WAN ADMIZA WAN HASSAN, a post  grad chook interested in international broadcasting, has made it to the pointy end of her PhD. Her final seminar is Friday the 11th December, 12 – 2pm in room Z2 310. Come along and support her as she discusses entertainment television in Malaysia. Read more about her project below.

LOCAL ADAPTATION OF GLOBAL TELEVISION STRATEGIES: MALAYSIAN ENTERTAINMENT TV PROGRAMS

Globalisation of modern culture and technology has affected what programs are shown on television. The scripted, pre-produced studio-bound situational comedy and pre-recorded programs are joined now by multi camera production shows where almost everything goes live-to-air.

This research looks at the development of entertainment TV programs in Malaysia, focusing on local adaptation of global entertainment television formats.

The dramatic rise in the popularity of entertainment TV programs can be considered as an important feature in the world media landscape now. Many entertainment TV programs such as talent quest, reality TV, game shows etc have created history in terms of audience participation and revenue generation. Recently in Malaysia, entertainment TV programs such as Akademi Fantasia, One in a Million (OIAM), Bintang RTM, Gang Starz etc. have become very popular with television viewers and this entertainment TV programs is a contest to determine the best young singer. Like any other entertainment programs, the winner is decided by public votes or short message system (SMS).

Although entertainment TV programs have created new dreams and hopes for producers, advertising agents, aspiring contestants and devoted viewers in Malaysia, the Government is not too pleased with some of these programs.

This research will consider on the development and popularity of the adaptation of global television strategies into local entertainment television programs in Malaysia, as well as the constraints that facing by Malaysian producers. One of the major constraints is public and policy anxiety that arise concerning on the quality of the entertainment TV programs.

This research aims to look at the aspects of local adaptation of global entertainment television programs format and the quality concerns in Malaysian entertainment TV programs in order to support the on-going development of the commercial television production industry in Malaysia.

We got our first snowfall of the season on Thursday afternoon and evening.

Snow Covered Spruce Tree

Normally, I love snow. I love skiing and snowshoeing through the woods. We only got about two to three inches, but for some reason, it took me one hour and ten minutes to get home from work last night, yet I only live eight miles from the office.

First Snow of the Season on Our Patio

I think everyone around here forgot how to drive over the summer months.

Neither Dave nor I have found our festive holiday spirits yet, but we are planning to put our Christmas tree up this weekend, and some lights outside, so hopefully that will give us the boost we need. Maybe this white stuff will brighten up the gray landscapes too.

(By the way Dorrie, it’s supposed to be a high of 25 degrees here today!)

Not if it is conventionally grown!

just an apple? think again.

In a world where there is sometimes a fine line between inorganic and organic products and produce, it can be hard to justify spending the extra cash on, say, the organic apples when the inorganic apples look just as shiny, maybe shinier.

Do not be deceived!  Conventional apples are DRENCHED in pesticides.

A publication in which I am particularly impressed with month after month is:  ”Prevention” magazine.

I was particularly impressed with an article that appeared in the November 2009 Issue, entitled: “7 Foods That Should NEVER Cross Your Lips.”

November 2009 issue of Prevention magazine

Conventionally grown apples are one of the seven forbidden fruits, if you will.  The article quotes, Mark Kastel, a former executive for agribusiness and co-director of the Cornucopia Institute, a farm-policy research group that supports organic foods.  Kastel refuses to purchase and eat inorganic apples explaining that he would rather spend the extra dough on the organic apple than a new electronic.

If this guy would rather place his bet on the organic fuji apple vs. the new apple ipod, well then heck! there must be something to it.

In fact, there is!

A whopping 48 different pesticides were detected by the FDA when they tested 2,500 apples between the years of 1984 and 1991.  In 1993, 36 different pesticides were detected.  Obviously we are moving in the right direction here but seeing that it is almost 2010, I am afraid to ask what the pesticide count still is today.

According to the Prevention article, apples are individually grafted.  Which means that they are all descendants of one single Fuji apple tree.  This is so each variety of apple maintains its distinctive flavor. Unfortunately, these apple transplants do not develop a natural resistance to pests and are thus sprayed frequently.

