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.
