International Studies Concentration

Asking how diseases are understood in different cultural and social contexts and relations of power gives historians important insight into Latin America’s past and present. How cultural and social context and relations of power change in new epidemiological environments—the ways diseases “talk”—is equally important.

Jerome, Jessica Scott. A right to health: medicine, marginality, and health care reform in northeastern Brazil. Texas, 2015. 177p bibl index afp ISBN 9780292766624 cloth, $50.00 [CC] Anthropologist Jerome (St. John's College, New Mexico) offers an absorbing ethnography of a poor urban community that complements a number of other recently published and excellent studies of the marginality and resolution of the poor (e.g., Janice Perlman, Favela, 2010) and commodification of scalpel-driven beauty services, e.g., Alexander Edmonds's Pretty Modern (CH, Sep'11, 49-0353) in Brazil. Jerome is primarily interested in the options and choices of health care access. She draws a sharp contrast between an older generation of residents who protested for the expansion of health care (which became a universal right in the 1988 Brazilian constitution) with a younger generation more critical of the public clinic and hospital system. Younger people sometimes use being able to pay for private care as a status symbol of their presumed upward mobility. " Neoliberal economics " is too vague a catchphrase for all that excludes and marginalizes, and readers may not be entirely convinced that the state, with its lumbering inefficiencies and frequently corrupted or neglectful " servants, " can provide better health care than those driven by subsidized and competitive markets. Nevertheless, Jerome's ethnography is rich and affecting because of the deep relationships she developed during several long-term stays within a favela over a ten-year period. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels/libraries.-I. W. Read,

Latin America is a geographically, culturally, linguistically, and politically diverse region that is generally understood to include all countries south of the US/Mexico border as well as the Caribbean countries where a Latin based language (Spanish, French, or Portuguese) is spoken.

We compare Japan and Chile in two focused ways:  1) epidemiological change driven by globalization; and 2) the efforts by states to shape the meaning of disease categories, and thereby attempt to control diseases through publicly directed medical intervention and law.  Co-authored with Michael Weiner.

A review of Charles L. Briggs, Norbelys Gómez, Tirso Gómez, and Clara Mantini-Briggs Una enfermedad monstruo: Indígenas derribando el cerco de la discriminación en salud. Buenos Aires: Lugar Editorial, 2015; and Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

This volume investigates the multifaceted SHAPES (socio-historic, artistic, political, and ecological significance) of global disease. It challenges conventional views of infection and transmission by associating epidemics with ideologies and their accompanying institutions. It argues that the physical threat of epidemics is irrevocably linked to culture, economic resources, social class, and power. Epidemics involve both the infected and non-infected, affect the local and global, and they expose control and neglect. This book provides a radical collaborative approach, drawing contributors from closely related and vastly distant fields in the search for innovative ways to address human suffering, and to find real solutions that may determine whether people live or die. Such an approach is needed within an increasingly interconnected world where both pathological diseases and health behaviors are infectious. Experts from fifteen diverse disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities present case studies from across the world and time, demonstrating the uniqueness of each disease and epidemic in its place, but also the shared experiences that span human life and death. In order to identify, measure and control epidemics, we must understand epidemics more as long biosocial processes than abrupt events in nature or culture. Such methodology examines the meaning we attach to epidemics, as well as their material reality, and provides a more complete understanding of how epidemics shape and are shaped.

The book is highly relevant for understanding Covid-19, but it also speaks to aspects of life that are much older and will extend well beyond our current, ghastly pandemic.  One of the lessons of the book is that humanity has always died from, survived, made sense of, or lived with epidemics.  Covid-19 is just the latest reminder of this ancient and universal fact. The epilogue of The Shapes of Epidemics and Global Diseases conceptualized the historical teachings of how epidemics shape us and how we shape them described in the book to the current COVID-19 pandemic.

I am happy to announce that I can now share the entirety of The Shapes of Epidemics and Global Disease introduction.
This volume investigates the multifaceted SHAPES (socio-historic, artistic, political, and ecological significance) of global disease. It challenges conventional views of infection and transmission by associating epidemics with ideologies and their accompanying institutions. It argues that the physical threat of epidemics is irrevocably linked to culture, economic resources, social class, and power. Epidemics involve both the infected and non-infected, affect the local and global, and they expose control and neglect. This book provides a radical collaborative approach, drawing contributors from closely related and vastly distant fields in the search for innovative ways to address human suffering, and to find real solutions that may determine whether people live or die. Such an approach is needed within an increasingly interconnected world where both pathological diseases and health behaviors are infectious. Experts from fifteen diverse disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities present case studies from across the world and time, demonstrating the uniqueness of each disease and epidemic in its place, but also the shared experiences that span human life and death. In order to identify, measure and control epidemics, we must understand epidemics more as long biosocial processes than abrupt events in nature or culture. Such methodology examines the meaning we attach to epidemics, as well as their material reality, and provides a more complete understanding of how epidemics shape and are shaped.