Apples are wonderful for you, but I cannot be a cheerleader for them if they are sprayed with enough pesticides to wipe out a colony of bugs.

My thought:  Get them organic.  Do not buy conventional.  And if you are still concerned, wash and peel.

In the meantime, let’s rephrase:  ”An organic apple a day, keeps the Doctor away.”

Food for thought:  ”Farm workers have higher rates of many cancers.”  -Kastel

I have been looking back through some of the common topics I blog about here, seeking some inspiration:

On the trails, at the market, in my garden, Etsy buys, Sunday stash, and progress reports.

bridge over the bridal path

We went hiking last weekend on a trail close to our house, but I didn’t bring my camera. Since I can’t have a post without a picture, I am going to share a few more pictures from our adventures in New York.

silly squirrel on the fence

Our outdoor farmers market ended in early November.

Perfectly shaped Fall tree in Central Park

Our gardening season is over, which I’m happy about. By September, I get burned out on gardening and yard work. After raking leaves a couple times in October, I am really done.

leaves in the vegetable garden

I have been doing a little etsy shopping lately, so I can’t wait to receive those handmade goodies.

I haven’t ordered any new fabric in a long time, but I did visit this cool fabric shop in New York City. It’s about two to three blocks from my brother-in-law’s office, in the most quaint and quiet neighborhood.

The City Quilter shop

I did buy a couple pieces of fabric. No plans for it yet; I just had to have it. You know how that is.

musical fabrics

I haven’t sewn anything new in a couple weeks, so I don’t have a progress report to share. I received a commission request today, so now I am excited to have a sewing mission to work on!

I haven’t cooked much or baked at all since Thanksgiving, so I don’t have any recipes to report on. This weekend I am hoping to bake some sugar cookie cut-outs to decorate, and peanut butter blossoms, which I adore.

Stanzi and Holly, two gray mammals

I will leave you with that picture of my sister-in-law and brother-in-laws adorable kitties. We had so much fun hanging out with them too. Hope everyone is having a good week!

If I had to spend the rest of my life trapped somewhere, I hope to God that it is a Whole Foods Market.

Whole Foods exudes health.

The food is of the utmost quality and their selection is not only diverse but mouthwatering.

Today I drove thirty minutes to the new Whole Foods in the Maplewood, NJ area.  If there is a heaven on earth, well I found it today.

Upon my entrance, I was enveloped in a sea of colorful fruits and vegetables and low and behold, a beautiful display of freshly squeezed and packaged, unpasteurized fruit and vegetable juices.

As I made my way through the aisles, tears formed in my eyes as I discovered a display of dispensers offering a variety of sea salts.  Seriously.  Pink. Grey. Black.  For some, a salt is a salt.  However, the iodized table salt you find on a daily basis is a far cry from the quality sea salts you can find at WFM and Health Food Stores, alike.

Table Salt often contains additives to prevent the salt from clumping, and is mined from underground salt deposits.  Table Salt is generally highly processed and iodine, a naturally occurring essential mineral, is added because the majority of trace minerals in the original product, are eliminated during the processing.

A quality Sea Salt on the other hand, is produced through the evaporation of, yep, you guessed it…. sea water.  It contains a minute amount of naturally occurring essential trace minerals.

It is my expert opinion that the less processed something is, the better it is for you.  In the case of sea salt, those little trace minerals add flavor, color, and add to the coarseness of the salt.

Coarse Sea Salt, Pink Sea Salt, Iodized Table Salt

Whole Foods is a marvelous establishment because they offer a variety of “healthy” to “healthier” options. At WFM, there is something for everyone.  Whether you are a salt enthusiast or a soda addict looking to transition to a healthier, but still enjoyable option, there is something for you.

Born and raised with a soda-slurping, Southern mother, it has been a tricky feat to transition members of the family off of their white-sugar soda high.

Sometimes I will pick up the following soda from WFM (for the family) in order to encourage healthier eating habits.

Zevia Brand Diet Soda: sweetened with Stevia instead of sugar or other chemically treated sweeteners, Zevia is a wonderful 0 calorie alternative for soda lovers. The fam is particularly inclined to the Cola and lemon flavors (not shown).

