Volume 55, No. 1, Spring 1996
The Inventions of Practice
Shirley Fiske and Erve Chambers
Key words: Practicing anthropology, professionalization, professional organizations, employment, training, ethics, US.
The integration of applied and practicing anthropology into the professional mainstream has never been as apparent as in recent years. As this integration has proceeded, little attention has been paid to the variety of interpretations offered to describe current modes of anthropological practice. The authors suggest that the idea of practice is still in the process of being invented and devote their attention to discussing differences in some of the major ways in which applied and practicing anthropology has recently been represented. The article focuses on three components of practicing anthropology, beginning with a discussion of the institutionalization of practice in the last decade. The authors then examine the extent to which recent reports on the employment of practicing anthropologists might help us identify different modes of practice. The article concludes with a discussion of a variety of issues related to practice, each of which has yielded different models and interpretations.
Worklessness and Social Pathologies in Aboriginal Communities
Peter Douglas Elias
Key words: employment, work, economic change, community economies, social pathologies, planning, development, Indians, Inuit, Metis, Eskimo, Canada, Manitoba
This article describes a model of relationships between worklessness and entrenched patterns of harmful behavior. Most observers agree that worklessness is a cause of social pathologies, and the worklessness is an effect of near-global and broad local causes. Pathological behavior, once entrenched and passed from generation to generation, may become the culture of reproduction. For decades, aboriginal people in Canada, the United States, and Greenland have been attacking the causes and consequences of social pathologies all along the chain of cause and effect, from near-global causes to spiritual and psychological suffering. A development initiative aimed at any link in the chain can consume a large part of the resources that a community might have available for development, so it is important for local planners and decision-makers to know exactly how social pathologies arose in their community - so development resources can be most effectively applied. The model is tested with a case study of Churchill, Manitoba, to illustrate how then it may be used in planning.
Prevention and Resiliency: A Cross-Cultural View of Farmworkers' and Farmers' Beliefs about Work Safety
James Grieshop, Martha Stiles, and Ninfa Villanueva
Key words: farmers, farmworkers, agriculture, safety, locus of control, US, Canada
Two loci of control scales were adapted to farm safety for farmworkers and farmers in California. Internal and External dimensions and hazard coping strategies were used. Searching for Safety (SS), a behavioral strategy, involves planning for hazardous events. Accepting Danger (AD), a cognitive strategy, accepts uncertainty and the unpredictability of some events. Although workers scored high on Internality, Externality was higher - this suggests that accident control is placed outside of themselves and given over to God, luck, or "bosses." Farmworkers utilized AD and SS with equal success. Farmers scored higher on Internal beliefs, thus emphasizing personal control over safety, yet acknowledging worker responsibility. They placed more faith in their planning efforts (SS) than in the mental mechanism of accepting uncertainty (AD). Factor analyses showed the two scales successfully measured Internality and Externality and two coping strategies. Suggested improvements include standardizing one scale for both groups and identifying specific behaviors and mental strategies.
Dissenting Workers and Social Control: A Case Study of the Hotel Industry in Huatulco, Oaxaca
Michelle E. Madsen Camacho
Key words: tourism, development, unions, labor market, Mexico, Oaxaca, Huatulco
This article utilizes a microlevel analysis to understand employee social relations within the hotel industry in the burgeoning tourism zone of Huatulco, Oaxaca, Mexico. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews revealed a series of tensions that were exacerbated by a union/non-union division among workers. In this case, workers in non-union jobs fared significantly better, both economically and socially, than did their unionized co-workers. The study demonstrates the cyclical patterns of employment which impose union control on workers in less stable and more physically rigorous jobs. Union employees discuss at length their dissatisfaction with the union and reveal how workers adapt, accommodate, and resist - both directly and indirectly - behavioral and ideological workplace pressures.
Health Care Seeking Behavior and Formal Integration: A Rural Mexican Case Study
John C. Kennedy and Karen Olsson
Key words: biomedicine, integration, health seeking, Mexico
In 1990 we interviewed 205 clients attending the rural community health clinic in Tlayacapan, Morelos to determine the range of health care practitioners that people consulted and the reasons behind their choice. Using a separate questionnaire, we also interviewed 17 health care practitioners, ranging from biomedical physicians to indigenous healers, regarding their etiology and treatment of various biomedical and traditional health problems. Analysis of the data revealed that health care seeking behavior is linked to a person's perceived etiology or cultural knowledge. The more traditional the perceived etiology, the more apt the client was to choose a traditional practitioner or, for practitioners, the more apt to prescribe traditional treatments. Our data identified specific practitioner statuses which could serve as models for the formal integration of biomedical and traditional health. While conducted in a Third World context, our findings have implications for the growing use of alternative health care in the First World.
Can We Predict What Mothers Do? Modeling Childhood Diarrhea in Rural Mexico
Gery Ryan and Homero Martínez
Key words: decision making, diarrhea, medical anthropology, research methods, Mexico
In this paper, we build a decision-model to predict how Mexican women treat childhood diarrhea. From ethnographic interviewing, we found that women's beliefs about types and causes of diarrhea, and women's perceptions about different treatments do not uniformly affect behavior. Some beliefs appear to affect treatment choices while others have no noticeable consequences. We also found that beliefs about diarrhea and its treatment varied among community members. Despite this intracultural variation, we built a decision-making model that predicts 84% of an independent sample of reported treatments. The model uses 11 rules. The research has implications for medical anthropology, research methods, and medical intervention strategies.
