Area of Interest:

Medical anthropology; Gender and health; Economic anthropology; Political economy; Globalization; Mexico; Latin America

Education:

Ph.D. CUNY, 1973

Research & Activities:

Research Background: I have done extensive field research in Mexico in rural and urban settings, where I studied peasants and shanty town swellers, their sources of livelihood, migration, family, structure, gender relations, ethnic relations, development and change, religious beliefs and practices, and traditional and modern medicine and how these have been affected by globalization. For the past 20 years my research has focused on issues related to medical anthropology. My major concerns are with the cross-cultural comparison of healing systems and their efficacy, with the anthropology of sickness and the healing process, and with the relation between gender, sickness and society.

Most recently I have done fieldwork n the United States and addressed issues relation to the ways in which medical concepts influence people's experience in daily life. My most recent focus has been on how the New Genetics and the new reproductive technologies influence family and kinship in American society.

I have also given special attention to methodological issues in medical anthropology. I have done studies of and published on peasant economics and politics, dissident religious movements, efficacy of therapeutic systems including Spiritualist healing and biomedicine, medical pluralism and medical choice, and the cultural underpinnings of medical systems including biomedical knowledge such as the new genetics.

In addition to having spent eight years doing field research in Mexico and the United States, I had the opportunity to experience other cultures through stays in Brazil, Bolivia, China, Japan, India, Europe and the Middle East.

Present Research: My current research continues to build upon my previous published works dealing with comparitive medical systems, biomedical knowledge and women's health.

Selected Publications:

2000 Experiencing the New Genetics: Family and Kinship on the Medical Frontier. University of Pennsylvnia Press.

1994 Women in Pain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 239 pp.

1994 Spiritualist Healing in Mexico: Successes and Failures of Alternative Therapeutics. Republished with a new preface by Sheffield Publishing Company.

1994 Sacred and Biomedical Healing Compared. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 8(2) pp. 179-198.

1994 El cuidado de la salud. un problema de relaciones de poder. In America Indigena vol XXXVII No 2 1977. Also republished in In La Antropología Médica en México. Tomo 2 Ed. by Roberto Campos: Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma. Metropolitana, pp. 202-221.

1994 Review Essay: Dolor y Alegria. Women and Social Change in Mexico: Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review. Vol. 31 (4), pp. 391-402.

1991 Physicians at Work, Patients in Pain. Westview Press. 273 pp.