R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Georges, Eugenia"

Browsing by Author "Georges, Eugenia"

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A Leaky House: Haiti in the Religious Aftershocks of the 2010 Earthquake
(2012-09-05) Payne, Nichole; Faubion, James D.; Georges, Eugenia; Cox, Edward; Woodson, Drexel
My research explores nation building, religious conflict and Christian democratization in Post-earthquake Haiti. Christians I spoke with blamed Vodou for the destructive quake. In Haiti, Vodouisants now require UN protection to practice their faith. The thick religious tension in Haiti post-earthquake could portend deep political riffs and dangerous religious persecution. What is more, the quake has effectively shut down government, leaving in its wake essentially an NGO Republic. Moreover, some sectors of the population, particularly the very poor in the black majority, have been converting to evangelical Christianity at very high rates. About the conversions Vodouisants say, "Kay koule twompe soley soley men li pa twompe lapil." A leaky house can fool the sun, but it can't fool the rain. I took this notion of a leaky house from the discussion with a Vodouisant research participant who often compared the massive conversions to an incomplete and quick cover for the inner turmoils of the Haitian subject. I expanded this phrase to work as analogy for the significant evangelical/NGO infrastructure in Haiti. Can this leaky house last as the pseudo-governmental body of Haiti? Problem: A devastating 7.0 Earthquake rocked Haiti on January 12th, 2010. By January 24th, at least 52 aftershocks measuring 4.5 or greater had been recorded (CBS News 2010). Cite’ De Soleil has turned into a devastating battleground-- Vodouisants against Christians. Christian evangelicals have a carte blanche to intervene into the lives of devastated Haitians, also into the Haitian government. Struggling with insufficient capacity in the face of overwhelming poverty and environmental disasters, the Haitian government has capsized in what many are calling a religious coup d’état. At least 10,000 religious non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are operating in Haiti. Against this background, the actual hypothesis to be tested in this research is that the conversion from Vodou to most sectors of evangelical Christianity and the subsequent violence against Vodou practitioners is, in the case of some of my research participants, actually a modality for expatriation from, or incorporation into, the New Haitian body politic.
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“All You See Is White Skin”: Race and Dermatology in the United States
(2024-07-23) Oyarzun, Yesmar S; Ballestero, Andrea; Georges, Eugenia
In the United States, dermatology education has lagged with respect to including learning materials that feature people with darker skin, leading to divergent outcomes for these patients and gaps in knowledge for trainees and providers. “All You See Is White Skin” engages the voices of dermatologists and dermatology trainees to contextualize, clarify, and critique what has been referred to as dermatology’s “problem with skin color.” This dissertation provides a nuanced understanding of the practices through which dermatologists come to understand skin and understand it differently with regard to skin color and race. I document and critique how the field of dermatology understands dark skin to always be abnormal, whether in a pathological or nonpathological state. Chapter 1 argues that learning how to see and describe skin lesions, in particular, is critical to dermatology trainees’ professionalization. Chapter 2 introduces the concept of “dark bodies,” the depersonalized bodies of people with dark skin, and shows how dark bodies are typically posed and understood to be abnormal: either pathological and diseased, or super and able to avoid damage. Both of these allow for abdication of responsibility for people with dark skin. In Chapter 3, I argue that a constellation of antiblack devices reproduce antiblackness in the specialty. Chapters 4 and 5 attend to the work that especially dermatologists of color have done since the mid 20th century to make people with dark skin visible in dermatology. Overall, this project destabilizes contemporary understandings of biomedical epistemology by showing how both seeing and not seeing are crucial to contemporary biomedicine.