Health and Mental Health among Mexican American Immigrants: Implications for Survey Research
Roberta Baer
Key words: US Census, Mexican Americans, mental health, US, Florida
This paper provides an example of the policy implications of the need to understand emic categories. As part of research commissioned by the U.S. Census Bureau, in-depth interviewing on the topic of health and mental health was conducted among Mexican and Mexican-American migrant workers in Florida. It was found that perceptions of these topics differ from the biomedical model, but are somewhat similar to the categorizations elicited from a sample of white middle class, highly educated urbanites. These results suggest that at least for this domain, standard demographic variables, such as ethnicity, level of education, language, and income seem to be less critical than is the lay/ professional distinction. The biomedical categories used in survey research may be inappropriate not only for ethnic minorities, but also for the mainstream population.
The Evolution of AIDS Work in a Puerto Rican Community Organization
Merrill Singer
Key words: AIDS, Puerto Ricans, community-based organizations, applied medical anthropology, US, Connecticut, Hartford
This article represents a follow-up report on the further evolution of AIDS prevention education work at the Hispanic Health Council (HHC), a community-based health research, service, and advocacy organization, and on the changing role of anthropology in the AIDS work of the HHC. The development of community-based AIDS programs have attracted the interest of public health AIDS researchers because of recognition that to be effective AIDS prevention must be sensitive to the cultures of targeted populations. A further aim of this article is to use the experience of the HHC in AIDS prevention over the last ten years to review critically several assertions made in the AIDS prevention literature concerning the impact of government funding on local prevention efforts and the surrmounterbility of barriers to community-based AIDS work.
Caretakers' Management of Childhood Acute Respiratory Infections and the Use of Antibiotics, Bohol, the Philippines
Alexandra Simon, Mohamed Janabi, Gabriel Kalmayem, Godfrey Waidubu, Esperanza Galia, Lenore Manderson, and Ian Riley
Key words: acute respiratory infections (ARI), childhood, folk classification, prescriptions, antibiotics, Philippines
This article describes the results of a qualitative research study which investigated the diagnosis and management of childhood acute respiratory infections (ARI) by their usual caretakers. Data are drawn from in-depth interviews with caretakers and health professionals, from observations conducted within the pediatric outpatient department and the pediatric ward, and from case-studies of sick infants. Caretakers-mothers and grandmothers-take advantage of a wide variety of health care options including home-based, traditional and biomedical, the majority obtaining treatment from different medical systems for the same episode. Resort to traditional therapeutic practice may precede or follow resort to biomedical care or home use of western pharmaceuticals. The study indicated women's compliance with medical prescriptions tended to be incomplete because of limited financial resources, fear of overmedication, or inappropriate emphasis on drugs prescribed for symptomatic relief. Overuse of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals was also common. The study draws attention to the difficulty that programs for the control of ARI have in promoting antibiotics for severe illness while restricting their use. It draws attention too to discrepancies among program manager's, doctor's, and caretaker's definitions of severe illness, and the implications of this in the household management of ARI.
Biodiversity and Medicinal Plants in Nepal: Involving Untouchables in Conservation and Development
Mary M. Cameron
Key words: biodiversity, medicinal plants, untouchables, Nepal
In this article, I consider the specific uses made of findings from anthropological research to a current biodiversity conservation project in Nepal. The project links biodiversity conservation with the marketing of high-altitude medicinal plants in the vicinity of Khaptad National Park. Drawing from ethnographic and historical data I demonstrate that employing a specific group of people untouchables achieves the project's key goal: to produce the greatest amount of benefit for the greatest number of people.
Women, Descent, and Tenure Succession among the Bambara of West Africa: A Changing Landscape
William I. Grigsby
Key words: gender, women, kinship, inheritance, land tenure, West Africa, Mali, Bambara
In many regions of Africa, gender-biased interventions and land tenure systems traditionally controlled by patrilineal descent groups have limited women's capacity to contribute to development. Empirical evidence suggests a shift among some cultures from corporate to more individualized forms of tenure, often associated with adoption of commercialized agricultural practices, which may lead to the displacement of existing land use systems (such as bush fallow). Affinal women, whose tenure security is marginal, may depend upon resources whose production and/or regeneration owes in large part to the fallow stage of a land extensive production cycle. Elimination of fallow by default eliminates resources of economic importance to women. Among the Bambara of Mali, employing the term "individualization" to any such change ignores the reality that the individuals in question are overwhelmingly male, and thus the gendered character of change may be of more fundamental importance than any tendency toward more individualizedrights.
Economic Mobility Strategies among Guatemalan Peasants: Prospects and Limits of Nontraditional Vegetable Cash Crops
Liliana R. Goldin
Key words: economic mobility, peasants, development, agriculture, Maya, Guatemala
A study of upward economic mobility was conducted in a Maya township of western Guatemala using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Strategies used by poor families to better their economic situations are described and analyzed. The production of nontraditional vegetable crops is discussed in the context of the likelihood of economic differentiation and classes developing within and between townships. A trend toward the development of unequal relations between towns raises questions about the prospects for the production of nontraditionals as a development strategy.
Indigenous Linguistic Revitalization and Outsider Interaction: The Itzaj Maya Case
Charles A. Hofling
Key words: indigenous languages, revitalization, language extinction, Guatemala, Itzaj Maya
Indigenous languages and cultures are under threat of extinction as never before. Cultural revitalization and language renewal are increasingly linked to environmental conservation. In this context anthropologists andlinguists are increasingly involved in both revitalization and conservation efforts. These efforts often have the opposite effects of those intended. The Itzaj Maya case is examined below to outline the dynamics of revitalization, conservation and development in the Petén, Guatemala, pointing out potential dangers of outsider involvement and suggesting some guidelines for participation in indigenous revitalization movements.
Malinowski Award Lecture: Being an Anthropologist, A Reflection
Claudio Esteva-Fabregat
