Wende Elizabeth Marshall

I am a cultural anthropologist with theological undertones, committed to the exercise of critical humanism. I am especially drawn to study the conjunction of bodies, power and healing. As a researcher I am preoccupied with manifestations of power and resistance, particularly in the practice of biomedicine and in alternative views of the body and disease that challenge biomedical hegemony. My goal as a researcher is to explore the relationships between political power, health and disease and to gather ethnographic data that leads to analysis of the power relations inherent in technologies of healing and perceptions of health.

I did my dissertation fieldwork in the predominantly Native Hawaiian community of Wai'anae on the island of O'ahu. My primary field site was a Native-run drug and alcohol treatment facility. The dissertation explored the struggle to be Hawaiian in the late twentieth century, and the evolving concept of decolonization. While most histories of Hawaii focus on the political/economic impact of Euro/Americans, my focus was on the suffering bodies of Hawaiians. I examined the relationship between foreign encroachment and the discourses (both Hawaiian and Western) of disease and illness in the process of colonization and decolonization. Constructed through the memory of living K'puna (elders), through contemporary narratives of historical memories from the time before the enforcement of the English language, and through the (re)creation of Hawaiian healing methods and views of the body/mind/soul, the process of decolonization becomes a way of healing that displaces Western science and medicine. The dissertation is also about colonialism, and the process through which Native Hawaiians were subsumed under the cultural, political and economic power of foreigners. Medicine, and the question of treating Hawaiians who were dying from diseases brought by the conquering Euro/Americans, was as much a pretext for the colonial project as was the spread of Christianity. From very early on in the colonizing process, Western discourses that were intended to justify the Western presence were medicalized discourses.

My current ethnographic projects focus on the production of multiple knowledge(s) and practices about HIV/AIDS, and on biomedical/scientific knowledge biomedicine as a site of contestation. I have begun exploring African American narratives of HIV and AIDS that counter the dominant biomedical discourses. I am particularly interested in disparities between official scientific discourses on the meaning of HIV and discourses originating in marginal Black communities. I am also committed to research on health disparities and on developing analysis of the role of structure and culture in the production on health and disease. Along these lines I have been conducting textual analysis of the discourses on AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa that originate in the West. I continue to be fascinated by Thabo Mbeki's critical stance toward western medical knowledge, and to the firestorm of controversy this stance has engendered in the West.

Specializations

Medical anthropology (anthropology of healing and discourses on health and disease; critical analysis of western science and bio-medicine, race and health and power); political anthropology (nationalism, colonialism/postcolonialism, decolonization, and anthropology of margins and minorities); community studies (health/disease and political empowerment; race, criminality and disease in urban communities); and race theory (constructions of race in Oceania and the U.S.; race and anthropological theory).

Courses

Culture, Healing and Health: An Introduction to Medical Anthropology; Race, "Progress" and the West; AIDS and the Africa Diaspora; The Black Body; Anthropology of Colonialism: Hawai`i; American Colonial Territories; Race, Class, Gender and Health.

Selected Publications

• 1999 - (co-authored with Ho'oipo DeCambra and Mari Ono) "Ho'omau Ke Ola: 'To Perpetuate Life as It Was Meant to Be.'" in Noreen Mokuau. ed. Responding to Pacific Islanders: Culturally Competent Perspectives for Substance Abuse Prevention. CSAP Cultural Competence Series 8. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Department of Health and Human Services: 73-96.
• 1997 - (co-authored with Karen Z. Ho) "Criminality and Citizenship: Implicating the White Nation." in Judith Jackson-Fossett and Jeffery Tucker. eds. Race Consciousness: Reinterpretations for the New Century. New York: New York University Press.