All it takes is one step in the right direction and you are on the path superior health.

Explore…

Enjoy…

Heaven on Earth.

Didier Fassin
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

This is a note of circumstance in two ways. First, it was written as the prelude to a lecture on “Global Health” delivered at the Conference of the Society for Medical Anthropology at Yale University in September 2009; it must therefore be placed in this broader perspective. Second, it refers to a scene I found significant in the early period of the debate around health care reform in the United States. However, I do not want to be seen as following the crowd of critics of this courageous and indispensable reform always deferred. Thus this fragment must be considered simultaneously within this specific context and outside of it, since it is meant to evoke the larger question of which members a society may exclude from its solidarity (and I refer here to “members” because people who live, work and die in a given society can claim membership whatever their citizenship and status).

Following Barack Obama’s much celebrated speech to defend his health plan before Congress on September 10 of this year, one anecdotal event received much attention: the interpellation of the President by infamous Representative Joe Wilson, who accused him of lying. Much indignation has been raised by this lack of civility or evidence of racism, depending on interpretations, but few have  commented on the matter that provoked this gross accusation of lying: the assertion that no illegal immigrants would receive benefits under the plan in preparation.

Whatever appreciation one may have of this assertion – whether it is true or false, good or bad – the remarkable fact is that it seems to take for granted a broad political consensus supporting the exclusion of undocumented foreigners from the plan for health reform. The President discarded the claim made by his opponents that he might think otherwise as obviously absurd and bogus, just as he protested  the claim that he is planning to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. In other words, saying that illegal immigrants would be included in the reform can only be a mere invention to discredit the government, as if this hypothesis were not only improbable but also unthinkable.

The implicit meaning of this reasoning is thus that the lowest common denominator for the reform is that it must draw a line within the population living in the country. If health is to be recognized as a common good, which is probably the most crucial issue of the present plan and its major ideological innovation, then it is necessary to define the moral community that deserves, or at least is entitled to benefit, from this collective solidarity. These notions – common good and moral community – are intricately related, but they may need some theoretical clarification and even more historical perspective.

It is certainly one of the most significant aspects of what Karl Polanyi coined as the “great transformation” characteristic of modernity that health has been recognized as a public responsibility rather than just a private matter and that we thus may be “in care of the state,” according to Abram de Swaan’s felicitous expression. This conception derives from the fact that health has increasingly been considered as a common weal and not just a natural given. One may remember that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the introduction to his 1754 Discourse on Inequality, distinguished between physical and moral inequality; for him, as for his contemporaries, disparities inscribed in the body were excluded from the political. One century later, they had become part of the progressive project of the hygienists.

It took one hundred more years to see this idea formally accepted at an international level. With the birth of international institutions like the World Health Organization in 1948, the idea of a global common good seemed to be on its way, just as the utopia of a world moral community was inscribed in the foundational texts of the United Nations in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, sixty years later, the idea and the utopia are still more present in the rhetoric of international agencies or the imaginary of non-governmental organizations than in the empirical facts anthropologists observe in their fieldwork.

Returning to the U.S. scene, to Barack Obama’s reform, and to Joe Wilson’s outrage, this is what the recent episode in Congress reminds us: that health remains largely a national affair rather than a global question, that its recognition as a common good has to be conquered over individualistic conservatism, and that within each specific context the necessary condition for obtaining this recognition is the delimitation of a moral community that separates the entitled from the excluded, the deserving from the undeserving. In its soft form, this means that those not entitled to public social protection may still benefit from compassionate help through private charity organizations. In its strong version, it implies that excluded persons may be left without any treatment or preventive care.

This point should be emphasized. That illegal immigrants may be absent from health reform is highly significant. Far from being a marginal dimension of this political project, as one might infer from the fact that the population concerned is itself marginal, it is a crucial test for policies. Just as Hannah Arendt asserted that the fate of refugees in the first half of the twentieth century was intimately related to the decline of the nation-state, we must consider the political treatment of immigrants as a major challenge for the social state in the early twenty-first century.  In fact, these two categories are less distinct than we might think, since today’s undocumented foreigners are often none other than rejected asylum-seekers. Even in a globalized world, the right to health is bound to state policies in the same way that civil rights are. Thus the ultimate moral of this recent Congressional fable may be simply that global health starts at home.

