debates surrounding gender and health, including
issues of embodiment, agency, identity, suffering, and resistance to (dis)ease-producing social relations and conditions. UM-Ann Arbor faculty
specialize in the broad area of gender and health, in both their
research and teaching. Topics
highlighted in their work include the social construction and “disciplining” of
the female body; women’s changing health needs through the life cycle; women as
reproducers in the West and across various global sites; the biologization, medicalization,
and technologization of women’s health; the health-demoting effects of
racism, poverty, and patriarchy; the effects of inhumane conditions of labor on
women’s lives; and ultimately, how women narrativize
and make meaning of their suffering. In addition, men’s health and masculinity
studies are increasingly emphasized in UM faculty members’ research and
coursework. Several UM-Ann Arbor faculty are widely recognized for their work in gender and
health and have won major prizes, including the Society for Medical
Anthropology’s Eileen Basker Prize for Outstanding
Research on Gender and Health.
Infertility and other reproductive “disruptions” are a special area of
focus for four faculty members, who participate in a monthly Study Group on
Adoption, Infertility, and Gender sponsored by UM’s Institute for Research on
Women and Gender. This IRWG Study Group
is open to both graduate students and faculty.
It is currently involved in sponsoring a May 2005 international
conference on “Reproductive Disruptions: Childlessness, Adoption, and Other
Reproductive Complexities,” at which many medical anthropologists specializing
in reproduction will be in attendance.
3) Medical Anthropology and History: The University of Michigan has a
unique Joint Ph.D. Program in Anthropology and History, which has attracted
many Ph.D. students wishing to combine anthropological and historical methods
in their work on medicine, health, and the body, especially in contexts of
colonial and post-World War II humanitarian aid and development. Furthermore, several faculty members are interested
in the history of comparative medical systems, including both ethnomedicine and biomedicine in pre- and post-colonial
settings around the world. In addition to the medical anthropologists already
mentioned here, a strong and diverse group of medical historians, including
John Carson, Joel Howell, Nancy Hunt, Michael MacDonald, Howard Markell, Jonathan Metzl, Michelle
Mitchell, Gina Morantz-Sanchez, Martin Pernick, and Alexandra Stern, has affiliations with various
units on campus, including this Joint Ph.D. Program, American Culture, and the
History Department. Also of note is the
new Science and Technology Studies program (see below), which includes a
graduate certificate, and is increasingly providing a science studies framework
for graduate students pursuing Ph.D. work on the social, cultural, and
historical study of medicine.
4) Global Public Health: Through research and training projects
conducted in international settings, several UM-Ann Arbor faculty members
specialize in issues of global public health and teach courses of this nature
in the UM School of Public Health.
Topics highlighted in their research and teaching include the history
and critique of the major international health agencies and their development
paradigms; the political economy and ecology of health, including infectious
disease; child survival and women’s reproductive health; and men’s health under
“modernization.” Students who take
courses in this area learn about a) medical anthropology in global public health (i.e., the principles, methods, and
approaches of applied medical anthropology in international health settings,
including public health educational interventions and disease control
programs); b) medical anthropology of global
public health (i.e., the ways in which medical anthropologists attempt to
understand global health problems in a larger cultural, historical, ecological,
and political-economic context); and c) medical anthropological critiques of global public health (i.e.,
the ways in which medical anthropologists have critically analyzed notions of
health “development” and have pointed out the challenges of developing
effective, long-term public health interventions for many of the most serious
global health problems). Medical
anthropology students at UM are encouraged to seek global public health
training, through student-initiated dual-degree enrollment (PhD-MPH) in UM’s
School of Public Health (UM-SPH). In Fall 2003, UM-SPH initiated a Global Health
Interdepartmental Concentration, which provides specialty training in global
health to interested students who are pursuing MPH degrees in any of SPH’s
departments. UM-SPH already offers a
Reproductive and Women’s Health Interdepartmental Concentration of this nature. One UM medical anthropology faculty member,
Marcia Inhorn, is jointly appointed in Anthropology and SPH through the
Department of Health Behavior and Education (HBHE), thereby providing a
critical link for medical anthropology students interested in dual-degree
training in global public health.
