Sarah Willen

PhD/MPH Candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Rollins School of Public Health 

Medical Anthropology: Changing Discipline, Changing the World

Can I tell you a secret?  When I first came to Emory to begin graduate work in Medical Anthropology, I wasn’t really sure I knew what the field was all about.  I’d fallen in love with my chosen area of study – or, I should say, my hazy sense of it – while pursuing my bachelor’s degree in the distant fields of English literature and Religious Studies and, crucially, after reading a book that really set me on fire, Birth as an American Rite of Passage.

In that now-classic ethnography, medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd offers sociopolitical and symbolic analysis, and – critically – individual women’s stories in demonstrating how American hospitals consistently and systematically strip women of power over their bodies, their social identities, and even their sense of self during the time they are uniformed (in hospital gowns), tagged (with hospital bracelets), poked (with IVs, catheters, and needles) and prodded by obstetrical health care professionals.  Much, though perhaps not enough, has changed in American hospital birth since Davis-Floyd’s book was first published in 1992, and the power of her ethnography and clarity of her argument have played important roles in the shift toward more “woman-friendly” hospital policies and practices and, by the same token, toward the increased popularity of midwifery models of labor and delivery.

From Davis-Floyd’s book, I understood that medical anthropologists were committed to analyzing and critiquing dimensions of social life – not only in far-off places, but also closer to my own Midwestern U.S. home – involving bodies, boundaries, and individual people’s intimate experience, particularly in the context of unequal power relationships.

From my inspiring undergraduate professor at Case Western Reserve University, both a nurse and a PhD anthropologist, I learned that medical anthropologists were deeply respectful of diverse, and at times competing, health belief systems, but also that most felt passionately that health care, like education, should be available to all.  In other words, I gathered that medical anthropologists tend to view health as a human right.  To my 19-year-old mind, that sure made a lot of sense.

Even after beginning my studies in medical anthropology at Emory under the guidance of Professor Peter Brown, defending my PhD thesis proposal, obtaining research grants, and conducting 26 months of fieldwork, I still wasn’t entirely sure what medical anthropology was “really” about.  Is the goal of medical anthropology to produce critical analyses using the tools of anthropological theory, or is its goal to improve access to health care and, in a nutshell, to change the world?

By now, I seem to have reached an answer as a result of my training at Emory both in the Department of Anthropology and in the Rollins School of Public Health through a fellowship from the Center for Health, Culture and Society in 2004-2005.  The answer I’ve found to this either/or question is simple: yes.  Critical analysis and a commitment to change go hand in hand, and the specific form this interrelationship takes may vary among medical anthropologists, over the course of a project (a dissertation research study, for instance), or over the course of a career. 

The doctoral study I chose to develop explores the health-related experiences and the everyday lives of so-called “illegal” migrant workers who live and work in Tel Aviv, Israel.  For more than two years, in the context of my multi-sited, multi-focal doctoral study, I volunteered at the reception desk of the only primary care clinic consistently accessible, and affordable, for undocumented migrants in Tel Aviv. 

Through my involvement with the clinic, whose patients hail from Nigeria, Ghana, the Philippines, Columbia, Romania, Moldova, Turkey, China, and Kyrgyzstan, among other points of origin, I was able to formulate a series of theoretical questions that have come to frame my dissertation-in-progress as well as a growing list of conference presentations and publications.  How is the “condition of migrant ‘illegality’” configured in Israel, and how is it experienced by undocumented migrants in the context of their everyday lives?  How do these configurations and experiences of “illegality” shape migrants’ encounters of health, illness, crisis, and tragedy, both as individuals and as communities?  How is the condition of “illegality” in Israel shaped by the interaction of local and global factors and, moreover, how does it differ from analogous situations in more popular destinations for undocumented migration throughout North America, Europe, and elsewhere in the Middle East?  These questions, I am discovering, tap into several emerging conversations within current anthropological scholarship.

After completing my field research I returned to Atlanta, where the Center for the Study of Health, Culture, and Society at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health opened its doors to me. The public health courses I’ve been able to take reveal a new array of opportunities for interweaving rigorous, empirically grounded qualitative research; critical analysis; and different forms of public health praxis.  So, too, have public health classes challenged what I’ve described elsewhere as, “the stereotypical ‘pessimism’ associated with critical study in the social sciences and humanities, on one hand, and the tone of ‘optimism’ and real-life impact associated with public health interventions … on the other.”

Discovering what Medical Anthropology is about, like discovering the breadth, depth, and significance of any other field of inquiry, is a challenge.  Not only does graduate study challenge aspiring scholars to acquire familiarity with their fields as their teachers and mentors know it, but it also pushes us to search for the holes, gaps, unanswered questions, and unbuilt bridges between our own areas of expertise and related fields of scholarship, policy, and praxis. 

As we develop as scholars – with all the quandaries, anxieties, and growing pains the process of graduate training involves – it’s probably worthwhile to remember that we’re not the only ones in the throes of transition.  Medical Anthropology today is not what it was a decade ago, when I took my first class in International Health as an undergraduate.  Through challenging research opportunities, like the field research I was fortunate enough to conduct, and challenging training opportunities, like the CHCS Fellowship, graduate students at Emory and their disciplines are maturing together.

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Sarah earned her BA in English and Religion from Case Western Reserve University in 1996.  Her doctoral research explores configurations and experiences of "illegality" among undocumented West African and Filipino migrant workers in Tel Aviv, Israel.  She's conducted over two years of field research in South Tel Aviv, and she's presently writing her dissertation.

In 2004 she won the David R. Blumenthal Award in Jewish Studies and the Humanities for her paper, "'Flesh of Our Flesh'?: Configurations and Experiences of 'Illegality' among Undocumented Migrant Leaders in Tel Aviv."  The award is given to Emory students (graduate and undergraduate) who submit the best paper or project that links the knowledge, insights, values, and perspectives of Jewish realities to generically human concerns in thought or action; in ethics, language and linguistics, literature, theology, exegesis, law, or the arts. 

A revised version of this paper now appears as “Birthing ‘Invisible’ Children: State Power, NGO Activism, and Reproductive Health among Undocumented Migrant Workers in Tel Aviv, Israel” in the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 1(2): 55-88 (June 2005).

For more information about Sarah's work and the work of other graduate fellows with the Center for Health Culture and Society, see the CHCS website at http://www.emory.edu/CHCS//P_F_Fellows04-05.htm.