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Instructions:
Picasso and American Art Discussion Essay Paper
Read Which Is the Most Influential Work of Art Of the Last 100 Years (Plagens, Peter, Newsweek, 7/2/2007, Vol. 150, Issue 2) and review ‘Picasso and American Art’ (Associated Press, 2006). These resources better explain how artists were influenced and inspired by other artists, social influences and cultures, including Picasso himself while painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. Write a 1-2 page paper in APA Format discussing the following topics:
How art was understood, appreciated and shared historically, both by artists and the general public
How the discovery and appreciation of art has changed due to advances in technology
How social and political happenings have influenced artist
An Anthropology of Structural Violence Article Analysis
Read the Brondo article #6.1: “An Anthropology of Structural Violence” and answer the reflection questions.
After finishing the module and all of the reading, explain in your own words your understanding of the concept of “violence,” and how violence relates to culture.
After reading Paul Farmer’s article, explain your understanding of the concept of structural violence. According to this article, how does structural violence play into health issues in Haiti?
Read again carefully the last two paragraphs of this article. What justifications were given by the U.S. officials in the Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to NOT invest U.S. resources in AIDS therapy for Africa? Why is Farmer so troubled by these justifications?
5.1 An Anthropology of Structural ViolencePAUL FARMERStructural violence refers to the systematic ways in which the political and economic organization of our social world harms or otherwise disadvantages individuals and populations. These forces are often not ethnographically visible, but, Farmer argues, they are essential to understanding that which is apparent to the ethnographer’s eye. Drawing on his experience as an anthropologist-physician, Farmer illustrates the profound violence Haiti’s history of slavery and debt has inflicted on the bodies of the world’s vulnerable, resulting in tuberculosis and AIDS epidemics on a grand scale.
These leading causes of young adult death in Haiti, Farmer argues, are outcomes of European expansion in the New World, and the slavery and racism that accompanied it. In addition to its place as a seminal piece illustrating structural violence, this ethnographically rich piece is also a key example of medical anthropology. Through it, students are introduced to an illness narrative, which is an explanatory model for what is happening to a patient’s body that covers the psychological and social experiences that a patient encounter. Illness is distinct from disease, which refers to the physiological conditions that doctors tend to focus on.
Through Farmer’s narration of Anite, a patient he encountered with a large, fungating breast mass and her search for explanation and cure, one can see the tensions that arise at the interface of traditional and biomedical health systems.QuestionsWhat is important about Anite’s illness narrative? What does it reveal about Haitian ideas about biomedicine and about the social nature of illness? How does her narration—its content and the context of her telling it—differ from Western biomedical interactions between doctors and patients and the settings in which they interact?What is the relationship between debt, trade, and HIV and tuberculosis?
Discuss the importance of situating what is ethnographically visible within that which is not visible. Apply the concept of structural violence in this response, using examples from the reading.The ethnographically visible, central Haiti, September 2000: Most hospitals in the region are empty. This is not because of a local lack of treatable pathology; rather, patients have no money to pay for such care. One hospital—situated in a squatter settlement just 8 kilometers from a hydroelectric dam that decades ago flooded a fertile valley—is crowded…. Every bed is filled, and the courtyard in front of the clinic is mobbed with patients waiting to be seen.
Over a hundred have slept on the grounds the night before and are struggling to smooth out wrinkles in hand-me-down dresses or pants or shirts; hats are being adjusted, and some are massaging painful cricks in the neck. The queue of those waiting to have a new medical record created is long, snaking toward the infectious disease clinic I am hoping to reach. First, however, it is better to scan the crowd for those who should be seen immediately.
Less ethnographically visible is the fact that Haiti is under democratic rule. For the first time in almost two centuries, democratic elections are planned and could result in a historic precedent: President Ren Prval, elected some years earlier, could actually survive his presidency to transfer power to another democratically elected president. If Prval succeeds, he will be the first president in Haitian history ever to serve out his mandate, not a day more, not a day less. To local eyes, the prospect of this victory (which later did indeed come to pass) is overwhelmed by the vivid poverty seeping into the very seams of Haitian society. For the rural poor, most of them peasants, this means erosion and lower crop yields; it means hunger and sickness. And every morning the crowd in front of the clinic seems to grow.