5) Science & Technology Studies (STS): STS exists at
UM-Ann Arbor as a small but vibrant lecture series with a recently approved
undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate program. It is hoped that the area will grow
substantially over the next few years, with UM medical anthropologists adding
greatly to that effort. The STS lecture
series has recently included a number of speakers jointly sponsored by the
Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG), who have addressed gender
and medicine, mostly in a historical idiom.
The program receives financing from the International Institute, which
should encourage a transnational focus in years to come. UM medical anthropologists offer the
possibility of integrating contemporary, ethnographic and transnational studies
of medical practice into the program.
There should also be opportunities for involvement in the multi-campus
expansion of the Life Sciences, Values, and Society Initiative. Medical anthropology STS students will have
the opportunity to take classes from several disciplinary bases that together
ask such questions as: How does scientific and medical knowledge, about such
things as genetics, gender, sexuality, race and disease, stratify and constrain
the life chances of individuals? Why are
more and more areas of private and public lives being medicalized? What is bioethics, what does it replace, and
why has it become part of the medical establishment? How are truth and efficacy in medicine
established? Does the corporate sponsorship of medical experimentation promote
health and accountability? What are the connections between bioweapons
and the medical establishment? Is
scientific or medical knowledge political, and if so, in what ways? Faculty in this area focus
on the relationship between ethics, social justice, and medicine, including the
relationship between human rights and health. Several faculty are
concerned with the intersection of law and medicine, including the intellectual
property right debates surrounding pharmaceuticals. Another major area of concern involves local
moral systems, particularly moral responses to the introduction of global
biotechnologies on the local level.
6) Biocultural Medical Anthropology: The University of Michigan has several
physical anthropology faculty who focus on biocultural issues of interest to medical
anthropology. Particular strengths exist
in nutritional anthropology, including understanding the ways in which diverse
food preferences among humans are population specific. Faculty attempt to
determine the extent to which cultural food preferences are related to genetic
factors. For example, avoidance
of dairy products in some populations and among some individuals is related to
genetic differences in the activity of lactase.
Some populations have evolved cultural adaptations to overcome this
genetic difference and thus still consume dairy products. Similarly, it is unknown whether the extent
to which humans avoid bitter foods is related to genetic differences in the
ability to taste bitter biochemical traits.
Biocultural anthropologists at the University
of Michigan attempt to understand this dynamic interaction between cultural and
biological factors with respect to individual and population differences in
food preference and avoidance.
Given these
six diverse areas of concentration and faculty research interests, graduate
students at the University of Michigan who focus on medical anthropological
topics work with an array of faculty members, often on a very interdisciplinary
basis. Students may form graduate committees with
members from more than one department.
Furthermore, cross-campus affiliations with medical anthropologists at
Michigan State University, Wayne State University, and University of
Michigan-Dearborn, allow University of Michigan medical anthropology students
to take up to nine credit hours of courses at these affiliated campuses. Within the University of Michigan at Ann
Arbor, medical anthropology students are encouraged to partake in dual-degree
programs. For example, several doctoral
students are in the Anthropology and History program, while others are in the
Anthropology and Social Work program.
Students are also able to receive master’s degree training at the
University of Michigan School of Public Health.
Of the nearly 20 current UM
doctoral students focusing in medical anthropology, their projects are of their
own choosing and are located in a wide range of global sites. Some examples include: the legacy of colonial
medicine (and particularly Rockefeller hygiene projects) in rural Java,
Indonesia; the impact of state-sponsored family planning on notions of national
identity in Trinidad and Tobago; efforts by pregnant American middle-class
women’s to produce “quality” children through a variety of pregnancy rituals
and technologies; the history of the Cuban eugenics movement and its effects on
Cuban gender identity and sexuality; doctor-patient discourse during biomedicalized birth in Mayan Guatemala; and the role of
HIV/AIDS non-profit service organizations in prevention efforts in New York
City and Amsterdam.