Birth in Crisis: Public Policy and the Humanization of Childbirth in Brazil
(2019-08-07) Williamson, Kathryn Eliza; Georges, Eugenia
This dissertation is about shifting paradigms of care in childbirth. Based on over eight years of experience with Brazil and 24 months of ethnographic research for this project, I track the implementation of Rede Cegonha (Stork Network), a federal government program to improve public maternal and infant health care, during a period of crisis in contemporary Brazil. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork that followed Rede Cegonha from the halls of the Ministry of Health to local government offices, clinics, and communities in Salvador, I examine the program from the perspectives of federal policymakers, local and state government agents, health care professionals, activists, and women and their family members. I draw on their experiences with Rede Cegonha in order to interrogate the program’s central goal of “humanizing” childbirth. Aiming to lower the rate of cesarean section deliveries, combat obstetric violence, and reduce maternal and infant mortality, I contend that Rede Cegonha is a key part of a broader effort to shift the ethics and politics of care in childbirth. The various social actors involved in the program are incited to think and feel differently about care in birth, cultivating ethical subjectivities aligned with the aims of humanization. I show, furthermore, that the strategies Rede Cegonha draws upon are intimately linked to a broader project of instituting and maintaining universal health care in post-authoritarian Brazil. However, the frictions that emerge in Rede Cegonha’s implementation call into question the program’s ability to effectively address the structural conditions that impact maternal and infant health. Health care workers struggle with imperatives to provide care in ways they feel are incompatible with their training and working conditions, and practices officially defined as “humanized” are often interpreted by women and their families as poor care. These tensions in turn reveal the systemic, racialized social inequality that undergirds the very problems Rede Cegonha seeks to remedy. Despite its pitfalls, however, Rede Cegonha produces ethical reflections on the nature of good care and how best to get it and give it in a context of ongoing crisis and persistent social inequality.
Creating Emergency: Hierarchy, Ideology, and Competition in the Humanitarian Network of (Post-)Disaster Port-au-Prince
(2015-11-10) Mantel, Rebecca; Georges, Eugenia; Faubion, James; Howe, Cymene; Duno-Gottberg, Luis
I assert that in the months and years following the January 2010 earthquake, the humanitarian ecology in Port-au-Prince was neither a singular apparatus, as it is often called, nor a scattered and uncontained chaos of uncoordinated NGOs (James 2010). I argue that instead of these two extremes, the humanitarian actors collected into groups distinctive in characteristics such as size, funding mechanisms, and interactions with the attempted humanitarian oversight structure. These factions, internal to the aid apparatus, at once shaped aid workers’ perceptions of urgency and their subsequent views on the needs of the urban Haitian population at a given time while they were shaped, themselves, by the internal logics of competition underlying the inflated population of aid agencies and organizations. In the protracted setting of emergency and crisis in Port-au-Prince, need was based on often opposing analyses of in what particular stage of need lay the imagined state of emergency. These temporal analyses defined the form and function of aid offered to different communities, and the aid apparatus was rarely, if ever, in consensus about where on the continuum of need lay the residents of Port-au-Prince. Multiple contradictory analyses led to discordance within the overall aid effort: some were firmly rooted in the relief timeline typical of an immediate post-disaster temporality, while other took actions reflective of a longer-term development mindset. These contradictory analyses were especially evident in medical settings, wherein the efforts that aid workers took in assisting individual patients often reflected their organizations’ overall attitude concerning the temporality of need of Port-au-Prince as a whole. While aid workers constructed their analyses in part through their daily routines, their interactions with and observations of the medical structure as it existed in the post-earthquake months, these attitudes were also fueled by a broader, underlying internal competition that played out in the hyper-saturated ecology of aid in Port-au-Prince. This dissertation is divided into five chapters. The first chapter lays out the background of each of the three major sets of humanitarian actors that will be the focus of this work: the UN and its military arm, MINUSTAH; Cuban medical aid and its relatively recent Venezuelan-Bolivarian influence; and what I call micro-NGOs, the small-scale organizations that did not fall under the radar or command of the UN humanitarian coordination agency, OCHA. Chapter two focuses on a singular geographic space, the Pétionville tent camp, where I conducted my first months of field research in 2010. By focusing on particular projects implemented within the camp by its managing NGO, I use this camp space to describe how NGOs dealt with the often hazy period of transition between emergency relief and development aid. Chapter three takes a step away from Port-au-Prince and back in time to look at the development of the relationships between Venezuela and Cuba, Cuba and Haiti, and Haiti and Venezuela. This chapter discusses the making of the “fragile state” in contemporary development policy research, and explains how the alliance between Cuba, Venezuela and Haiti marks a turning point in both Latin American regionalism and the oft-referenced “South-South aid” collaborations. The fourth chapter discusses two very disparate ways in which revolution and its identities and ideologies played out in the setting of post-earthquake Port-au-Prince. The first section looks at revolutionary ideology in Chávez’s political and economic campaign as it joins Cuba and Haiti into his Bolivarian movement, while the second section looks at the reasons for which MINUSTAH armed forced have failed to connect with the local populous and has, in fact, come to signify a newfound revolutionary enemy by certain political and geographical factions within Port-au-Prince. The fifth and final chapter looks more closely at the relationship between micro-NGOs and the UN oversight structure. Here, I finalize the argument that I began above wherein competition between the “uncoordinated” NGOs proved to be an integral part of the post-earthquake humanitarian structure, the many disparate pieces actually forming an ecology and an economy that supported the continued presence of all levels of foreign interventionist actors.