To foreign eyes, the Haitian story has become a confused skein of tragedies, most of them seen as local. Poverty, crime, accidents, disease, death—and more often than not their causes—are also seen as problems locally derived. The transnational tale of slavery and debt and turmoil is lost in the vivid poverty, the understanding of which seems to defeat the analyses of journalists and even many anthropologists, focused as we are on the ethnographically visible—what is there in front of us.Making my way through this crowd has become a daily chore and triage—seeking out the sickest—a ritual in the years since I became medical director of the clinic….I see two patients on makeshift stretchers; both are being examined by auxiliary nurses armed with stethoscopes and blood-pressure cuffs.
Perhaps this morning it will take less than an hour to cross the 600 or so yards that separate me from another crowd of patients already diagnosed with tuberculosis or AIDS….A young woman takes my arm in a common enough gesture in rural Haiti. “Look at this, doctor.” She lifts a left breast mass. The tumor is not at all like the ones I was taught to search for during my medical training in Boston. This lesion started as an occult lump, perhaps, but by this September day has almost completely replaced the normal breast. It is a “fungating mass,” in medical jargon, and clear yellow fluid weeps down the front of a light blue dress. Flies are drawn to the diseased tissue, and the woman waves them away mechanically.
On either side of her, a man and a woman help her with this task, but they are not kin, simply other patients waiting in the line.“Good morning,” I say, although I know that she is expecting me to say next to nothing and wants to be the speaker. She lifts the tumor toward me and begins speaking rapidly. “It’s hard and painful,” she says. “Touch it and see how hard it is.” Instead, I lift my hand to her axilla and find large, hard lymph nodes there—likely advanced and metastatic cancer—and I interrupt her as politely as I can. If only this were a neglected infection, I think. Not impossible, only very unlikely. I need to know how long this woman has been ill.
But the woman, whose name is Anite, will have none of it. She is going to tell the story properly, and I will have to listen. We are surrounded by hundreds, and at least 40 can hear every word of the exchange. I think to pull her from the line, but she wants to talk in front of her fellow sufferers…. There is so much to complain about. Now I have time only to see patients as a physician and precious little time for interviewing them. I miss this part of my work, but although I want to hear Anite’s story, I want even more to attend to her illness. And to do that properly will require a surgeon, unless she has come with a diagnosis made elsewhere. I look away from the tumor.
She carries, in addition to a hat and a small bundle of oddments, a white vinyl purse. Please, I think, let there be useful information in there. Surely she has seen other doctors for a disease process that is, at a minimum, months along?I interrupt again to ask her where she has come from and if she has sought care elsewhere. We do not have a surgeon on staff just now. We have been promised, a weary functionary at the Ministry of Health has told me, that the Cuban government will soon be sending us a surgeon and a pediatrician. But for this woman, Anite, time has run out.“I was about to tell you that, doctor.” She has let go of my arm to lift the mass, but now she grips it again. “I am from near Jrmie,” she says, referring to a small city on the tip of Haiti’s southern peninsula—about as far from our clinic as one could be and still be in Haiti. To reach us, Anite must have passed through Port au Prince, with its private clinics, surgeons, and oncologists.“I first noticed a lump in my breast after falling down. I was carrying a basket of millet on my head. It was not heavy, but it was large, and I had packed it poorly, perhaps. The path was steep, but it had not rained on that day, so I don’t know why I fell. It makes you wonder, though.” At least a dozen heads in line nod in assent, and some of Anite’s fellow patients make noises encouraging her to continue.“How long ago was that?” I ask again.“I went to many clinics,” she says in front of dozens of people she has met only that morning or perhaps the night before. “I went to 14 clinics.” Again, many nod assent.
The woman to her left says “Adj!” meaning something along the lines of “You poor thing!” and lifts a finger to her cheek. This crowd response seems to please Anite, who continues her narrative with gathering tempo. She still has not let me know how long she has been ill.“Fourteen clinics,” I respond. “What did they say was wrong with you? Did you have an operation or a biopsy?” The mass is now large and has completely destroyed the normal architecture of her breast; it is impossible to tell if she has had a procedure, as there is no skin left to scar.“No,” replies Anite. “Many told me I needed an operation, but the specialist who could do this was in the city, and it costs $700 to see him. In any case, I had learned in a dream that it was not necessary to go to the city.” (“The city” means Port au Prince, Haiti’s capital.)More of the crowd turns to listen; the shape of the line changes subtly, beginning to resemble more of a circle.