Didier Fassin, MD, PhD, is James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the author of seven books, including When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (2007) and The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (2009), as well as numerous articles in social science and medical journals.  Fassin’s body of work is situated at the intersection of the theoretical and ethnographic foundations of the main areas of anthropology—social, cultural, political, medical. Trained as a medical doctor, he has conducted field studies in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France, leading to publications that have illuminated important aspects of urban and maternal health, public health policy, social disparities in health, and the AIDS epidemic. He recently turned to a new area that he calls “critical moral anthropology.” He argues that morality should be treated as a legitimate object of study for anthropologists and analyzed in its political contexts. From this perspective, his work has been concerned with the “politics of compassion,” namely, the various ways in which inequality has been redefined as “suffering,” violence reformulated as “trauma,” and military interventions qualified as “humanitarian.”

Object-Name: METAL Merlin’s Laptop inSL
Region: Foyle Gully (258560, 232448)
Local-Position: (44, 70, 1112)

Hails my friends,

I hope all is well in the 2D net world.
To send me email inSL/ and or a SLEMail, you can just click on the encrypted email below:

“Click here to send me a SLEMail when I am inSL.“

or just copy this encrypted email address below:

2245fd45-a976-715d-48cb-a5776658ee46@lsl.secondlife.com

Then use it to send me your SLEmail message and I will get it inWorld.
See you in the METALVERSE™ !

PEACE OUT ~ METAL UP

Hey yall!  I got a new youtube account, yoyo6628!  make sure to go and subscribe because there will be clubpenguin tp stuff up soon!

www.youtube.com/yoyo6628

One of our far flung postgraduate chooks, AMANDA WATSON, is currently conducting research in Papua New Guinea. To see some information and photos about her study, have a look at Hatching Ideas.

Something exciting you would like to share with your fellow chooks? Email the chook farmers and we’ll post your info as soon as we come in from the barn.

TING TING SONG, one of our postgraduate chooks, is preparing to wow the panel during her final seminar – next Tuesday the 8th, 12 – 2pm at The Hall. Come along and show your support for her project.

For more information, check out her abstract here.

I am absolutely terrified of “The King“.

I am not talking about the future King of England, Prince Charles, (or any other existing royalty), but rather “The King” of the fast food joint– Burger King.  Clearly, their marketing has been effective to some extent, as I will forever have nightmares about his giant, masked face.  That being said, America’s favorite fast food restaurants do exceptionally well regardless of our economic state.  Burger King, itself boasts a whopping 11 million guests will visit a BK somewhere in the world today!

With a fast food restaurant on every corner, and time and/or money as a factor, you may find yourself trading in your healthy thoughts for an order of fries, a burger, or a chicken sandwich.

As a nutritionist, I meet many workaholics, mothers, and people that are always “on-the-go” and who feed me a different variation of the following phrase:

Please fill in the blank with your favorite answer.

“I have to stop at (insert your favorite fast food restaurant here) because ______________.”

a.  I am always on the road and there is nowhere else for me to stop

b.  I just don’t have the time to get anything else

c.  Eating healthy is too expensive for me right now

d.  The kids begged me to stop and I did not have the energy to resist

e.  There is nothing else in the area and I was starving!

f.  all of the above or insert your own answer.

As someone who spent their former occupation driving around in a car for an upward of nine hours, I understand time and I understand money.  I even understand having trouble locating a place to stop.

However, these are all excuses.

Instead of telling yourself that you have no other option, try these easy and delicious solutions.

Solution!

Every fast food restaurant offers a side salad.  If you are particularly hungry, order a couple!

Avoid the dressing, fried chicken, sour cream, croutons, cheese and other paraphernalia that “they” try to dress it with, and just stick with your friendly side salad.  But… don’t stop there!

You’ve got a purse/bag/backpack/briefcase. You’ve got a car!  You cart around everyone else’s junk, why not invest in yourself too!  Here are my following suggestions for dressing a salad when you are on the go.