Feeling the qi: Emergent bodies and disclosive fields in American appropriations of acupuncture
(1998) Emad, Mitra Clara; Georges, Eugenia
The ethnographic core of this dissertation is comprised of the body stories of American acupuncturists and their clients. I posit a notion of embodiment based on "feeling the qi." A unique bodily sensation during acupuncture treatments, "feeling the qi" also opens up the relationship between embodiment and storytelling. This is a paradigm of embodiment that is enacted in a process of disclosure and requires a revision of the notion of appropriation. The four central chapters are structured in terms of four relational bodies of appropriation: social bodies of translation, technocratic bodies, mediating bodies, and emergent bodies. I open with social bodies as the discursive realm of making sense of bodily being, in that social bodies trace the "translating channels" through which acupuncture is culturally translated into American contexts. Technocratic bodies exert control and act as general gatekeepers in biomedicine's encounters with acupuncture. Acupuncture practitioners are mediating bodies within the social realm in which practitioners, clients, technocracies, and emergent bodies all encounter one another. Emergent bodies in the stories of individual clients of acupuncture evoke thematics of gender, care, partnership, and bodily recovery. This dance of translative, technocratic, mediating, and emergent bodies revises conventional abstractions of "the body" as a metaphor. "Feeling the qi," initiates a movement in this dissertation through these four storied and relational bodies of appropriation, closing with an analysis of issues of positioning and reflexivity.
Gimp Anthropology: Non-Apparent Disabilities and Navigating the Social
(2012-09-05) Orlando, Rebekah; Faubion, James D.; Georges, Eugenia; Ninetto, Amy
Individuals with non-apparent, physical disabilities face unique social challenges from those that are encountered by the more visibly disabled. The absence of visible cues indicating physical impairment causes ambiguity in social situations, leaving the sufferer vulnerable to moral judgments and social sanctions when they are unable to embody and perform to cultural norms. This dynamic generates a closeted status that the individual must learn to navigate. Using Eve Sedgwick's "The Epistemology of the Closet," this paper deploys auto-ethnography, traditional ethnographic techniques, and literature reviews to illuminate a third space of functioning between the outwardly 'healthy' and the visibly disabled.
Lesbicas Negras' Ethics and The Scales of Racialized Sexual Recognitions in Gynecology and Public Discourses in Salvador-Bahia
(2015-04-20) Falu, Nessette; Faubion, James D; Howe, A. Cymene; Bongmba, Elias; Georges, Eugenia; Hennessy, Rosemary
This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation of the bio-cultural ethics of gynecological care among Afro-Brazilian lesbians, or lesbicas negras, in Salvador-Bahia. I argue that many lesbicas negras’ pursuit of what they believe is their human right to reveal their sexuality and integrate it into accessing quality gynecological care and health education from their physicians is informed by their ethical obligation to confront the wide social issue of “preconceito.” Preconceito, which literally translates to “prejudice,” represents a social phenomenon that signals how preconceived ideas can materialize micro-social inequities and the barriers to effective and affirming medical-patient interactions for these women. This project is an interpretation of the motivations and strategies to achieve social well-being in a context entrenched with preconceito toward skin color, homosexuality, poverty, and more. I contextualize particular strategies that help these women conceive themselves as agents of their well-being as black women, homosexuals, and as bodies historicized and continually marginalized as a population afflicted with economic, political, and health disparities. Theoretically, I demonstrate the ethical as a domain of relationships that my key interlocutors have toward themselves (also with others), and as a result, I pay attention to how such relationships inform a particular set of ethical practices for the acquisition of well-being and human rights as openly black gay women. I interpret such relationships to the self to be composed of the understandings my interlocutors have about the impact that the freedom to speak about their sexuality, particularly as consumers of healthcare system, has upon their well-being. Analytically, I scale the social complexities of pursuing recognition of sexual liberty across public discourses, micro-social quotidian experiences, and social interactions. Thus, I argue that lesbicas negras become ethical subjects everyday as they strive toward well-being and such strivings can demonstrate the complicated relationships across sexual health, sexuality, racial formations, social well-being, citizenship, public discourses, and freedom (libertade).