I think uncomfortably of the privacy of a U.S. examination room and of the fact that I have never seen there a breast mass consume so much flesh without ever having been biopsied. But I have seen many in Haiti, and almost all have proven malignant.Anite continues her narrative. She repeats that on the day of the fall, she discovered the mass. “It was small and hard,” she says. “An abscess, I thought, for I was breastfeeding and had an infection while breastfeeding once before.” This is about as clinical as the story is to get, for Anite returns to the real tale.
She hurt her back in the fall. How was she to care for her children and for her mother, who was sick and lived with her? “They all depend on me. There was no time.”And so the mass grew slowly and “worked its way under my arm.” I give up trying to establish chronology. I know it had to be months or even years ago that she first discovered this “small” mass. She had gone to clinic after clinic, she says, “spending our very last little money. No one told me what I had. I took many pills.”“What kind of pills?” I ask.Anite continues. “Pills.
I don’t know what kind.” She had given biomedicine its proper shot, she seems to say, but it had failed her. Perhaps her illness had more mysterious origins? “Maybe someone sent this my way,” she says. “But I’m a poor woman—why would someone wish me ill?”“Unlikely,” says an older man in line. “It’s Gods sickness.” Anite had assumed as much—“God’s sickness” being shorthand for natural illness rather than illness associated with sorcery—but had gone to a local temple, a houmfor, to make sure. “The reason I went was because I’d had a dream. The mass was growing, and there were three other small masses growing under my arm. I had a dream in which a voice told me to stop taking medicines and to travel far away for treatment of this illness.”She had gone to a voodoo priest for help in interpreting this dream. Each of the lumps had significance, said the priest.
They represented “the three mysteries,” and to be cured she would have to travel to a clinic where doctors “worked with both hands” (this term suggesting that they would have to understand both natural and supernatural illness).The story would have been absurd if it were not so painful. I know, and once knew more, about some of the cultural referents; I am familiar with the style of illness narrative dictating some of the contours of her story and the responses of those in line. But Anite has, I am almost sure, metastatic breast cancer.
What she needs is surgery and chemotherapy if she is lucky (to my knowledge, there is no radiation therapy in Haiti at this time). She does not need, I think, to tell her story publicly for at least the fifteenth time.Anite seems to gather strength from the now rapt crowd, all with their own stories to tell the harried doctors and nurses once they get into the clinic. The semicircle continues to grow. Some of the patients are straining, I can tell, for a chance to tell their own stories, but no one interrupts Anite. “In order to cure this illness, he told me, I would have to travel far north and east.”It has taken Anite over a week to reach our clinic. A diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer is later confirmed.***… I will be talking about Haiti and about tuberculosis and AIDS.
I’m not sure I would know how not to talk about these diseases, which each day claim almost 15,000 lives worldwide, most of them adults in their prime…. I ask how the concept of structural violence might come to figure in work in anthropology and other disciplines seeking to understand modern social life….… Structural violence is violence exerted systematically, that is, indirectly by everyone who belongs to a certain social order: hence the discomfort these ideas provoke in a moral economy still geared to pinning praise or blame on individual actors….…
An honest account of who wins, who loses, and what weapons are used is an important safeguard against the romantic illusions of those who, like us, are usually shielded from the sharp edges of structural violence. I find it helpful to think of the “materiality of the social,” a term that underlines my conviction that social life in general and structural violence in particular will not be understood without a deeply materialist approach to whatever surfaces in the participant-observer’s field of vision—the ethnographically visible.By “materialist” I do not mean “economic” as if economic structures were not socially constructed. I do not mean biological as if biology were likewise somehow immune from social construction….
The adverse outcomes associated with structural violence—death, injury, illness, subjugation, stigmatization, and even psychological terror—come to have their final common pathway in the material….An anthropology of structural violence necessarily draws on history and biology, just as it necessarily draws on political economy. To tally body counts correctly requires epidemiology, forensic and clinical medicine, and demography….… Erasing history is perhaps the most common explanatory sleight-of-hand relied upon by the architects of structural violence.