Option #1: Keep First-Cold Pressed Extra Virgin Olive Oil in your car.  You many even want to store some balsamic vinegar in there too.  Keep it in a baggy to prevent leaking.

If you want to add a little oomph!

a.  Sprinkle on a few sunflower seeds, almonds or flax seeds.

b.  Add a handful of unsweetened dried apple chips or raisins!

c.  If you must, add grilled chicken but then do not add any other toppings besides your dressing.

Option #2: Before heading out the door, grab a ripe avocado.  Avocados are rich and creamy and are very satisfying.  Cut one in half and squeeze the contents onto your salad.  They are relatively easy to cut and even one of those skimpy little plastic knives will do the trick.

a.  Add a handful of unsweetened dried apple chips or raisins!

Option #3: If you can work magic in the kitchen, make your own dressing the night before and grab it out of the fridge before heading out the door.

* I will have great salad dressing recipes to come!

Option #4: Carry snacks on hand!  If you are in the car, keep some imperishable snacks in your car like raisins, or Suzie’s Spelt Crackers.

Yum! Now you will be able to stick to healthy lifestyle and not feel weighed down by the calling of your stomach or those deep fried potato sticks (ahem, “french fries”).

Peter J. Guarnaccia
Rutgers University

As a long-term advocate of universal health care, I am cautiously optimistic that current bills will make a positive difference for many. But as someone who has rapidly become more involved with transnational Mexican communities and their health issues, I am dismayed by the current refusal to include unauthorized immigrants in the health care plan.

In preparing our book, A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship (2006), Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston and I organized two conferences to discuss issues of organ transplantation, Latinos in the U.S. health care system, and rights to medical care. I came to this project amazed that Jesica Santillan, an 18-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant who had come to the U.S. explicitly to try to get a heart-lung transplant, had managed to receive such a procedure. In my experience in central New Jersey, the doors to medical care, beyond care in a local free clinic and a federally qualified health center, were relatively inaccessible to undocumented immigrants. Jesica’s story was remarkable on a number of levels: her mother got a job with health insurance, a local builder became an advocate and fundraiser for Jesica’s cause, and Duke University Hospital put Jesica on its waiting list for a heart-lung transplant because she had the financial resources to pay for the procedure.

Tragically, when Jesica got the transplant, she received mismatched organs in terms of blood typing, and she died – despite a second transplant with organs that did match. The second transplant provoked a flurry of vitriolic posts on anti-immigrant websites, and Jesica’s case became a lightning rod for promoting the denial of organ transplants to undocumented immigrants. As the contributors to the volume argued so cogently, these reactions were uninformed by how the U.S. organ sharing system treats non- citizens: 5 percent of organs are allowed to go to non-citizens, though the stereotype is that they go to wealthy individuals from abroad. Less known is that undocumented immigrants donate many more organs than they receive in the U.S. The deep analysis of this case offered in our edited volume provides many insights relevant to current debates about undocumented immigrants and their rights to health care.

The current debates on health care for immigrants – or, more appropriately, the denial of health care to undocumented immigrants – make evident that health care reform and immigration reform are inextricably linked.

At a basic level, I believe health care is a right and that all people in the U.S. have a right to health care. Undocumented immigrants are making tremendous contributions to U.S. society – our food, children, homes and communities depend on their labor. Somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of undocumented immigrants receive health insurance through their employer; all should, as should all employees. Many pay for health insurance – and pay social security and Medicare taxes – and do not realize they are paying for these benefits for themselves and for older Americans.

Immigrants are the lowest users of health services, and undocumented immigrants lower users still. They are not overwhelming our health care system; rather they are suffering with illness until it is a crisis, and then they appear at the emergency room very sick. These are the sensational stories that appear in the media, but they are the tail end of lack of access to health care. These desperately ill individuals are typically covered by uncompensated care funds or charity care because their more-than-full-time jobs do not provide health coverage. One of my concerns about the impact of health care reform on undocumented immigrants is that these kinds of funds to cover the poor and uninsured will be severely curtailed or even disappear. Paradoxically, if health care reform succeeds, there will no longer be a rationale for these kinds of funds as all citizens will have insurance coverage in theory, and hospitals will no longer need to provide charity or uncompensated care.

