The Royal Anthropological Institute and the Marsh Charitable Trust announced that Juliet Beford, a Co-Investigator (Co-I) of the Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform (SSHAP) and Director of Anthrologica, is the 2022 winner of the Marsh Award for Anthropology in the World.
An overview of key messages circulating on WhatsApp and the local media (radio, print and video) in North Kivu in September 2018.
Key considerations and immediate recommendations related to community engagement.
Key considerations about the context of North Kivu province including insecurity and local actors.
Social Anthropologist Julienne Anoko visits communities to encourage safe and dignified burial. Infection of the Ebola virus can occur from touching the bodies of those who have died from Ebola virus disease (EVD).
Key socio-anthropological considerations regarding ‘indigenous communities’.
Why did Ebola response initiatives in the Upper Guinea Forest Region regularly encounter resistance, occasionally violent? Extending existing explanations concerning local and humanitarian “culture” and “structural violence,” and drawing on previous anthropological fieldwork and historical and documentary research, this article argues that Ebola disrupted four intersecting but precarious social accommodations that had hitherto enabled radically different and massively unequal worlds to coexist.
The disease and the humanitarian response unsettled social accommodations that had become established between existing burial practices and hospital medicine, local political structures and external political subjection, mining interests and communities, and those suspected of “sorcery” and those suspicious of them.
This article outlines a research program for an anthropology of viral hemorrhagic fevers (collectively known as VHFs). It begins by reviewing the social science literature on Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa fevers and charting areas for future ethnographic attention. We theoretically elaborate the hotspot as a way of integrating analysis of the two routes of VHF infection: from animal reservoirs to humans and between humans.
Correspondence on continued poor integration of social sciences during global health crises.
What does experimentation look like in the time of emergency?
Ann H. Kelly explores the design of clinical trials amidst the Ebola crisis.
The current crisis is not a nightmare unfolding in front of our eyes, as in a “disaster movie.” It is not an anomaly or an accident which has afflicted public health services unexpectedly. It is also not, to use development gobbledygook, an organisational, financial and political “challenge” for the international community and humanitarian workers.
Quite the opposite: the Ebola crisis is the result of two decades of political choices and actions.
This paper reviews and summarizes the available literature on Haitian mental health and mental health services. This review was conducted in light of the Haitian earthquake in January 2010. We searched Medline, Google Scholar and other available databases to gather scholarly literature relevant to mental health in Haiti. This was supplemented by consultation of key books and grey literature relevant to Haiti. The first part of the review describes historical, economic, sociological and anthropological factors essential to a basic understanding of Haiti and its people.
This includes discussion of demography, family structure, Haitian economics and religion. The second part of the review focuses on mental health and mental health services. This includes a review of factors such as basic epidemiology of mental illness, common beliefs about mental illness, explanatory models, idioms of distress,help-seeking behavior, configuration of mental health services and the relationship between religion and mental health.
In August of this year, when the Ebola outbreak escalated in Liberia and a state of emergency had been declared for the country, Fatu Kekula, a young Liberian nursing student, improvised personal protective equipment (PPE) to care for her father, mother, sister, and cousin.
After three of the relatives survived, her method was featured prominently in the international news media as the “trash bag method”. The reports were meant to ignite a spark of hope in the Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.
The lead for a story on the Ebola outbreak is, by now, familiar: on the 22nd of March, the Guinean Ministry of Health declared an outbreak of Ebola, the first ever in the region.
The virus has since spread through the countryside and across its borders: west to Sierra Leone, south to Liberia, and most recently, north into Senegal. Cases in Lagos and Port Harcourt, Nigeria have put countries across the region and beyond on high alert; as far away as Kenya, public health posters inform people about modes of transmission.
Since the implementation of the mVisa program, refugees overwhelmingly believe malnutrition rates are as high as they have ever been in Gihembe, that the same illnesses abound, but that there is less excrement – or watery diarrhea – visible in the residential quarters.
Their rationale: when there is less food to eat, there is less food to excrete. Refugees are constantly left pondering how to improve themselves, their lives, their health and futures.
In conversations with people living with polio in Hungary, I often encountered members of the tight-knit community referring to themselves as “dinosaurs”.
We are a breed that is about to die out, they said. Nobody gets polio anymore, some added, and they were right – epidemics, even sporadic wild polio cases disappeared from the country in the 1960s.
“Untimely ends” can then be best approached as transformative topoi between the symbolic order of really existing epidemics and the pandemic imaginary, as a vision of the (biological and ontological) end of humanity.
Rather than just bridging experience and anticipation, they create the conditions of possibility of transference between the thinkable and the unthinkable.