Erasure or distortion of history is part of the process of desocialization necessary for the emergence of hegemonic accounts of what happened and why….“Modern” Haiti: Resocializing History and Biology… [In Haiti] I learned a good deal about the selective erasure of history and the force, often less readily hidden, of biology, but these erasures had not so much taken place within Haiti. In Haiti, the past was present—in proverbs, in the very language spoken, itself a product of the slave colony, and in popular Haitian readings of its present-day misfortune.
In Haiti structural violence continues to play itself out in the daily lives and deaths of the part of the population living in poverty. People know about the body count because they bury their kin.… The biggest problem, of course, is unimaginable poverty, as a long succession of dictatorial governments has been more concerned with pillaging than with protecting the rights of workers, even on paper…. While the dictatorships may be gone, the transnational political and economic structures that maintained them are still in place and still inflicting their harm. An ethnographic study of modern Haiti may or may not discuss the ways in which West Africans were moved to Haiti.
It may or may not discuss tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, or yellow fever. A modern ethnographer may not mention the former colony having been forced to repay a debt to the French supposedly incurred by the loss of the world’s most profitable slave colony…. [T]heir absence makes a fully socialized accounting of the present nearly unthinkable. Allow me to sum up the post-independence history of Haiti:The Haitian revolution began in 1791.
France’s refusal to accept the loss of so “efficient” and profitable a colony led, ultimately, to the expedition of the largest armada ever to cross the Atlantic. After the 1803 Battle of Vertires, in which Napoleon’s troops were defeated, Haiti was declared an independent nation. But its infrastructure lay in ruins: some estimate that more than half of the island’s population perished in the war.
The land was still fertile, if less so than when the Europeans began mono cropping it, and so the new republic’s leadership, desperate to revive the economy, fought to restore the plantations without overt slavery….Even if there were other ways of growing these products—and coffee, unlike sugar, was clearly a product that could be grown on small homesteads—who would buy them?
The Europeans and the only other republic in the Western Hemisphere, the United States, were the only likely customers, and they mostly followed a French-led embargo on Haiti. How many people in France remember that, in order to obtain diplomatic recognition, Haiti was required to indemnify France to the tune of 150 million francs to the government of Charles X beginning in 1825?
One hundred fifty million francs in reparations to the slave owners, a social and economic fact redolent with meaning then and today and one with grave material consequences for the Haitians….This set the tone for the new century: trade concessions for European and U.S. partners and indirect taxes for the peasants who grew the produce, their backs bent under the weight of a hostile world. Especially hostile was the United States to the north, the slave-owning republic (Lawless 1992: 56).
The United States blocked Haiti’s invitation to the famous Western Hemisphere Panama Conference of 1825 and refused to recognize Haitian independent until 1862. This isolation was imposed on Haiti by a frightened white world, and Haiti became a test case, first for those arguing about emancipation and then, after the end of slavery, for those arguing about the capacity of blacks for self-government.
In the years following independence, the United States and allied European powers helped France orchestrate a diplomatic quarantine of Haiti, and the new republic soon became the outcast of the international community….But the isolation was largely diplomatic and rhetorical…. The United States was increasingly present as a trading partner and policeman…. Continuous U.S. naval presence led, eventually, to an armed occupation of Haiti in 1915.
This occupation, another chapter of U.S. history now almost completely forgotten by the occupiers, was to last 20 years….Since 1915, at the latest, the United States has been the dominant force in Haitian politics. The modern Haitian army was created, in 1916, by an act of the U.S. Congress. From the time of troop withdrawal in 1934 until 1990, no Haitian administration has risen to power without the blessing of the U.S. government…. Indeed, there have been no major political discontinuities until perhaps 1990, with the result that the template of colony—a slave colony—continued to shape life in Haiti. Just as the wealthy were socialized for excess, the Haitian poor were socialized for scarcity….
This is the framework I had in mind when I began studying specific infectious diseases—one old, one new—in rural Haiti. In anthropology a version of this framework has been called “world systems theory” (Wallerstein 1974)…. It is an approach that is committed to ethnographically embedding evidence within the historically given social and economic structures that shape life so dramatically on the edge of life and death. These structures are transnational, and therefore not even their modern vestiges are really ethnographically visible….The public health infrastructure is of special concern to me. In the past decade I have witnessed two related processes in central Haiti: the collapse of the public health sector and the overwhelming of the hospital of which I am the medical director.