We will explore, celebrate, and recognize the lived reality of Latin America, the richly diverse and fascinating area of the world that includes Mesoamerica, South America and the Caribbean.  The course uses multiple perspectives that focus on gender, race and class to understand the experiences and processes that have shaped the region. Students will reflect on identity, revolutions, nation-state formation, modernization and social mobilization based on analysis of primary sources such as cinema, music, literature, art and historical documents along with many rich secondary sources.  The course is a radically interdisciplinary study of Latin America; crossing discipline boundaries will give us multifaceted insight into the lives and cultures of Latin American peoples.

This class begins with a question: What do the two largest and, arguably, most powerful nations in Latin America have in common? Brazil and Mexico are postcolonial societies of fallen Iberian empires. They are also regionally commanding, exceedingly diverse, devoutly Catholic, socially unequal and traditionally exploitative of their poor and weak (especially the indigenous peoples of Mexican or descendants of African slaves of Brazil). These countries also attract thousands of foreign visitors who marvel at their natural beauty and celebrate their rich multicultural traditions. Through history, politics, culture and current events, this class will compare these two diverse nations. Text, film, music and images will be used in a classroom environment that stresses multiple pedagogical styles. This class may be of special interest to students who wish to study abroad in Latin America.

Through lectures, discussion, student presentations, and other pedagogies, this class aims to achieve four primary objectives: 1)  To explore the role that disease and medicine played in important historical events;  2) to study the social, institutional and cultural dimensions of disease, ailments, and medicine today’s global societies; 3) to become familiar with some of the basic mechanics of epidemic diseases, such as smallpox, influenza, yellow fever, cholera, bubonic plague, syphilis, AIDS, and the Covid-19; 4) and to understand how some of the most important policy debates in international studies take (or should take) infectious diseases into consideration.  Western (bio-) medicine is emphasized, but Eastern traditions and alternative medicine are not excluded.  Students interested in careers in medicine, nutrition or public health may consider this class.

Europeans who wrote about Brazil during the colonial period (1500-1822) usually depicted the country as a healthy Eden and an exception to the "torrid zone. " For more than three centuries, a mostly positive impression of health and climate, shared by intellectuals across the Atlantic, influenced colonialism, European rivalries, the slave trade, and early national sentiment. The enduring reputation was ruined suddenly in the mid-nineteenth century by the arrival of new plagues and prejudicial ideas of racial degeneracy. Both the diseases and ideas were infectious, dramatically altering understandings of health and race well into the twentieth century. The rapid change in perception is illustrated by the beliefs of three medical experts, José Francisco Xavier Sigaud, Robert Dundas, and Gustavus Richard Brown Horner. These three men, French-Brazilian, Irish, and American respectively, exemplify the prevalent and transatlantic views of Brazil's climate held by most medical and scientific men who lived in or studied Brazil. Yet they would revise their opinions dramatically when unfamiliar plagues arrived after 1849. When optimism finally returned in the early twentieth century, it rested on a new understanding of climate and race, but their entangled nature continues to persist.

Like the coronavirus, another contagious, airborne, respiratory, and viral disease has escaped collective immune responses and medical interventions through mutated variants to create destructive pandemics. The influenza virus shows that epidemics cannot be understood or controlled through the old beliefs that nature and culture are ontologically separate and dichotomous. This article first explores the entangled being of influenza using a historical method and a short case study from Brazil. In the late 19th century, Brazilians recognized an influenza pandemic in ways that thoroughly integrated matter and significance. Next, the article discusses influenza from biological, chemical, and ecological perspectives. I argue that the properties of influenza viruses and other infectious diseases are not self-revealing or a reflection of ourselves, but something in between and among, objects dynamically marked, shaped, and receptive to new translations into human language and understanding. This position calls for a different epidemiological ethics that discards other unhelpful dichotomies (life/ non-life, harmful/ harmless germs, healthy/ ill) to bring us an ethics of epidemiology best rooted in the relational and radiant ontology of Buddhist belief.