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Nancy Gibson to Present at American Anthropology Association Conference
Interdisciplinary Studies alum Nancy Gibson will present her paper on inappropriate donation of used medical equipment to the developing world at the 2009 American Anthropology Association Conference on December 6 in Philadelphia.
Nancy's paper, Junk for Jesus: Understanding the Supply Train Chain, was selected as one presentation in a session titled The Devil is in the Consequences: (Mis)Translating Social Policy into Practice.
Nancy organized the session featuring anthropologists from around the globe: a professor from University of Kentucky, a Ph.D. student from University of Madrid, and a Ph.D. student from York University in Canada.
American Anthropology Association Web Site
Abstract
Nancy Gibson’s "Junk for Jesus"
– Understanding the Supply Train Chain
This article discusses the hegemonic discourse and the resulting social inequality of the American Medical Industry as it engages with transnational entities. It is based on a socio-linguistic study of articles written for the medical industry including, medical supply manufacturers, medical materials managers, hospital administrators, and ethnographic research undertaken by Gibson in Peten, Guatemala. The donation of used medical equipment and supplies from countries such as the United States to less developed countries is a global process with local consequences when the donated items are inappropriate, broken or constitute hazardous waste. The study follows the flow of materials and information through this complex system to its final disposal in the local landfills of developing countries, such as Guatemala. This social inequality results in coloring a negative image of the United States as a provider of needed medical equipment, which can ultimately affect our international diplomatic and economic relationships.
Panel Abstract
The Devil is in the Consequences:
(Mis)Translating Social Policy into Practice
This panel focuses on the damaging consequences of implementing social programs and/or policies designed to right injustices and inequalities in four diverse areas of the world. Critics of state attempts to improve the lives of their citizens at times bemoan the ways in which progressive policy exists only "on paper," and point to failures in implementation as proof of institutional hypocrisy, while institutions and agencies preen for having created policies or programs intended to solve dire problems. However, as the papers in this session demonstrate reasons for policy and program failures cannot be adequately captured in specters of "bad policy"; policies take shape as they are decoded through local cultural practices. Our panel asks, what can be made of situations in which disasters and damage in implementation cannot be easily attributed to hypocrisy, corruption, or ill-intention? Through ethnographic studies of health, humanitarian aid, development and law, we demonstrate the technologies of governance through which progressive policy goals unravel and the local resistances which shape policy.
The papers in this panel attend to this question by examining the processes of translating policy into action from a variety of sites and locations. The initial paper draws upon fieldwork in Guatemala, as well as professional articles written for the medical industry, to analyze the consequences of the transnational donation of used medical equipment and supplies for those that receive them. The next paper takes up an analysis of assumptions of opposition and conflict that both undergird and undercut attempts by social service agents to provide aid to Spanish "gypsies" in Madrid. Another paper discusses the consequences of the Indian state’s adoption of "alternate dispute resolution" in the form of a system of specialized family courts in Kolkata for issues of integral process, voice and authority, and multiple State entities regulating "law." The final paper is through the lens of governmentality. She argues that the "failure" of Canadian public health agencies to implement mental health policy in Ontario, although it has been attributed to lack of political will or apathy among the public, are in fact indicators of the governement’s attempts to cope with fundamental shifts in core assumptions about the form and content of public health care. Together, the papers map some trajectories of the global flow of resources and concepts, and the mis-translations that emerge from this travel.