Even if our hospital were uninterested in seeking foreign aid in the conventional sense, we would desperately be awaiting the rebuilding of the Haitian health system…. We have read the Durban declaration, which calls for reparations to postslavery societies. We agree that this hemisphere’s poorest country is also and not coincidentally its largest postslavery society.
Cuba would be in second place. Guess which two Western Hemisphere republics are under an aid embargo? Does anyone think that Haitians, at least the ones I live with, do not see the continuity between the current and previous embargoes?“What embargo?” one may well ask. “Imposed on Haiti? By whom?” Since the Haitian elections of 2000, the U.S. government has used its influence with international lending institutions such as the Inter-American
Development Bank to withhold already approved loans earmarked for development and improving health, education, and water quality in Haiti….… Take as an example Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Loan No. 1009/SFHA, Reorganization of the National Health System. On July 21, 1998, the Haitian government and the IDB signed a $22.5-million loan for phase 1 of a project to decentralize and reorganize the Haitian health care system.
The need to improve the health care system was and remains urgent: there are 1.2 doctors, 1.3 nurses, and 0.04 dentists per 10,000 Haitians; 40% of the population is without access to any form of primary health care. HIV and tuberculosis rates are by far the highest in the hemisphere, as are infant, juvenile, and maternal mortality. To use the bank’s jargon, the project was to target 80% of the population for access to primary health care through the construction of low-cost clinics and local health dispensaries, the training of community health agents, and the purchase of medical equipment and essential medicines….
Ratification of the loan agreement was initially held up by Haiti’s famously obstructionist 46th Legislature, whose goal was clear enough within Haiti to paralyze all social services, including health care, in order to undermine every effort of the executive branch … to improve the living conditions of the poor majority that had elected him by a landslide….In October 2000, after the installation of the more representative 47th Legislature, the new parliament voted immediately to ratify the health project along with the three other vital IDB loan agreements.
Nevertheless, by early March 2001, the IDB had not yet disbursed the loan but announced that it fully intended to work with the new Aristide government and to finance projects already in the pipeline. It demanded, however, that a number of conditions be met, requiring the poorest nation in the hemisphere to pay back millions of dollars of outstanding debts racked up by the previous U.S.-supported dictatorships, as well as “credit commissions” and interest on undisbursed funds. For example, as of March 31, 2001, Haiti already owed the IDB $185,239.75 as a commission fee on a loan it had never received. The total amount of fees owed on five development loans from the IDB was $2,311,422.
Whereas in the nineteenth century Haiti had had to pay reparations to slave owners, at the start of the twenty-first century a different sort of extortion was being practiced to ensure that Haiti not become too independent. The health loan has still not been disbursed and thus the embargo on international aid to Haiti continues, despite the fact that the Haitian government has followed all the stipulations set down for resolving the disputed elections. In the meantime, the courtyard around our hospital remains overflowing—that is the ethnographically visible part.
These details about loans and such may seem pedestrian to an academic audience. They certainly would hold no great interest for me were it not for their direct and profound impact on the bodies of the vulnerable (Farmer 2003). Trust me, they are of life-and-death significance. For those reluctant to trust a physician-anthropologist on this score, one has only to consider the case of Anite, dying of metastatic breast cancer. She inhabits a world in which it is possible to visit 14 clinics without receiving a diagnosis or even palliative care.
The contours of this world, a world in which her options and even her dreams are constrained sharply, have been shaped by the historical and economic processes described in this paper…. Creating Mirages: Erasing Biology… Tuberculosis and AIDS cause millions of premature deaths every year. These two pathogens are, in fact, the leading infectious causes of adult death in the world today….An anthropological understanding needs to be … both biological and social. Let me illustrate with the better-known of the two diseases:
Tuberculosis was long called “the white plague,” and it is widely believed that it arose with the industrial revolution and then faded. As the historian Katherine Ott notes, however, “Tuberculosis is not ‘resurgent’ to those who have been contending with and marginalized by it all their lives” (1996: 49). A third of the world’s population is infected with the causative organism. We can expect 8–10 million cases a year, with 2–3 million deaths.
