“I’m an anthropologist by training and I work as a medical interpreter.” When I tell this to people from anthropology backgrounds, I often receive sympathetic groans from them, as if I fell out of anthropology heaven, wasting my graduate training. It certainly felt that way when I left academic anthropology. However, my medical interpreter job proved me wrong.

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely thrilled about this job when the offer came to me at first. Having read numerous scholarly critiques of biomedical institutions during my studies in medical anthropology, I felt that I would be engulfed by biomedicine and end up working on the “wrong side” of the powerful (biomedicine)-powerless (patients) equation.

Anyone who has studied medical anthropology should be familiar with the canonical work in critical assessments of biomedicine (or Western medicine) by Arthur Kleinman, Byron Good, Margaret Lock, etc (for practical advice on working within biomedicine, see Kleiman’s essay “Anthropology in Clinic”). They warn us of the authoritative power of biomedical knowledge, which is so extensive that it permeates as legitimate cultural norms, values, and morals through our everyday lives. Specifically relating to my current job, some scholars caution about the negative consequences of medical interpreters in patients’ health outcomes: the interpreter as information gatekeeper and provider proxy (Hsieh and Kramer 2012), the interpreter as a covert co-diagnostician and institutional gatekeeper (Davidson 2001), and the interpreter as an ineffective mediator for meaningful clinical communications (Leanza, Bolvin, and Rosenberg 2010).

Despite my skepticism, the medical interpreter job hasn’t bulldozed over my principles as an anthropologist. And I credit this positive result to the medical interpreter certification program, as well as my training in anthropology. The interpreter training was carefully crafted to encourage prospective interpreters to learn how to focus strictly on being communication conduits between providers and patients, while also developing the ability to assess when to become a patient’s advocate. The instructor of this training program made us practice juggling these roles in various hypothetical scenarios over and over again.

Being detail-oriented, which I acquired from my ethnographic research as a part of the training in anthropology, helps me fulfill these medical interpreter roles as well. We interpreters are the eyes and ears of these complex medical situations, vigilantly attending to facial expressions of the provider and the patient and any words and sounds uttered by them. What our eyes and ears catch is instant data, so to speak, in order for us to identify miscommunications, distrusts, and disagreements between both sides of the equation. In this way, we can quickly step out of the communication conduit role and jump back in to help attenuate conflicts and tensions.

One unexpected benefit from my training in anthropology came to light through writing up mandatory post-appointment reports. My interpreter agency often commends me for my meticulous reports. Writing these reports certainly brings back some of the memories from my ethnographic research – Flashback: I’m sitting in my car at a gas station a couple of blocks away from one of my research sites and madly scribbling down every little detail I saw and heard during a long event where I just did participant-observation. I can later type this all up into a coherent story as a part of research data that will be coded and analyzed after the completion of the research.

Sure, writing post-appointment reports isn’t as complicated as typing up fieldnotes. But all of the words I jot down while interpreting my clients become something like the notes I took during my participant-observation, as I type them up into a post-appointment report – sometimes on my phone as soon as I get back to my car in the hospital parking lot. I honestly would have never thought that ethnographic research skills would be useful at a job outside anthropology.

To see Part 2, click here.

[Note: Ramadan is long over, but due to some technical difficulties, our weekly entries were interrupted. With this entry on not fasting during Ramadan, we pick up where we left off.] 

Ramadan Diaries takes you into the Ramadan experience of two students of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, Oguz Alyanak and Dick Powis. They will be fasting amongst Muslims in two Francophone contexts, Strasbourg, France and Dakar, Senegal, respectively. By sharing brief notes on the fasting experience, the aim is to provide a reflexive account of participant observation as it is undertaken by two scholars with distinct backgrounds and field sites. This is the fourth entry in the series, you can read the Introduction, Week One, and Week Two here. 

