F A C ULTY SPO T LIGH T
Sienna Craig
Associate Professor of Anthropology ANNIE HUANG
Image courtesy of Sienna Craig
Sienna Craig, Associate Professor of Anthropology, with one of her research assistants in Qinghai Province, China.
Can you tell us about your current research on traditional Tibetan medicine? I’m working on a couple of projects right now. I just published a book, Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine which is based on about a decade of research working with Tibetan doctors in Nepal and Tibetan areas in China. On Sunday (Oct 14, 2012), I’m going to Xining, which is the capital of Qinghai province in China, where I’ve worked for the last couple of years on a collaborative research project looking at the ways Tibetan doctors, Tibetan formulas, Tibetan ideas about health and illness are globalizing – traveling to new parts of the world, to new patients, and to new markets. I’m going back to Xining now to run a research methods workshop, the goal of which is to bring medical anthropology, field methods and ethnographic approaches to some of the Masters and Ph.D. students at the Qinghai Tibetan Medical College, and also to the Tibetan Medical Hospital in Xining so that they can think about FALL 2012
incorporating them into their own work and research. The research that has been done on Tibetan medicine in a hospital setting is primarily in China but is also in other places.
Can you tell us about some of your collaborative projects? In anthropology, we have four subfields. We have cultural anthropologists, which includes medical anthropologists like myself. We have sociolinguists, people who study the relationship between language and culture; archeologists who study human history and ancient civilizations; and biological or physical anthropologists whose research ranges from human evolution to primatology and paleontology. My National Science Foundationfunded research project brings two main subfields together. The principal investigator is biological anthropologist Cynthia Beall, who is at Case Western Reserve University. Aside from me, another cultural anthropologist and a demographer, Geoff Childs, based at Washington University –
St. Louis is also working on this project, which examines the relationship between genetics and the fertility of ethnically Tibetan women in northern Nepal Cynthia Beall has worked in the Andes as well as on the Tibetan Plateau for more than 30 years. Her main scientific contribution has focused on human adaptation to living at altitude. Part of what she has discovered is that not only are there specific cultural adaptations Tibetans have acquired to living in high and extreme environments, but it’s also an example of natural selection in a living population: over time, Tibetans have genetically adapted to living at altitudes. In particular, part of what Cynthia and colleagues of hers, geneticists, have discovered genetic markers in Tibetan populations that not only seem to be correlated with the ways that Tibetans carried oxygen in their blood, (hemoglobin levels), but also, in the case of women with these markers, with reproductive outcomes. Our project is testing the hypothesis that women with these genetic markers will have better reproductive outcomes than those who do not. But many other things affect whether or not a child lives or dies at altitude. To put it in a different way, a remote, resource-challenged part of a poor country, like Nepal, is bound to introduce other complicating factors to women’s fertility, their reproductive histories, and their children’s rates of survival. This is where Geoff and I come in. We know the two areas in Nepal where we are doing this work very well and have good rapport with local people. We were not only helping Cynthia to collect the biological data that she needs to answer those genetic questions, but also connecting this information to household demographic data, economic surveys, family histories, and reproductive histories. For this project we interviewed hundreds of ethnically or culturally Tibetan women in Northern Nepal last summer, asking them about their histories of childbirth, when they got married, and many other questions. We asked them a wide range of questions to get a clearer picture of the cultural, socioeconomic, 9