Some fledgling ideas for addressing the health care issues of Mexican immigrants have recently begun to circulate. Last year, at Binational Health Week, representatives of the Mexican government discussed potential solutions that would involve linking Mexico’s national health insurance system with the U.S. Other intriguing ideas would make Mexican insurance portable. Emergency care would be provided locally, and major medical care would be provided back in Mexico, with provisions to allow people to return to work once they are well. These ideas, however, will go nowhere unless there is a serious discussion of immigration reform linked to health care reform.

These ideas are those of the author and do not in any way reflect policy positions of Rutgers University.

Peter Guarnaccia, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Cook College and Investigator at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers University. His research interests include cross-cultural patterns of psychiatric disorders, cultural competence in mental health organizations, and processes of cultural and health change among Latino immigrants.

Josiah Heyman
University of Texas at El Paso

Representative Joe Wilson famously interrupted President Obama’s health care speech to Congress by shouting “you lie,” just after the President had said that proposed legislation would not provide access to health insurance for undocumented immigrants.  Factually, Wilson was wrong.  The legislation indeed restricts the undocumented from receiving its benefits.  But the central assumption of the debate itself is wrong.  Obama claimed that a rigid line had been drawn; Wilson that it was not rigid enough.  But on close examination the rigid line fades from sight.

In public health, our fates are connected.  The H1N1 flu is a mild reminder of this.  When there is a more severe pandemic, we will regret frightening off and making access hard for any of our biological neighbors.  To offer a different, but I hope even more persuasive angle: health care access is a matter of mutual moral obligations, a network of ties accumulated throughout society.  I know a 100-year-old woman, still in good health but needing a bit of attention.  She herself is an immigrant, a citizen and retiree after years of marginalization and hard labor.  Her caregiver is undocumented, undergoing the same life of sweat and stigma in the present day.  They owe each other their existence.  They depend on each other for their health.

The undocumented are among us; they are you and I, our mothers and fathers, uncles and cousins.  More than three million U.S. citizen children live with at least undocumented parent–a parent who might one day be crippled from lack of simple health care.  Families are healthy together or unhealthy together; the health care access of such “mixed status” families might be divided by law, but the health of such families is not so easily divided.  The undocumented in very modest ways sometimes do have health coverage–though of all sectors, they work the most with the least use of public resources. An example is prenatal care for undocumented women, who are expecting future citizen children.  Such children will live in our neighborhoods and attend our schools.  The connections are inevitable, whether we honestly admit them or not.

Lack of papers keeping people from government programs is not really the main issue.  Except for children, few would qualify for public benefits.  In the main, undocumented people are working adults, not welfare users.  Rather, their jobs are concentrated in sectors without health insurance, or with salaries so low that they cannot afford to utilize such coverage as would be available.  If health reform passes, this situation may actually improve–not because the aim is to benefit the undocumented, but because the undocumented share the same obstacles as many others of us: the flaws of the employment based health insurance system.

At the same time, the federal government is pressuring employers to fire workers who do not have social security numbers that match recorded numbers and names.  Leaving aside the operational flaws of this program, it is likely to push many undocumented workers and their employers into the black market. They will be back to being uninsured.  What will happen then?  Back to untreated illness.  Back to expensive and overloaded hospital emergency rooms.

Why then the heated debate?  The health costs involved are small, and the measures unlikely to matter much, even from a perspective that seeks to cut off access to care for the undocumented.  I am not entirely sure of the answer, but it seems rooted in the notion of lack of deservingness because of their illegalized status and more widely their place as immigrant newcomers.  Perhaps this is what happens with inequality in a period of decline: we turn inwards in a vicious competition to hold onto our own and deprive others of goods that are shared and redistributed in society.

