The Dialogics of Southern Quechua Narrative

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65196/1/aa.1998.100.2.326.pd

Shifting attention in viewer- and object-based reference frames after unilateral brain injury

The aims of the present study were to investigate the respective roles that object- and viewer-based reference frames play in reorienting visual attention, and to assess their influence after unilateral brain injury. To do so, we studied 16 right hemisphere injured (RHI) and 13 left hemisphere injured (LHI) patients. We used a cueing design that manipulates the location of cues and targets relative to a display comprised of two rectangles (i.e., objects). Unlike previous studies with patients, we presented all cues at midline rather than in the left or right visual fields. Thus, in the critical conditions in which targets were presented laterally, reorienting of attention was always from a midline cue. Performance was measured for lateralized target detection as a function of viewer-based (contra- and ipsilesional sides) and object-based (requiring reorienting within or between objects) reference frames. As expected, contralesional detection was slower than ipsilesional detection for the patients. More importantly, objects influenced target detection differently in the contralesional and ipsilesional fields. Contralesionally, reorienting to a target within the cued object took longer than reorienting to a target in the same location but in the uncued object. This finding is consistent with object-based neglect. Ipsilesionally, the means were in the opposite direction. Furthermore, no significant difference was found in object-based influences between the patient groups (RHI vs. LHI). These findings are discussed in the context of reference frames used in reorienting attention for target detection

"Now he walks and walks, as if he didn't have a home where he could eat": food, healing, and hunger in Quechua narratives of madness

In the Quechua-speaking peasant communities of southern Peru, mental disorder is understood less as individualized pathology and more as a disturbance in family and social relationships. For many Andeans, food and feeding are ontologically fundamental to such relationships. This paper uses data from interviews and participant observation in a rural province of Cuzco to explore the significance of food and hunger in local discussions of madness. Carers’ narratives, explanatory models, and theories of healing all draw heavily from idioms of food sharing and consumption in making sense of affliction, and these concepts structure understandings of madness that differ significantly from those assumed by formal mental health services. Greater awareness of the salience of these themes could strengthen the input of psychiatric and psychological care with this population and enhance knowledge of the alternative treatments that they use. Moreover, this case provides lessons for the global mental health movement on the importance of openness to the ways in which indigenous cultures may construct health, madness, and sociality. Such local meanings should be considered by mental health workers delivering services in order to provide care that can adjust to the alternative ontologies of sufferers and carers

'Now my daughter is alone': Performing kinship and embodying affect in marriage practices among Native Andeans in Bolivia.

My dissertation contributes to kinship theory in Anthropology by analyzing affective aspects of relationships as socially and historically embedded, jointly produced and emergent in the embodied interactions of individuals, and inextricably intertwined with relations of politics and power. The central argument of the dissertation is that the practices and discourses of relatedness among kin, particularly among in-laws, provide a window onto the mutually constitutive and dynamic articulation of local and global systems. Kinship is a system that is lived. I explore the everyday interactions which establish relatedness among individuals and groups in ayllu Sullk'ata (Province of Chayanta, Department of Potosi). Affective relationships are emergent in the interactive emotional expression of social actors, but are also produced through discourses which do not directly reference emotion. From this perspective, relatedness in kinship is corporeally mediated but not singularly based on sexual reproduction. Kinship is an arena of transformation as well as continuity in the Andes. The shifting articulation of the local kinship system with a global economic system is evident in changes in the relationship between affines, particularly between mothers- and daughters-in-law and marriage partners. Local values of reciprocity and sociability which permeate Native Andean subsistence agricultural practices, cosmological conceptions, and gender and kinship relationships articulate with patterns of migration and wage labor, increasing commodification, and urban and transnational conceptions of gender, class, and ethnicity. In spite of ideals of complementarity and caring between marriage partners and of reciprocity and respect between mothers-in-law and daughtersin-law, marriage creates contradictions and conflicts that are recognized in songs, stories, gossip, emotional displays, and physical violence. The emotional terrain of kinship among Sullk'atas is in part influenced by national and transnational discourses of progress. Even as emotional discourses are embedded in a context of situation, and in broader social and historical contexts, they act upon the situation at hand, such that emotion and politics are inextricably intertwined and the trajectory of influence between 'domestic' and 'public' is turned on its head.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyIndividual and family studiesSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132023/2/9938557.pd