How would a critical anthropology look at tuberculosis? Unfortunately, much of the work to date has been focused on the “cultural beliefs,” as they are termed, of the victims of tuberculosis. In Haiti, for example, anthropologists have hastened to note that the locals often regard tuberculosis as a disease sent by sorcery …I took up this question of folk belief some decades later and discovered that many of the terms used in late-twentieth-century Haiti came right out of the slave plantations (Farmer 1992).
In the Central Plateau, ethnographic research conducted in the 1980s revealed that tuberculosis was seen as “sent” by sorcery by the majority of those afflicted. A decade later, after an effective tuberculosis treatment program was put in place, Didi Bertrand and others noted that tuberculosis was increasingly seen as an airborne infectious disease. More to the point, it was seen as treatable, and the stigma associated with it was clearly on the wane.
This indissociable trio of anthropology, history, and biology is just as readily evident when we look closely at the world’s most recent plague and the complex trajectory of its causative agent—a virus, in this case. Since the syndrome was first described, AIDS has also been termed a “social disease” and has been studied by social scientists, including anthropologists…. When AIDS was first recognized, in the early eighties, it was soon apparent that it was an infectious disease, even though other, more exotic interpretations abounded at the time. Well before Luc Montagner discovered HIV, many believed that the etiologic agent was a never-before described virus, and people wanted to know, as they so often do, where this new sickness came from. During the eighties the hypotheses circulating in the United States suggested that HIV came to the United States from Haiti. Newspaper articles, television reports, and even scholarly publications confidently posited a scenario in which Haitian professionals who had fled the Duvalier regime ended up in western Africa and later brought the new virus back to Haiti, which introduced it to the Americas. AIDS was said to proliferate in Haiti because of strange practices involving voodoo blood rituals and animal sacrifice.These theories are ethnographically absurd, but they are wrong in other ways, too. First, they happened to be incorrect epidemiologically. AIDS in Haiti had nothing to do with voodoo or Africa. Second, they had an adverse effect on Haiti—the tourism industry collapse in the mid-eighties was due in large part to rumors about HIV, and on Haitians living in North America and Europe. The perception that “Haitian” was almost synonymous with “HIV-infected” in the minds of many U.S. citizens, has been well documented….How, then, was HIV introduced to the island nation of Haiti? An intracellular organism must necessarily cross water in a human host. It was clear from the outset that HIV did not come to Haiti from Africa. None of the first Haitians diagnosed with the new syndrome had ever been to Africa; most had never met an African. But many did have histories of sexual contact with North Americans. In a 1984 paper published in a scholarly journal, the Haitian physician Jean Gurin and colleagues revealed that 17% of their patients reported a history of sexual contact with tourists from North America (Gurin, Malebranche, and Elie et al. 1984). These exchanges involved the exchange of money, too, and so sexual tourism—which inevitably takes place across steep grades of economic inequality—was a critical first step in the introduction of HIV to Haiti….There is more, of course, to the hidden history of AIDS in Haiti. By the time HIV was circulating in the Americas, Haiti was economically dependent not on France, as in previous centuries, but on the United States. From the time of the U.S. military occupation through the Duvalier dictatorships (1957–86), the United States had come to occupy the role of chief arbiter of Haitian affairs. After the withdrawal of troops in 1934, U.S. influence in Haiti grew rather than waned. U.S.-Haitian agribusiness projects may have failed, deepening social inequalities throughout Haiti as the rural peasantry became poorer, but U.S.-Haitian ties did not. Haiti became a leading recipient of U.S. aid, and the United States and the “international financial institutions” were the Duvalier family’s most reliable source of foreign currency. Haiti became, in turn, the ninth largest assembler of U.S. goods in the world and bought almost all of its imports from the United States. Tourism and soustraitance (offshore assembly) replaced coffee and other agricultural products as the chief sources of foreign revenue in Haiti.Haiti is the extreme example of a general pattern. If one uses trade data to assess the degree of Caribbean basin countries’ dependency on the United States at the time HIV appeared in the region, one sees that the five countries with the tightest ties to the United States were the five countries with the highest HIV prevalence. “… AIDS in Haiti is a tale of ties to the United States, rather than to Africa; it is a story of unemployment rates greater than 70 percent. AIDS in Haiti has far more to do with the pursuit of trade and tourism in a dirt poor country than with, to cite Alfred Mtraux, … dark saturnalia celebrated by ‘blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened’ negroes” (Farmer 1992: 264).But this was merely the beginning of