The U.S. lacks a tradition of shared rights to health care, immigrants or not; this worsens possessive competitions.  The possible health reform is a modest and flawed step away from this.  But the ethic of redistribution reaches its current limit with undocumented immigrants, many of them Latinos, who symbolize absolute outsiderness resident within the bounds of our illusorily sealed-off nation.  Yet immigrants will not go away.  They are far too integral to our world, far too much a part of our economy and our society.  The debate will certainly return soon, when Congress considers legalization of the currently unauthorized, specifically with regard to their access to insurance and health care programs.

We ethnographers have some duties in this situation.  One is to document the mutual interconnections of immigrants (of all legal statuses) with the larger society.  We need a robust factual ground to make persuasive cases in the moral debates over migration.  The other is to spend time among the people who respond to immigrants to understand the bases of both rigid exclusion, the central assumption of the Wilson-Obama confrontation, and of moral connection.  We know far more about immigrants than hosts, which hobbles our ability to understand and contribute to the public debate.

Josiah Heyman, PhD is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at University of Texas El Paso (for identification purposes only). He is currently conducting research on access and barriers to health care for immigrants, and Latinos more generally, in El Paso, Texas (see Heyman, Núñez, and Talavera, Family and Community Health, 2009, Vol 32, pp. 4–21).  Previous work has examined U.S. border enforcement, U.S. border officers, and border communities and cultures. He is the author of Finding a Moral Heart for U.S. Immigration Policy: An Anthropological Perspective (Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association) and Life and Labor on the Border: Working People of Northeastern Sonora, Mexico, 1886-1986 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press), and more than fifty scholarly articles and book chapters.  He was chair of the Society for Applied Anthropology Public Policy committee from 2001-2007, and has participated extensively in the U.S.-Mexico Border and Immigration Task Force.

Jennifer S. Hirsch & Emily Vasquez
Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University

What a bitter irony to read about hospitals’ growing willingness “to consider patients’ cultural beliefs and values.”  In “A Doctor for Disease, a Shaman for the Soul” (September 19, 2009) the New York Times describes the integration of Shamans and their traditional healing practices, including “soul calling” and chanting, at a hospital in Merced, California, that serves patients from a local Hmong community. The program, meant to build understanding between the Hmong and the medical establishment, exemplifies an approach “being adopted by dozens of medical institutions and clinics across the country that cater to immigrant, refugee and ethnic-minority populations.”

Cultural sensitivity is certainly an improvement over cultural insensitivity.  Any real commitment, however, to improving immigrant health would start by considering the critical role of immigrant workers in our economy and the logical corollary that those contributions ought reasonably to be rewarded with the right to purchase health insurance. Moreover, the concentration of immigrant workers in our nation’s most dangerous jobs in the fields of construction and agriculture means that they suffer disproportionately from under-funded enforcement of existing occupational safety and health regulations. In the case of Latino immigrants, the Pew Hispanic Center reported in September that 28 percent of Hispanic adults living in the United States who are legal permanent residents or citizens are uninsured. Of those who are not citizens or legal permanent residents, nearly two out of three are uninsured (compared to 17 percent of the adult population of the United States who lack health insurance).

“Certified shamans” are fine, but the majority of immigrants would be better served by attention to the living and working conditions that put their health at risk and by a less hypocritical conversation about their exclusion from the health care system.

Jennifer S. Hirsch, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality, and reproductive health, U.S.-Mexico migration and migrant health, and the applications of anthropological theory and methods to public health research and programs. Her books include the 2003 landmark volume, A Courtship After Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families, which explored changing ideas and practices of love, sexuality and marriage among Mexicans in the U.S. and in Mexico, and two edited volumes on the comparative anthropology of love (Modern Loves, edited with Holly Wardlow, and Love and Globalization, edited with Mark Padilla, Richard Parker, Miguel Muñoz Laboy, and Robert Sember). She is also lead author of the forthcoming The Secret: Love, Marriage and HIV, which presents findings from a recently completed NIH-funded comparative ethnographic study that explores the factors that put married women at risk for HIV infection in five countries: Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea.

Emily Vasquez is pursuing an MPH at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.  She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where, as a Public Policy major, she focused on immigrant social policy.  She was awarded a U.S. Student Fulbright grant in 2006 to study the impacts of international migration on migrant-sending communities in Paraguay.