Oguz Alyanak: Last week, I took the overnight bus from Strasbourg to Paris to attend a two-day conference. The six-hour bus trip, on Wednesday (to Paris) and Friday (back to Strasbourg), started at midnight. I boarded the bus less than two hours after breaking fast, and skipped my last meal of the day (sahur) because I fell asleep during both legs of the trip. So far, fasting has not been physically demanding. However, I was not sure whether my body would handle it while attending a conference tired and sleep-deprived. Hence, for the first time, I thought about skipping. The idea led me to think of my Ramadan experience, and particularly of its purpose, and what I made of it as part of my fieldwork. Continue reading →

Political conflict can create deep turmoil within families. Marina lost her only son to fighting in eastern Ukraine. He died while fighting in a Ukrainian airborne division that was attempting to regain territory lost to separatists. The magnitude of this loss becomes more palpable if we consider Marina’s family as a whole: her mother had welcomed the separatists and supported them in their fight. Her sister was politically active and took a leadership position in one of the breakaway republics. So as Marina sees it, her mother and sister helped facilitate the death of her only son.

The EU referendum results have also thrown families into upheaval. The title of a recent article sums it up well “I can barely even look at my parents.” In the aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the EU, a generation gap between the millennials and the older generation has widened. Young people report having heated arguments with their parents, being hung up on, and even being told to leave Great Britain if it is so wonderful in the EU. A primary issue is that the younger generation has been planning for a future that as a result of the vote to exit the EU, is out of reach. One man summed up his feelings toward his parents by saying “I feel betrayed.” https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jun/27/brexit-family-rifts-parents-referendum-conflict-betrayal

Betrayal. It is a commonly used word within families affected by the war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine as well. I am calling this phenomenon, that seems to be a part of conflict in many places and times, fractal kinship. A fractal is a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern that displays at every scale. Fractals are useful in modeling structures like coastlines and snowflakes, in which similar structures recur at progressively smaller scales.

There are other pertinent examples of fractal kinship in more distant history. Abraham Lincoln warned in 1858 that a “house divided against itself cannot stand.” This notion became part of the American political vocabulary. The American Civil War pitted brother against brother and father against son. As Taylor (2005) points out, the division of families in the Civil War shattered expectations and beliefs about the meaning of family at the time, prompting people to step back and think. Continue reading →

This morning I was taking notes on my laptop as an officer from the NYPD counter terrorism department’s SHIELD unit gave a room full of academic staff ‘active shooter’ training. As the first video was rolling, he walked over and stood behind me to see what I was typing and almost inaudibly asked the young man from IT who was sitting behind me what I was up to. “She’s taking notes,” he whispered back, loud enough for me to hear. My first instinct was to think that maybe buying a bright red laptop was a bad idea, followed quickly by a wish that I had had enough time before the session to run to my office to drop off my stuff and pick up a notebook. My heart was pounding loudly; this person had taken over my safe space rendering it anxious and forced my body to feel defensive when all I had been doing was taking notes. I did not flinch or acknowledge his existence as he paced around me. Even though I like to pretend it does not matter, I know that it was not the red laptop that was the trigger for his suspicion, but rather my hijab. I watched the screen as Derrick O’Dell told us what he did in 2007 during the Virginia Tech mass shooting. I thought of the many students I taught. I thought of the kids in the neighborhood schools. I thought of my young daughter. I thought about what I could do to make it past an ‘active shooter’, and I realized I would have to have a second plan in place as well: how to make it past law enforcement without them thinking it was me.

Continue reading →

During the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, protestors streamed into the residence of former President Yanukovich at Mezhyhirya reclaimed it. The hat thief who became Head of State is charged with squandering billions of dollars during his years as President. Ukrainians are still asking how to repair the political culture that made it possible to elect this man.

The Yanukovich estate has been turned into a “Museum of Corruption.” Vans with the “Museum of Corruption” placards fill with passengers on the outskirts of Kyiv about every twenty minutes and careen to the estate where visitors can gawk and repent. Like the Museum of Terror in Budapest that explores fascist and communist terror in Hungary, Yanukovich’s estate exposes the idiocies of modern leadership through bizarre inversions. This is a place where animals lived better than many Ukrainians. Museums of corruption may become a thing of the future: one opened in Thailand in June 2015.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/thailand-launches-museum/2136102.html.