Medical
Anthropology Theory and Practice (Faculty)
Communities in
Crisis (Button)
Media Advocacy and Public
Health (Button)
Media Coverage of Public Health
Issues (Button)
Bioterrorism: Community Preparation and Response (Button)
Native American Health
(Button)
Global
Perspectives on Gender, Health, and Reproduction (Fadlalla)
Gender, Poverty,
and Medicine (Fadlalla)
Anthropology of
Kinship (Feeley-Harnik)
Nutrition and
Evolution (Frisancho)
Human Adaptation
(Frisancho)
Nutritional
Anthropometry (Frisancho)
Health and Illness in African Worlds (Hunt)
Global Women’s Health (Hunt)
Gender and Health:
Ethnographic Perspectives (Inhorn)
Intersectionality and Women’s Health: Ethnographic Approaches to Race,
Class, Gender, and “Difference” (Inhorn)
Global Health:
Anthropological Perspectives (Inhorn)
Qualitative Methods and
Proposal Writing (Inhorn)
Culture and Medicine
(Peters-Golden)
Medical Anthropology (Peters-Golden)
Culture and Childbirth
(Renne)
Demographic Approaches in
Anthropology (Renne with Tom Fricke)
Maternal Health and
Environmental Pollution in Africa (Renne)
Genes, Genealogies,
Identities: Anthropological Perspectives
(Robertson)
Politics and Practice of
Ethnography (Robertson)
Health and Wellness in East
Asia (Robertson)
Political Economy of Gender
and Health (Ticktin)
Health and Human Rights
(Ticktin)
The Politics of Suffering
(Ticktin)
Anthropology of Science and
Ethics (Ticktin)
Gregory V. Button is an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Michigan's School of Public
Health. With a PhD in Medical
Anthropology from Brandeis University, his research interests include
communities in crisis, the media coverage of public health issues, and Native
American health. He has conducted extensive research in the United States and
Europe on the impact of disasters on local communities. Dr. Button is currently
conducting research on the long-term impact of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill on
Alaska native communities. Additional research includes the cultural and
historical formation of bioterrorism policy. He has been a consultant to the
CDC, U.S. EPA, the U. S. Senate, the State of Michigan, the Kellogg Foundation,
and numerous NGOs. As a former Congressional Fellow he served as a health
policy analyst in the United States Senate for the late Senator Paul Wellstone
(D-Minn.). As a member of Sen. Wellstone’s staff, he worked on a number of
health issues, including the restructuring of FEMA, the 1993 floods in the
Midwest, the Hanta virus outbreak, and Native American health. Prior to his
career in academia, he was a producer and reporter for public radio. As a
journalist, he covered a number of stories on natural and man-made disasters,
as well as environmental health issues.
Amal Hassan Fadlalla
is an Assistant Professor in Women’s
Studies and Afroamerican and African Studies at the
University of Michigan. She received an
MA in Anthropology from the University of Khartoum in 1992 and a PhD in
Anthropology from Northwestern University in 2000. She also received certificates in Gender
Studies and African Studies from Northwestern University in 2001 and a certificate
of training in population, health and development, as part of the David Bell
MacArthur Fellowship Program at the Harvard Center for Population and
Development, School of Public Health, in 2001-2002. Dr. Fadlalla’s
academic interests encompass cultural anthropology, gender studies, medical
anthropology, and anthropological demography, particularly analyses of
fertility, health, identity, and development, and the situation of such
analyses in gender dynamics, social inequalities, cultural worldviews, and
local and global political economies (Africa and the Middle East). She has recently completed a book on Fertility, Foreignness, and Regeneration
among the Hadendowa women of eastern Sudan, where she
focuses on how perceptions of danger and disease underlie women’s explanations
of fertility, infertility, and social well-being. Her future research will focus on the
questions of fertility, health, and marginality among Sudanese in the diaspora and at home.
Gillian Feeley-Harnik is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at
the University of Michigan. Her areas of
ethnographic and archival research include Madagascar (since 1971) and the
United States (since 1994) and Great Britain (since 1998). She is also interested in the history and
anthropology of the Bible and biblically inspired religions in the Jewish and
Christian diasporas and beyond. Her research in these areas has been
published in several articles and books, including A Green Estate: Restoring Independence in Madagascar (Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1991), The Lord's Table:
The Meaning of Food in Early Judaism and Christianity (Smithsonian
Institution Press, 2cd ed., 1994), and a third book in progress, The Ethnography of Creation: A Comparative Study of Charles Darwin and
Lewis Henry Morgan, based on archival research. Morgan, Darwin's American contemporary, was
the founder of the comparative study of kinship, and through kinship, the
founder of anthropology in the U.S. Both
Darwin and Morgan argued that "descent is the hidden bond of
connection" linking all forms of life (Darwin's words). Both drew on biblical language to articulate
social, biological, and moral concerns they hoped to resolve through
science. The goal of the research is to
illuminate how people grasp the "mystery of life" in their everyday
social practices, in reckoning who is kin to them,
how they are connected to other creatures living and dead, and to the places
where they live, and how popular practices of kinship and ecology in 19th-
century Great Britain and America contributed to the life sciences of biology
and anthropology. Her research and
teaching interests include social-cultural anthropology, religion, political
ecology, kinship, gender, and history of the life sciences.
