Charles L. Briggs
Weatherhead Resident Scholar
In July 2008, anthropologist and Weatherhead Fellow Charles Briggs and public-health physician and SAR research associate Clara Mantini-Briggs, both in residence at SAR this year, returned to the Delta Amacuro in the Venezuelan rainforest to follow up on work they had done with the indigenous Warao group during the 1992–93 cholera outbreak. That research resulted in their 2007 J. I. Staley Prize-winning book Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare. They returned to the Delta in 2008, using the cash award from the 2007 Staley to collaborate with local communities in developing innovative health policies and practices. “But a conversation with indigenous leaders Conrado and Enrique Moraleda changed everything,” said Briggs. From photographic and video documentation collected at the request of the indigenous health leaders, Briggs and Mantini-Briggs are also producing a film about this incident, directed by UNM Professor Miguel Gandert and with the participation of indigenous UC-Berkeley graduate student Kalim Smith. “We hope the film will help us reach beyond the anthropological community to a much larger audience,” said Mantini-Briggs. “There are messages here about human dignity and justice, and about the possibilities that people themselves can be engaged in understanding and producing valuable knowledge about the health problems in their own communities.”
Christopher B. Teuton
Katrin H. Lamon Resident Scholar
As a Native American literary studies scholar specializing in the relationship between oral and literate discourses, Teuton found his work with the Liars’ Club benefited from setting aside certain methodologies that come out of ethnographic and anthropological theory and folklore studies. Teuton and the Club members agreed it was critical to include contemporary stories in the volume along with traditional stories and stories recounting Cherokee history because they want to avoid the perception that Cherokee storytelling is an art of the past.
James A. Trostle
Weatherhead Resident Scholar
This unique research project employs the concepts and methods of “cultural epidemiology,” an approach James Trostle presented in his 2005 book Epidemiology and Culture that links culture to human health at population scale. Moving beyond a standard “risk factor” analysis, Trostle and his team are drawing upon systems thinking and the social sciences in innovative ways.
Lynn M. Morgan
Weatherhead Resident Scholar
In Latin America over the past decade, there has been a “fairly sudden massive social mobilization around reproductive rights issues” involving governments and churches as well as NGOs and individuals, says Lynn Morgan. This trend has resulted in paradoxical policy changes. Costa Rica, for example, has a notably progressive record in health and gender equity, yet has not implemented sex-education programs or approved emergency contraception, and has banned in vitro fertilization. “This current project is, in a sense, pulling together these two different strands of my work, and bringing them together in the reproductive rights debates that are going on now across Latin America.” Morgan will be contributing four chapters to this book, which she is co-authoring with Roberts.
Sherry Farrell Racette
Anne Ray Resident Scholar
Drawing on her multi-faceted network of scholars, Cree speakers, elders, and artists who continue to work with large animal hides and porcupine quill, she has assembled a trove of information about the mesmerizing coats, and has begun to analyze the possible meanings of their iconography, construction, and history. One of her major goals is to make both half-sized and full-sized models of the coats, and take them back to the communities to see what memories they might trigger.