Locating Nonviolence: the people, the past, and resistance in Palestinian political activism
(2014-04-24) Alazzeh, Ala; Faubion, James D.; Georges, Eugenia; Makdisi, Ussama
This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation of political culture and contemporary activism in Palestine. I illustrate the entangled processes that enabled the discourse of nonviolence to flourish in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) in the last ten years. I particularly explore the refashioning of the Palestinian Authority under the banner of a ‘state’ through intensive structural reforms that emphasize ‘security’ as a marker of political modernity and the dominant liberal hegemonic understanding of morality through a shifting global political context that impacts perceptions on political violence. In addition, the phenomenon of NGO-ization in the OPTs has functioned as a force of re-politicization through the construction of a new paradigm of ‘nonviolence’ to narrate the Palestinian history of struggle. I argue that in contrast to the hegemonic discourse of nonviolence, it is the question of mass-based participation that fuels the great nostalgia among Palestinian activists in the post-Oslo era for the experience of the first intifada. This study also addresses perceptions and practices of resistance that arise in response to the colonial modalities of control, analyzing the fusion of discursive processes that produced a new taxonomy of society under colonial control and the structural transformations of the material conditions of society. I ethnographically demonstrate how contemporary confrontation politics in the OPTs function in opposition to the logic of settler colonialism, where the primary focus of colonial subjugation is located in the land, on the body, and in political consciousness. Confrontational politics mobilizes around these same sites through the notion of dignity and the primacy of the land. I contextualize these discussions by examining representations of armed struggle that still prevail within local activism in the OPTs, particular through resistance song and literature, in connection to the history of the Palestinian national imaginary and the contemporary neoliberal economy and process of state-formation.
Over the Moon: Extended-Cycle Contraception and the Recent Evolution of Medicine and Womanhood
(2011) Jones, Laura Kathryn; Georges, Eugenia
This dissertation is based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork that followed the development and diffusion of extended-cycle hormonal contraception, or birth control that is designed to eliminate monthly bleeding. It encompassed several sites and multiple constituencies: a clinical trial, documented medical conferences, users, potential users, and refusers of the pharmaceuticals, along with key academic and popular proponents of their adoption. Extended-cycle contraception is a critical topic because this new generation of pills, IUDs, shots, and implants is not only refiguring the length of women's cycles, but it is also augmenting the extent to which its users' bodies are medicalized, or subjected to a type of manipulation and regulation that was previously impossible. No longer just for pregnancy prevention, these regimens are increasingly touted as elective enhancement technologies that may improve on the human design, on the one hand, and as crucial preventative medicine for diseases such as reproductive cancers, on the other hand. Remarkably, these pharmaceuticals are as socially complex as they are chemically--they may facilitate the renegotiation of constructions of womanhood, nature, and progress.
Relativism and rage: Representations of female circumcision and female genital mutilation
(2003) Miller-Mitchell, Beverly; Georges, Eugenia
In recent years, there has been an enormous surge in the level of public awareness in the United States regarding female circumcision/female genital mutilation (FC/FGM). These practices, historically portrayed by anthropologists as predominately African cultural rituals known most commonly as female circumcision, have been reconstructed in various discursive sites more frequently as violence and torture against girls and women. In the latter sites, the practices are referred to as female genital mutilation. This reconceptualization has been conducted in large part beyond the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology and at times in opposition to relativistic scholarship in the field, creating a dichotomous ideology that has pitted cultural relativists against political activists aimed at eradicating FC/FGM. These polarized perspectives are played out in the exponential growth of multi-sited representations of FC/FGM within academic, applied and popular culture arenas. Within popular culture, representations of these practices have become ubiquitous and are the subject matter of innumerable print, television and radio "documentary" stories. The production of everyday knowledge has become so mainstreamed that FGM has surpassed being featured on Oprah as a measure of it cultural embeddedness by additionally appearing as the subject matter of television dramas, stage productions, and adult and juvenile literary fiction. This dissertation traces representations of FC/FGM in various Western discursive sites and analyzes the "ideological work" which the debates have produced in arenas of anthropology, law, advocacy and popular culture. Cultural relativists are often charged with condoning the practices, while the "outraged" are portrayed as neocolonial, moral imperialists. I will argue that anthropology has not responded to the "rage" by discarding its relativistic roots, but rater channels its relativistic scholarship to inform "appropriate" change efforts aimed at reducing FC/FGM practices. Laws within the U.S., on the other hand, effectively invalidate cultural relativism by negating "culture" as a reason for FC/FGM and by criminalizing FC/FGM entirely. Finally, popular culture functions to situate immigrants as the "exotic Other" among us, while becoming part of the global discourse to eradicate FC/FGM. Both our laws and popular culture show that we critique others in ways we cannot critique ourselves.