A. Roberto Frisancho is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of
Anthropology and Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Human Growth and
Development at the University of Michigan.
Past president of the American Human Biology Council and a four-time
recipient of the Excellence in Education Award at the University of Michigan, he
is a specialist in biocultural anthropology, with
research interests in human nutrition, genetics, adaptive physiology and human
ecology, epidemiology, and kinesiology.
He has conducted field research projects around the world, and
particularly in Latin America, on such topics as: the role of maternal
nutritional status in prenatal growth; the developmental and nutritional
determinants of pregnancy outcome among teenagers; biological and environmental
determinants of hypertension among African-Americans; the effects of smoking on
prenatal growth; the influence of lead levels on linear growth of
Mexican-American children; the developmental components of respiratory
adaptation to high altitude hypoxia; and issues of undernutrition
and obesity. The author of more than 100 articles, he has two books forthcoming
on Nutrition and Evolution and Anthropometry for the Evaluation of
Nutritional Status.
Rebecca Hardin is
an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the School of
Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Michigan. She is also an Academy Scholar at the Harvard
Academy for International and Area Studies.
Her Ph.D. research (Yale University, 2000) concerned the colonial
practices of forest management in the western Congo basin and the impact of
contemporary ecotourism and game trophy hunting practices in the region. Her more recent research looks at the
relation between the management of extractive industries and new forms of corporate/community interaction in historical context. Her most recent fieldwork entails a
comparative project working with corporate social responsibility staff and
traditional community leaders in two African contexts: platinum mining in the Republic of South
Africa and forest management for timber and tourism in the Central African
Republic. She heads an international working group on the anthropology and
ecology of emergent viral disease in tropical forest environments.
Nancy Rose Hunt is an Associate Professor in History and Obstetrics/Gynecology
at the University of Michigan. She is a
specialist on women’s health in Africa.
Her prize-winning book, A Colonial
Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility
in the Congo, is a historical ethnography of childbirth and reproductive
practice in the Congo in the twentieth century.
She is currently working on projects related to women’s health in the
city of Accra (Ghana); the history of STDs and infertility in the Congo; and a
comparative study of eclampsia in Africa and the U.S.
South. She regularly teaches courses on
global women’s health; health and illness in African worlds; and African social
and cultural history; and she has done graduate seminars on the global politics
of reproduction and the comparative study of colonial medicine.
Marcia C. Inhorn is a Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health
Education (School of Public Health), the Program in Women’s Studies, and the
Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is also Director of the Center for Middle
Eastern and North African Studies at the UM International Institute,
and the newly elected President of the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA)
of the American Anthropological Association. A medical anthropologist
specializing in gender and health issues, she has conducted research on
infertility and the new reproductive technologies in Egypt over the past 20
years. She is the author of three books
on the subject, Local Babies, Global
Science: Gender, Religion, and In Vitro
Fertilization in Egypt (Routledge, 2003), Infertility and Patriarchy: The Cultural
Politics of Gender and Family Life in
Egypt (U Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and Quest
for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and
Egyptian Medical Traditions (U Pennsylvania Press, 1994), the latter of
which won the Society for Medical Anthropology’s Eileen Basker
Prize for outstanding research in gender and health. She is also the primary editor of two books, Infertility Around
the Globe: New Thinking on Gender, Childlessness, and Reproductive Technology
(U California Press, 2001), and The
Anthropology of Infectious Disease: International Health Perspectives (Routledge, 1997).
From 2003-2005, she is undertaking a multi-sited ethnographic study in
Lebanon and “Arab Detroit” on “Middle Eastern Masculinities in the Age of New
Reproductive Technologies,” funded by the U.S. Department of Education
Fulbright-Hays program and the National Science Foundation. Her research and teaching interests include
global perspectives on gender, health, and reproduction; infertility and new
reproductive technologies; globalization and health; science and technology
studies; cultures of biomedicine and ethnomedicine;
stigma and suffering; and the intersection of anthropology, feminism, and
epidemiology. She is coordinating an
international conference at the University of Michigan from May 19-22, 2005 on
“Reproductive Disruptions:
Childlessness, Adoption, and Other Reproductive Complexities,” which
will feature the work of numerous medical anthropologists.
