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Ashwak Hauter (Anthropology and Development Studies major)
"'Glocal' Biomedicine: Reformulating Expertise and Epistemology in a Yemen Hospital"
Sponsor: Stefania Pandolfo, Anthropology
Project Description
In the last 20 years, Yemen experienced a civil war, discontinued aid from
the gulf countries, and reforms that cut spending towards health care. Ashwak's
project explores how Yemeni doctors and lay persons view foreign western
medicine in comparison to Yemen's western medicine and how they use
communicative practices (Hanks 1996) to explicitly and implicitly
co-construct and reproduce these views. This will give insight and space to
investigate how medical discourse in Yemen influences consumption and choice
of medical practices when faced with the option of local and foreign
operated medical institutes. For this project, Ashwak will conduct
ethnographic work supplemented by conversational analysis of
semi-structured interviews with patients, the accompanying parties, the
physicians, the nurses, and the nearby locals at both the Yemen-German and
al-Thawrah Hospital in Sanaa, Yemen.
Scholar's Photo
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Ashwak is in her mom's village at Alghazali residence, Badad, IBB holding her cousin's daughter on a weekend gateway to relax during research. |
Scholar's Journal
Native Anthropology and the insider's view was the only way I thought to be rid of the gaze. The gaze, which eroticizes peoples, can culminate in the production of specific types representations and subjects. I believed that Native Anthropology was the way to conduct fieldwork abroad and be able to be analytical. Boy, was I in for a ride.
Traveling to my home country to conduct participant observation and semi-structured interviews was a very strenuous endeavor. A trip to Yemen, which I had known to be a leisurely experience, was now my primary field site. I had some level of understanding that this trip and undertaking would not be easy, and in fact it will be challenging for thus type of research in Yemen.
In a month, I was to negotiate access to two hospitals and gain trust of both staff and patients in order to conduct my interviews. I conducted ethnography, interviews, and observations of patient-doctor interaction at the Modern German Hospital (private hospital) and the Al-Sabeen hospital (government hospital). Such a challenge did not sink in until I arrived in Yemen and began to feel the stress level rise.
At the hospitals, time constraints and personal insecurities caused added stress and made my job seem that much harder to accomplish. I had volunteered in one of the hospitals in years past and had fun shadowing nurses and doctors. However, I was now the Anthropologist, and all I did was write in my field notebook and seemed to linger about the facilities of the hospital, which I am sure came off as off-putting behavior. However, after a while I blended in, and both doctors and patients started to frame my project according to their own assumptions. To the doctors, my research was Public Health centered and a great asset to them. To the Patients, my work was a statement to doctors and Public health official to shed light on a citizen's social and medical rights.
Conducting interviews, were really challenging and a daunting task. Some days I would be lucky enough to have one. Towards the end of the month, I was able to have up to four in one day. The days in which I would have multiple interviews back to back were the most difficult. An interview may not seem so grueling; however, they required much planning and strategizing. I had to understand my participant and shift the question in response to their answers. Most of the time, my assumptions were proven wrong and I had to think of new ways to extrapolate the data I needed. Since Yemen has many different dialects and diverse populations, I had to cater the quality of language and the questions asked to the participants for sensitivities and appropriateness.
When I collected the data, I began to doubt my abilities because at the time and in that space, I felt that I had nothing. I had recordings of all interviews, but felt that I was not getting what I needed. The problem was that I was stressed by my own expectations to make some universally grand argument, as well as by the time constraint. Also, I suffered from the downfall of an insider's view, in which everything going on was common sense and I could not really estimate what was significant in the date until I returned to the States, where I was removed from that setting.
Once I got back, just re-listening to the audio and reading the transcriptions I had transcribed to Arabic while I was there, really opened my eyes. I was now, Ashwak the Anthropologists, rather than the participant in an interview between a field agent and her participants. I knew then that there was something powerful within my grasp. I had data about how developmental discourse and medical discourse influences decisions and people's imaginings of geography, modernity, and tradition. More importantly, there was a space provided to which dialogue was enabled to understand people, their needs, and insights on the issues they felt must be addressed.
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