Will all decent Republican Conservative candidates PLEASE consider leaving the GOP?  The Republican politicians in Washington could not be comprised of a more vapid, idiotic, self-serving, and power-hungry group of jackals.  Instead of refusing to be a part of the nationwide rape that is Obamacare, we have the GOP falling right into the Democrat trap of actually debating the health care bill as if there was any part of it worth the reams of paper it was printed on.  And who is the first spineless, bipartisan, weenie in line with an amendment??  RINO extraordinaire, John McCain, of course.  This guy and the GOP rank and file he represents have already forced the election of a communist to the presidency, so it is a puzzle to me why McCain, Graham, and the like keep getting reelected.  For Conservatives, these posers are far more dangerous than the transparently socialist Barney Franks of the world.  We absolutely MUST rid ourselves of these snakes at the earliest possible opportunity.

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According to RedState…

Senate GOP Decides To Improve Health Care Bill So It Can Pass

The Senate Republican Conference is giddy that its first amendment to the health care legislation is to preserve the bloated Medicare bureaucracy.  The Senate Democrats want to do what they always accuse the GOP of doing and cut Medicare.  The GOP is apparently giddy at the opportunity to rub the Democrats’ noses in their Medicare cuts.

So now the GOP is using its first amendment to reaffirm the Democrat theory that Medicare cannot be cut and cuts even to the rate of growth of Medicare are also wrong.

The GOP could have, by chance, offered up the Stupak language, which has not yet been inserted.  The GOP could have offered up an amendment to split the Democrats up front.  The GOP could have done nothing and moved on to let cloture fail, thus killing the bill.  Instead, Democrats and Republicans will no doubt join hands and vote to put the money back in Medicare, making it a grand bipartisan exercise.

What next? A GOP amendment to guarantee breast cancer screenings in the legislation?

Having started from the presupposition that the health care legislation is going to pass, the GOP seems to be signaling it will work to “improve” the legislation just enough to overcome a filibuster.

The legislation has 57 votes already.  The GOP does not need to offer amendments to improve the bill — they need to bring it to a vote and kill it.  Preening for cameras and favorable press coverage is going to get the bill to 60 votes and a signing ceremony…

Back in the mid 80’s, I worked for a fellow who I’ll call Stuart.  Stuart was smart, conscientious, cool under pressure, and a great coach.  Truly, a good influence on me that I appreciate to this day.  Of course I’m still friends with ‘Stuart’ and it’s easier to poke fun at him than to tell him what a great guy he is.  I’ll save the psychology of that for another article down the road.

One of the great lessons that Stuart inadvertently taught me is that we are influenced by our surroundings.

It went like this.

I sat in a cubicle next to Stuart’s.  It was an easy set up because we could converse quickly, I could get his advice and direction, and all I had to do was stand up and look over the cubicle wall.

One day, as I sat there in my cubicle happily working, I began to hum quietly to myself.  I can’t remember the song but it was likely whatever pop song was in heavy rotation.  As I continued to work, concentrating on what I was doing, I stopped humming, as thoughtlessly as I had started.

A number of minutes later, I heard a hum from one of the cubicles around me.  It was Stuart.  No big deal, there are a lot of cubicles, people talking, whistling, phones ringing, Selectric typewriters clacking; general busy office noises.

Then it hit me.  Stuart was humming my song.

Thus began my great experiment.

Through many variations, over a year or so, I enjoyed seeing how many songs I could get him to pick up.  It was a precarious business.   Figuring out where our musical tastes intersected, what songs were so ubiquitous that he would still know them, how quickly I could get him to pick up the tune….

That brings me to the title of the article and to you, reader.

Whether you know it or not, you are being influenced by your surroundings.  What do you surround yourself with?  Who are the people who you choose to spend time with?  How do you react in situations where you must spend time with negative, coarse, or aggressive individuals?  What kinds of places do you spend your time in?

Remember that it all has a subtle affect on you —  whether you know it or not.  I’ve never heard of turning a barrel of bad apples good by throwing in a good apple.

I did eventually tell Stuart about my experiment.  After all, it was more fun to let him know that so I could poke fun at him.