Julia Paley is
an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the School of
Social Work at the University of Michigan.
She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University,
where she participated in the group on Medical Anthropology. She earned her B.A. in Urban Studies at the
University of Pennsylvania. Her primary
research interests are on the multiple meanings and practices of democracy in
various geographic contexts. Through
fieldwork in Chile, she has explored the ways in which social organizations in
a Santiago poblacion
(shantytown) created strategies to improve living conditions and analyze
political phenomena in the post-dictatorship period. Her work focused primarily on a grass-roots
health group and its campaigns around cholera prevention, garbage dumps, and
meningitis. Through research in
Ecuador, funded by the Fulbright Commission and the Wenner-Gren
Foundation, she is investigating democracy promotion activities by
international agencies in relation to citizen participation processes by
alternative local governments. One of
the key issues in this fieldsite is the
decentralization of health care. Dr.
Paley's book, Marketing Democracy: Power
and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile (University of California
Press, 2001) won the 2001 Sharon Stephens Award of the American Ethnological
Society for the best first book by a junior scholar. Dr. Paley has also received an award for
excellence in teaching urban studies.
She is currently writing about her research in Ecuador, as well as a
book about democracy, and editing a volume based on an Advanced Seminar at the
School of American Research on the Anthropology of Democracy.
Holly Peters-Golden is a Lecturer III in the Department of Anthropology
at the University of Michigan. She
earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel
Hill, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins School of
Public Health, before coming to Michigan in 1984 as a faculty member in the
Integrated Medical-Premedical Program.
With a joint appointment in the Residential College and the Institute
for Social Research, she introduces anthropology into the premedical and
medical school curriculum, while conducting ethnographic research with breast
cancer patients. In addition, she has
served as a liaison between the social sciences and medical campus as a Senior
Founding Faculty Fellow in the Program for Society and Medicine, a Senior
Faculty Associate in the Michigan Forum on Health Care Reform, a Senior Faculty
Associate in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, and a member of
the Medical Ethics board at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital. From 1992-1994, she served as the Lyle C.
Roll Scholar for Humane Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine. In the
Department of Anthropology, she teaches Introduction to Anthropology, Medical
Anthropology, and an honor’s seminar in Culture and Medicine. She serves on the departmental committee to
address the integration of medical anthropology into the University’s new Life
Sciences Initiative, and is an advisor to the Complementary and Alternative
Medicine Research Center. She has
published work on stigma and social roles, physician-patient communication,
breast cancer, and has authored an undergraduate Case Studies textbook. Her current research interests include
illness narratives, science studies, the construction of self and personhood in
illness; the production of medical knowledge; risk; explanatory models of
illness, and social construction of disease.
Elisha P. Renne
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of
Michigan. Dr. Renne earned her Ph.D. in
anthropology from New York University in 1990. From 1991 to1993, she was a
post-doctoral fellow at Australia National University, Canberra, where she
collaborated with demographers on a project studying fertility change and
reproductive health in southwestern Nigeria.
She has also taught at Ahmadu Bello
University, Zaria, Nigeria, and at Princeton University before joining the
University of Michigan faculty in 1998.
At Michigan, she has conducted graduate seminars on contemporary African
societies and demographic anthropology, and undergraduate courses on
introductory anthropology, the anthropology of childbirth, and African
women. Dr. Renne’s
research in Nigeria focuses on her continuing interest in reproductive health,
gender relations, and Islamic education.
Her current project is a National Science Foundation-funded study of
Hausa women’s Islamic education in Zaria, Nigeria. Recently, she completed of a book on Population and Progress in a Yoruba Town
(University of Michigan, 2003). She is also the co-editor of the volume, Regulating Menstruation (University of
Chicago Press, 2001), the volume, Population
and Development Issues (African BookBuilders
Ltd., Ibadan, 2000), and a special edition of the journal, Africa Today (“Sexuality and Generational Identities in Sub-Saharan
Africa,” 2000).