Tourists can leave Ukraine’s Museum of Corruption with souvenirs like refrigerator magnets in the shape of a golden toilet (Yankovich reportedly had golden toilet fixtures) or toilet paper printed with the face of the latest political bad boy.

A paradoxical layer here is the humanitarian purpose his estate now serves. People who have been displaced by the war in eastern Ukraine and the occupation of Crimea were granted permission to live here. Yes. This is a good thing, sort of. Continue reading →

Hi everyone! I hope you are enjoying your Tuesday, maybe still recovering from Pride weekend? I have some light readings for the week to aid in your recovery.

The need for queer anthropology only grows in the shadow of Orlando and growing political discourses on queer people around the world. Tamar Shirinian illustrates the intimate relationship between the nation-state and the lives of queer people.

Stem cells still fascinate biologists for their vast potential in medicine and learning about human development. However, stem cell tourism that promises miracle cures across the world is emerging. An emerging issue among medical anthropologists who study medical tourism.

The EU is in peril as the Brexit situation looks more and more uncertain. Simon Roberts reflects on the importance of anthropology in perilous times and the value of ethnography in public policy.

Surfing as metaphor for ethnographic practice. David Whyte offers parallels between the embodied knowledge of surfing in constantly changing environments to the shifting cultural landscapes within ethnographic field work.

Do you want to mix it up a little bit in the fall when teaching classes? Food Anthropology suggests cooking a meal in the tradition of experiential learning?

Sleep vs. Nap vs. Inemuri. When regular sleep patterns are a virtue; why is sleeping in public so prevalent in Japan?

If you are not familiar with the work of Paul Stoller (earlier announced as an inaugural member of the Public Anthropology Institute), here is a video that illustrates the foundational work of Dr. Stoller.

If you have any article that you recommend, please share them with me at smechong@gmail.com

See you next Week!

One of an ethnographer’s most important instruments is his or her body. What has been called an “affective turn” in the social sciences has entailed thinking of the body as more than a set of significations in the performance of an identity. Writing in anthropology along these lines has provided a refreshing appreciation of how discursive approaches do not adequately capture the body that lives, moves, and senses. “From a phenomenological perspective, the living body is considered the existential null point from which our various engagements with the world—whether social, eventful, or physical—are transacted.” 1

Doing fieldwork with people displaced within Ukraine this summer has taught me a lot in this regard. When I most fully appreciated this was last night. I noticed as I was going to sleep that it was raining. Then, as I was dozing off, I heard what I thought was bombing. Gunfire. Then car alarms in my neighborhood began going off.

With my heart pounding, I leapt out of bed, and started to climb under it. Then I thought better of that idea, threw on my clothes, and grabbed my wallet and passport with the thought that I do not want to die in pile of rubble here and now. I ran around the room in circles a few times thinking about what else to take before deciding my belongings were, at that moment in time, irrelevant. Then, as I was breathing rapidly and turning the key in the lock, I stopped to think about what I was hearing. Continue reading →

Ramadan Diaries takes you into the Ramadan experience of two students of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, Oguz Alyanak and Dick Powis. They will be fasting amongst Muslims in two Francophone contexts, Strasbourg, France and Dakar, Senegal, respectively. By sharing brief notes on the fasting experience, the aim is to provide a reflexive account of participant observation as it is undertaken by two scholars with distinct backgrounds and field sites. This is the third entry in the series, you can read the Introduction here and Week One here.

Oguz Alyanak: On Ramadan Diet: A Vegetarian’s Perspective

Without a doubt, one of the challenges of doing fieldwork is dietary. While some may be open to dietary change, and willing to experience new dishes, others, like myself, may be less inclined in giving up on dietary restrictions. Continue reading →