The Power of the Personal: Science and Society in Postsocialist Czech Republic
(2023-04-17) Lotterman, Charles; Georges, Eugenia; Ballestero, Andrea
My dissertation centers around themes of trust and truth within the context of Czech science in order to, ultimately, join literature on the relation between liberalism, individualism, and empiricism. By depicting the ways that personal experiences figure into the production of scientific facts for my interlocutors, it shows how, in contrast with the normative ideal, conceptions of scientific objectivity can be constructed from appeals to subjectivity. Importantly, I ground my findings squarely within the anthropology of science, a literature that recognizes scientists and scientific inquiry as contingently and reciprocally swept up in social currents – in this case, those of a post-socialist, nascent liberal society. In doing so, my project offers a unique vantage toward Central Europe, a region that lays complexly within multiple junctures. I rewrite the narrative of the region, drawing strange parallels between socialist-era dissidents’ hopeful appeals for “living in truth,” and contemporary illiberal populists’ angry renunciation of expertise, for example. Locating my ethnographic findings within such contexts, my dissertation argues that liberalism’s multiple and conflicting meanings, from the agreement of a social contract to the celebration of liberty and the marketplace of ideas, blasts open space for a far greater range of practices than has been traditionally appreciated.
The social relations of a basic life science laboratory and its heterotopic milieu
(2015-12-03) Chryssikos, Timothy James; Faubion, James; Georges, Eugenia; Harter, Deborah
The social relations of a “basic” life science laboratory, its relations to the other life sciences, to the physical sciences, to clinical medicine, and to the economic imperatives of the present era are examined. This work attends to some of the "day to day" activities of this group as it transitioned to a state-of-the-art, architecturally “open” and strategically situated research facility designed to enhance "unplanned" interactions among its variously trained occupants. These activities are situated within a broader discussion of this laboratory's primary disciplinary influences and the specific epistemic contests in which it was primarily invested. A theorization of these relations is carefully distinguished from prior approaches in "science studies" and elsewhere, thereby providing a new framework for analyzing inter-scientific relations.
Waterbirth and Russian-American Exchange: From the Iron Curtain to Facebook
(2012-09-05) Belousova, Ekaterina; Georges, Eugenia; Ninetto, Amy; Long, Elizabeth
The doctoral dissertation “Waterbirth and Russian-American Exchange: From the Iron Curtain to Facebook” presents the social history of the Russian waterbirth movement, from the Cold War epoch to the present. One of the first ethnographies to examine Russian-American cultural exchange, this study fills a number of gaps in both Russian and American cultural history, bringing together the issues of religion, science, gender, body politics and the state. By drawing on interviews with Russian and American birth practitioners, as well as participant observation of the birthing practices on both continents, I seek to define their agendas for the development of alternative ideologies and practices, as well as their specific effects, experienced on both global and local scales. In particular, I attempt to problematize the conventional narratives of globalization and biomedicalization, presenting “local” cultures either as passive victims of the dominant Western agent or rebels exercising futile resistance. Despite the turbulent effects of Western intervention into the Russian value system and everyday practices, the local culture of Russia proved capable of producing, promoting, and communicating to the world particular models and schemes that proved to be viable, went global, and affected the vision of the body and self in the Western world. By examining the case of the waterbirth movement, the project seeks to enrich current understanding of the information flows between Russia and the West. By looking at Russian and American utopian projects, which center on science, nature, tradition and globalization, and carefully tracing their sources, origins, mutual impacts and conflicts, we can get a better understanding of the formation and distribution of authoritative knowledge on global and local levels. An empirical study of this specific set of problems is expected to stimulate a valuable insight into the mechanisms governing the relationships between social orders, complex transnational identity formation, and global/local knowledge production in late modern societies.

Browsing by Author "Georges, Eugenia"

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