Navajo Alcohol Abuse

The article that I read this week is about the changes in patterns of alcohol use and abuse among Navajo Indians from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s.  Historically the Navajo have been widely criticized for their alcohol abuse.  The prevalence of alcohol dependence in the Navajo remains higher than in the general United States population, but remission is much more common in the Navajo people than was initially thought.  The Native American (peyote) Church has been widely credited with helping people stop alcohol use and abuse.

This study helped to shed light on the reasons why the Navajo tend to abuse alcohol. Navajo men have much higher rates of alcohol dependence than women.  The men tend to engage in heavy drinking in response to the drinking of those around them. But it has been shown that Navajo women tend to drink in response to psychiatric disorders, depression, and abuse by their partners.

This study shows an encouraging trend amongst the Navajo.  They still have a higher prevalence of alcohol abuse than the general population, but the Church and other rehabilitation programs focused on the Navajos are slowly helping to reverse this trend.   

Carolina in the Carolines

The title of the article that I read this week is "Carolina in the Carolines: A Survey of Patterns and Meanings of Smoking on a Micronesian Island".  First of all, you might be asking, what/where are the Micronesian Islands? Micronesia is subregion of Oceania.  It is made up of thousands of small islands in the western Pacific Ocean. Micronesia is found to the west of the Phillipines and Indonesia.

The title of this study is meant to show the connection between the Caroline Islands, found in Micronesia, and the Carolinas of the United States.  This connection comes from the "tobacco road" that originally referred to the tobacco-producing area of North Carolina, and the American manufactured tobacco products that people in Micronesia have now begun to consume.

People in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) were considered to be unusual for not using any psychoactive substances before contacting the outside world.  Tobacco was the first of these substances that were brought to the islands, and now they have been exposed to alcohol, marijuana, and betel.  However, cigarettes  remain the most widely consumed of these substances. 

This study looks at the way that cigarettes have been marketed to the FSM and the effect that cigarettes have had on the country as a whole. FSM smokers are hooked on cigarettes and spend a large amount of their small income on purchasing them.  The World Health Organization has deemed tobacco use as the number one preventable cause of death.  However, cigarettes are continually sold because of the high profit (average profit margin of about 35 cents per cigarette in 1994) and the highly addictive nature of tobacco. In fact, the study found that 20% of smokers in FSM smoke more than 20 cigarettes a day! 

Young people are initiated into smoking by taking a drag of another person's cigarette on the islands.  This shows some of the cultural motives for smoking in the FSM.  The study also found that the islanders prefer Winstons over the previously popular unfiltered Camels.  The brands that the islanders prefer may have changed over time, but the study shows that the demand for cigarettes from the United States continues to remain consistent.  

                     

Schizophrenia Stigma

I am a biology major, so I have chosen to read from Medical Anthropology Quarterly, which is a  journal that publishes research and theory in the field of medical anthropology. 

If you want to know what medical anthropology is, you can check out the Wikipedia entry, but it's "citation may be unclear", so as usual, use at your own risk. But basically medical anthropology looks at health and disease in humans and populations from a more holistic and cross-cultural perspective than usual medical studies do. 


The study that I chose to read about is called "Stigma Despite Recovery".  This study identifies the strategies used by people with schizophrenia-related illness to resist the social stigma associated with their disorder and addresses the experiences that they must go through everyday. In the study, 96% of the participants reported experiencing some sort of social stigma due to their disorder.


This study is considered to be significant right now because a new generation of anti-psychotic drugs has allowed people with schizophrenia and other related disorders to carry on more "normal" lives and keep their psychotic episodes to a minimum. 

The title of the study, "Stigma Despite Recovery" refers to the idea that the patients have begun to recover/have recovered from their schizophernia, thanks to the new drugs, but these people still have a social stigma surrounding their mental illness.

Some of the common strategies found to avoid social stigma are:

• Concealing diagnosis or medications
• Avoiding others 
• Attempting to pass for normal
• De-emphasizing the illness 
• Educating others about mental illness 
• Confrontation and opposition
• Humor and joking
• Socializing with others with mental illness or those who sympathize 

Each strategy to avoid social stigma can be considered beneficial or detrimental, based on the situation.  But I think that the most interesting strategy is known as "reproduction of stigma".  This is when people with schizophrenia make a clear distinction between themselves and others with similar illnesses in order to keep themselves from being included in the "mentally ill" category. I think this is interesting because those people that are reproducing the stigma are also the ones who are trying to avoid stigma themselves.  The whole thing is just a vicious cycle, really.  People are always going to compare themselves to others that are "lower" or "sicker" than them in order to make themselves feel better. 

Genres...

The concept of a genre seems like a simple idea, but in reality it is very complex, as shown by the Miller article that we are reading in class.  Most people give no consideration to what a genre is/how they are decided.  On a basic level I think that genres are a necessary evil.  I understand some of the points that Miller presents about how a genre should present the end goal of something, not just what that something contains.  But when it comes to something like music, how would you decide WHAT the goal of that music is?  I feel like you do need to classify the music on the specific things that it contains, otherwise how are you going to find what you are looking for? Or either I am just used to music being grouped by country, rock, hip hop, disco, etc.

On the other hand, there are now countless different genres of music, as shown in the picture below...

People make up these genres everyday, so it becomes difficult to sort out what they all mean.  And many artists can be categorized into multiple genres, where do they show up in i-Tunes or in Wal Mart?  I don't really have the answers to any of these questions, I just find it interesting.  So if anyone can enlighten me, please do.