At the 2014 AES conference, I organized a panel titled: "Visibilization and Concealment: Social Critique and Anthropologies of Value.” Panelists include: Daniel Souleles, Lucy Norris, Nusrat Chowdhury, Ping-Ann Addo, Nina Sylvanus, and Mrinalini Tankha. Elizabeth Ferry and Caitrin Lynch will serve as discussants. My paper is titled: “It’s almost like paying for praying:” Alternative Economies of Blessings and Valuation Practices.
Abstract: Ritual exchange practices in church and among kin is on of the institutional ways that families and networks are sustained and created in Samoa. However, church-based gift giving is critiqued in whispers, editorial articles, and in evangelical sermons. In this paper I ask why is reciprocity criticized now? Why do people feel vulnerable? Why is church reciprocity to blame for such a host of social ills? Contrasting the church’s capacity to be a burden and a blessing articulates a conflict between value and values in Samoa today. Value, as Miller and Graeber note, has two contrasting meanings: value as price and economic worth, which is measurable, and values as proper and good, which is priceless. Contestation emerges as how to best practice and create value that serves values. I trace “what value does” (Miller 2006: 1122) in gift-exchange and tithing to bring different values into being. I also draw from Graeber’s distinctions between open and closed reciprocity to examine why church-gift-giving is problematized and tithing is an attractive contrast. I argue that a sense of social decline across Samoa encourages many to re-conceive the church from an indigenous social structure, requiring the same kind of exchange and valuation practices as chiefs and the village, to the church as a social welfare institution that provides prosperity and alternative possibilities and modalities for achieving authority.
Anthropologist
SFAAs in Albuquerque
For the 2014 SFAA conference I organized a panel with Rochelle Rosen titled "Temporalities of Metabolic Disorders: Considering time in illness experience and interventions." Panelists include Amy Moran-Thomas and Emily Mendenhall; Carolyn Smith-Morris will serve as a discussant. I will present a paper titled: “The Chronicity of Healing: Conflicting Biomedical and Christian Healing Temporalities."
Abstract: Christian healing is ideologically constructed as instantaneous, individual, and efficacious because of divine intervention. However, for metabolic disorders in Samoa healing emerges as processual and efficacious because of the cultivation of interdependence between believers and the divine. Biomedical healing requires consistent and constant interventions, including pharmaceuticals, regular primary care, at times dialysis or insulin. This temporality of regular intervention suggests interdependence with technology and physicians. Many of my interlocutors refused biomedical healing temporality placing greater efficacy in Christian healing temporalities.
Ethnography at Dana Farber
On July 24 I will present a paper titled "Ethnography, Chronic Disease, and Community-Based Research” for the Population Science Discussion Group at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.