a biosocial story of the virus. The Haitian men who had been the partners of North Americans were by and large poor men; they were trading sex for money. The Haitians in turn transmitted HIV to their wives and girlfriends. Through affective and economic connections, HIV rapidly became entrenched in Haiti’s urban slums and then spread to smaller cities, towns, and, finally, villages like the one in which I work. Haiti is now the most HIV-affected country in the Americas, but the introduction and spread of the new virus has a history—a biosocial history that some would like to hide away.Like many anthropologists, I was not always careful to avoid stripping away the social from the material. But HIV, though hastened forward by many social forces, is as material as any other microbe. Once in the body, its impact is profound both biologically and socially. As cell-mediated immunity is destroyed, poor people living with HIV are felled more often than not by tuberculosis. Last year, HIV was said to surpass tuberculosis as the leading infectious cause of adult death, but in truth these two epidemics are tightly linked….All this is both interesting and horrible. What might have been done to avert the deaths caused by these two pathogens? What might be done right now? One would think that the tuberculosis question, at least, could be solved. Because there is no nonhuman host, simply detecting and treating promptly all active cases would eventually result in an end to deaths from this disease. Money and political will are what is missing—which brings us back to structural violence and its supporting hegemonies: the materiality of the social.AIDS, one could argue, is thornier. There is no cure, but current therapies have had a profound impact on mortality among favored populations in the United States and Europe. The trick is to get therapy to those who need it most. Although this will require significant resources, the projected cost over the next few years is less than the monies allocated in a single day for rescuing the U.S. airlines industry (see Swoboda and McNeil [Hamilton] 2001). But the supporting hegemonies have already decreed AIDS an unmanageable problem. The justifications are often byzantine. For example, a high-ranking official within the U.S. Department of the Treasury (who wisely declined to be named) has argued that Africans have “a different concept of time” and would therefore be unable to take their medications on schedule; hence, no investment in AIDS therapy for Africa. The head of the U.S. Agency for International Development later identified a lack of wristwatches as the primary stumbling block. Cheap wristwatches are not unheard of, but, as I have said, the primary problem is a matter of political will….The distribution of AIDS and tuberculosis—like that of slavery in earlier times—is historically given and economically driven. What common features underpin the afflictions of past and present centuries? Social inequalities are at the heart of structural violence….
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Excellent Quality 95-100%
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Introduction
45-41 points The background and significance of the problem and a clear statement of the research purpose is provided. The search history is mentioned. |
Literature Support 91-84 points The background and significance of the problem and a clear statement of the research purpose is provided. The search history is mentioned. |
Methodology 58-53 points Content is well-organized with headings for each slide and bulleted lists to group related material as needed. Use of font, color, graphics, effects, etc. to enhance readability and presentation content is excellent. Length requirements of 10 slides/pages or less is met. |
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Average Score 50-85% |
40-38 points More depth/detail for the background and significance is needed, or the research detail is not clear. No search history information is provided. |
83-76 points Review of relevant theoretical literature is evident, but there is little integration of studies into concepts related to problem. Review is partially focused and organized. Supporting and opposing research are included. Summary of information presented is included. Conclusion may not contain a biblical integration. |
52-49 points Content is somewhat organized, but no structure is apparent. The use of font, color, graphics, effects, etc. is occasionally detracting to the presentation content. Length requirements may not be met. |
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Poor Quality 0-45% |
37-1 points The background and/or significance are missing. No search history information is provided. |
75-1 points Review of relevant theoretical literature is evident, but there is no integration of studies into concepts related to problem. Review is partially focused and organized. Supporting and opposing research are not included in the summary of information presented. Conclusion does not contain a biblical integration. |
48-1 points There is no clear or logical organizational structure. No logical sequence is apparent. The use of font, color, graphics, effects etc. is often detracting to the presentation content. Length requirements may not be met |
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Picasso and American Art Discussion Essay Paper |
Picasso and American Art Discussion Essay Paper