In late August 2011, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Hurricane Irene tore northwards up the Atlantic, its projected path fixed over the U.S. East Coast. So great was the force of the tropical storm’s anticipation that flood-prone and low-lying metropolitan areas from Virginia Beach to Providence were preemptively evacuated.
New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, in what would later be dismissed by some as an overblown display of preparedness, closed the New York City transit system, shut off water and electricity in lower Manhattan, and preemptively deployed the National Guard.
Far away from the frontlines of the Ebola outbreaks in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, where people and their caretakers die from the disease, new forms of humanitarian aid and global health financing are being leveraged behind closed doors.
In Washington, D.C., London, and Geneva, long-standing government-to-government models of global cooperation and international development assistance, imperfect as they are, are being supplanted by new forms of finance that prioritize profits for private shareholders.
In this article, I share a 10-point list of actions that anthropologists could take, right now, to improve the global response to the West African Ebola outbreak. Take notice, global health and national and international biosecurity communities.
There exists an entire discipline of anthropology that is dedicated to connecting the global and the local, to understanding and mapping populations in crisis, and serve as interlocutors between international institutions and local populations in this region.
Cheikh Ibrahima Niang, a professor of medical and social anthropology at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, has researched anthropological aspects of a wide range of health issues.
In July 2014, WHO asked him to investigate community attitudes to Ebola virus disease. He led a team of anthropologists to Sierra Leone just as the outbreak exploded in the eastern part of that country. This is what he found.
Ebola virus control teams need a mix of expertise, including epidemiologists, logistics specialists, laboratory workers, hygiene experts and various other specialized professions.
Social anthropologists play a less well-known but equally important role.
‘Stigma’ is an umbrella term for the direct and indirect consequences of a number of processes that brand someone as different in ways that result in discrimination, loss of status and social exclusion. It can be short-term or evolve into a long-term and life-long issue. Who and how people are being socially labelled – plus the material, political, social and moral consequences of this labelling – often change rapidly throughout the course of an epidemic, particularly from the early stages of an emerging outbreak to an established epidemic.
The first step to addressing or seeking to avoid exacerbating stigma is to identify the nature of, and factors influencing, relationships between those associated with Ebola and the rest of society. Every policy decision should be made with consideration for its immediate and long term consequences for each social group affected. Efforts to de-stigmatise Ebola should focus on improving the social visibility and the physical,
This paper by Anoko J. N., reports on the success of a communication programme among 26 rebellious villages in Forest Guinea during fieldwork in June-July 2014.
A major challenge to outbreak control lies in early detection of viral haemorrhagic fevers (VHFs) in local community contexts during the critical initial stages of an epidemic, when risk of spreading is its highest (“the first mile”). This paper documents how a major Ebola outbreak control effort in central Uganda in 2012 was experienced from the perspective of the community. It asks to what extent the community became a resource for early detection, and identifies problems encountered with community health worker and social mobilization strategies. Analysis is based on first-hand ethnographic data from the center of a small Ebola outbreak in Luwero Country, Uganda, in 2012. Three of this paper’s authors were engaged in an 18 month period of fieldwork on community health resources when the outbreak occurred. In total, 13 respondents from the outbreak site were interviewed, along with 21 key informants and 61 focus group respondents from nearby Kaguugo Parish.
Natural disasters and disasters that directly derive from human actions, both evolving and sudden, trace the structural fault lines of the societies that they affect. Disaster outcomes disproportionately impact those with the least access to social and material resources: women and children, and people who are elderly, disabled or impoverished.
Using a disability conceptual framework,the essays in this volume focus on disasters within their social and environmental ecologies, with particular attention to the ways in which conventional disaster planning and responses ensure that existing social inequalities will be perpetuated as consequences of disasters. We argue that by foregrounding the needs of those with the fewest resources, an applied anthropology of disaster points to potential benefits to all when disaster preparedness, response, and recovery plans include the expertise of disabled people.
As of November 4, 2014, the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa is confirmed to have infected 13,268 individuals, with 4,960 total deaths estimated. The global Ebola response is evolving rapidly, and as it has evolved, it has become increasingly apparent that the causes of this epidemic outbreak result from the underdevelopment of local regional healthcare systems, and several initial errors in the global Ebola response that lead to an underdevelopment of emergency response capabilities, and resulted in complications with triage, treatment, community mobilization and engagement, and communications efforts.
The steering committee of the AAA-Wenner Gren Emergency Ebola Response Workshop convened a meeting with policy makers, practitioners, donors, and NGOs involved in the global Ebola response. The goal of this meeting was to consult with a range of partners about their needs and priorities for anthropological guidance. Attendees included: the U.S.