Elizabeth
Roberts is
an Assistant Research Scientist at the Institute for Research on Women and
Gender. She received her PhD (2006) from
the joint program in Medical Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley- UC San Francisco. Her general interests include the critical
study of medicine and science, social theory, modernity, gender, race, religion
and Latin America. To date, the bulk of
her research concerns the comparative exploration of the categories of
religion, kinship, and "life", which manifest through the
globalization of biomedical technologies.
Dr. Roberts is currently working on a book manuscript entitled
"Equatorial In-Vitro: Reproductive Medicine and Modernity in
Ecuador," based on her ethnographic analysis of in-vitro fertilization
clinics in urban Ecuador. For this
project she examined what IVF in Ecuador reveals about this global,
person-making technology, and the dynamics of contemporary social life in the
Andes. The research has generated a
number of publications, among them "Extra embryos: Ethics,
cryopreservation and IVF in Ecuador and elsewhere." American Ethnologist,
2007 -34 (1), and "God's Laboratory: Religious Rationalities and Modernity
in Ecuadorian In-Vitro Fertilization." Culture Medicine
and Psychiatry, 2006 - 30(4).
Future projects include the investigation of the burgeoning
international demand for extracted human eggs for stem cell research, and a
study of medical migration and medical tourism.
In addition, Dr. Roberts has a long-standing interest in the practice
and theory of ethnographic methods especially in regards to methods that
address the complexities of contemporary global processes.
Jennifer Robertson is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Michigan. She also has an appointment as Professor of Women's Studies and is a
faculty associate in the Anthropology/History Program. Robertson earned her
Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University in 1985; she was an Invited
Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu
Berlin (1996-97) where she began her current research on the history and
present-day ramifications of eugenics and “blood” ideology in Japan and Israel.
Robertson is the originator and General Editor of Colonialisms, a new book
series from the University of California Press that aims to explore the
historical realities, current significance, and future ramifications of
imperialist practices with origins and boundaries outside of “the West,”
including transnational corporations (e.g., oil and pharmaceutical companies and hospitals), NGOs
and cyberspace (www.ucpress.edu/books/COL.ser.html).
Robertson is currently writing and editing articles and books on the cultural
history of Japanese eugenic colonialism, eugenics and bioethics in Japan today,
and the genre of war art. The liaison between Anthropology and the Life
Sciences Values and Society Program (LSVSP), she has created a new
undergraduate course for Fall 2004, Anthro 232 Genes, Genealogies and
Identities, and is collaborating with Dr. Michael Fetters on a future project
that explores the limits of “culture” in two much mystified illnesses in Japan: atopy (atopic
dermatitis) and depression. Two new medical anthropology courses she is
preparing are International Bioethics and Wellness and Illness in East
Asia. The author of five books— Native and Newcomer: Making and
Remaking a Japanese City (UC Press, 1991 & 1994); Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in
Modern Japan (UC Press, 1998; 2nd ptg. 1999; 3rd ptg. 2001, 1999 Kurt Weill
Prize, 1998 Ruth Benedict Prize); Odoru teikokushugi: Takarazuka ni miru
kindai Nihon no sei to bunka no shokuminchifu
(Tokyo: Gendai
Shokan, 2000); Editor, Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader (Blackwell
2004); and (forthcoming) Editor, A
Companion to the Anthropology of Japan (Blackwell 2004)—her
book-in-progress, Blood and Beauty:
Eugenic Modernity and Empire in Japan (UC Press), focuses on the colonial
history and present circumstances of eugenics, public hygiene, “blood” ideology
and bioethics in Japan/East Asia. With respect to medical anthropology, she has
published and lectured widely on the topic of suicide, sexuality, eugenics and
eugenic modernity, “blood” ideology, social and “race” hygiene, and bioethics
past and present.
Miriam Ticktin
is an Assistant Professor in Women's Studies and Anthropology, with her appointment
supported by the International Institute at the University of Michigan. She received an M.Phil
in English from Oxford University, a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from
Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology done in "co-tutelle" with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in France. She is currently working on her
book manuscript, “Between Justice and Compassion: ‘Les Sans Papiers’ and the Political
Economy of Health, Human Rights and Humanitarianism in France,” as well as
conducting research on the relationship between medical humanitarianism, health
and immigration in the United States, to put in comparative perspective with
her research in France. Her research and teaching interests include human
rights and social justice; the political economy of gender and health; the
anthropology of medicine, health and social suffering; anthropology of ethics;
transnational feminisms and feminist theory; and immigration and “the new
racisms” in Europe.