Newsletter: February 2006
Janelle S. Taylor, Contributing Editor
HIV Testing Us: Colleagues Become Key Informants
Submitted by Doug Goldsmith (Chair, AIDS and Anthropology Research Group)
HIV has tested us all, stretching the fabric of our theorizing, measuring our compassion and challenging our own prejudices, and again and again revealing the yawning gaps in our risk reduction strategies and in existing public health remedies. Many anthropologists have encountered AIDS concerns in the course of their ongoing research, or have become newly committed to study and ameliorate the impact of HIV. This work has led anthropologists to observe, at times to participate in and at times to evaluate, various interventions, such as needle exchange programs and condom distribution efforts in the cities of the US, as well as in Africa, and Asia, and the many hot spots of the burgeoning AIDS pandemic.
As anthropologists in AIDS studies we often become spokespersons on AIDS issues and at times become advocates for AIDS causes. However we soon learn that without key collaborators we cannot accomplish the work that needs to be done in documenting the struggles with this pandemic, epic and mundane, and in evaluating the responses and remedies, from protest and outreach to medicine and prevention. For this we must rely on interactions with many people with whom we have developed crucial relationships.
As medical anthropologists we might find wisdom in the words of Oliver Sacks, who muses in a footnote (on p. 216) of his book The Island of the Colorblind that “An anthropologist sees cultures, one wants to say, as a physician sees patients. The penetration, the sharing, of different consciousnesses and cultures needs skills beyond those of the historian or the scientist; it needs artistic and poetic powers of a special kind.” Oliver Sacks is not satisfied with the routine way a physician may “see” a patient, and is equally not merely praising the holistic way an anthropologist might “see” culture. Indeed, seeing the “whole box” with its “working parts” necessitates a level of abstraction that makes for a gruff bedside manner in a healer, or a preoccupied ceremonial-side stance in an ethnographer.
The special kind of artistic, poetic powers -- needed to truly see what is most important, and then perhaps to perceptively concoct and then realistically recommend potential solutions, while sensitively offering corroboration and/or solace – seem to be neither easily taught nor somehow innate. They sometimes seem to develop, however, when we speak of our close collaboration with our colleagues – people living with AIDS, peer educators, outreach workers, the many hands-on care-givers who are buddies or doctors or nurses or facilitators. These needed artistic, poetic powers must, perhaps, reflect empathy and humble observation, and be forged in our interactions with those who are embedded in the search for a cure, who are living the unfolding story that we are trying to tell.
In Print on the Website
Submitted by Lauren Wynne (SMA Webmaster)
Following ongoing SMA initiatives aimed at student members (see the December 2005 column), the SMA website (www.medanthro.net) would like to encourage students to submit their thesis and dissertation titles to our In Print section. This section is an important resource not only for our members but also for other health scholars across the world. The In Print section offers the opportunity for students (as well as established scholars) to make their work visible to this diverse audience, an important step both for building a career and for building a global community of medical anthropologists. Please send your thesis or dissertation title to webmaster@medanthro.net.
Watch This Space!
Look for planned future columns on:
- a new SMA book award
- a newly revitalized SMA student organization
- medical anthropology beyond the U.S.
- advice & mentoring from senior medical anthropologists
- conference reports
- brief discussions of substantive issues
Your contributions on any of these themes are most welcome!
Please send column contributions to the SMA Contributing Editor, Janelle Taylor (jstaylor@u.washington.edu)