Margarita Kay

Hot and cold in women's ethnotherapeutics: The American-Mexican west

The purpose of this paper is to report the current status of hot/cold principles in the ethnotherapeutics of women of southwestern U.S.A., northwestern Mexico. The paper presents a secondary data analysis from three studies, including a data bank of Womens Ethnotherapeutic Agents derived from literature searches, interviews of women in research of Mexican American Grandmothers as Health Care Advisors, and research in the historical roots of the ethnotherapeutic agents used in contemporary domestic medicine. This report presents womens home remedies, what these remedies are believed to do, and the sources of this domestic therapy knowledge. It concentrates on persistence and change in one aspect of the theoretical base of these remedies, their humoral complexional classification. In the analysis of data from these studies, continuation of aspects of the hot/cold theory is demonstrated. It is suggested that the persistence is tacit, with the lack of articulated knowledge of humoral theory today stemming from the content of contemporary remedy books. Instead of arguing either diffusion or independent invention, commonly held ethnophysiological concepts are offered as a possible explanation for the persistence of hot and cold therapy practices.

NERVIOS AND DYSPHORIA IN MEXICAN AMERICAN WIDOWS

One hundred widows participating in experimental research entitled Efficacy of Support Groups for Mexican American Widows were studied to learn how they express the loss of their husbands. Mourning practices, acknowledged symptoms of dysphoria, and somatic reactions were studied to learn if the syndrome of nervios subsumes their reaction to bereavement. In addition, their responses to instruments designed to measure depression, the Spanish version of the Beck Depression Inventory and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, were examined for correlation with nervios and relationships to Mexican American acculturation. Nervios seems to be a manifestation of dysphoria rather than a specific syndrome for these women.

Ethnography of the menopause-related hot flash

Research was conducted to learn how women of two ethnic groups in the United States experience and describe menopause-related hot flashes, their reports of associated events and activities, and the ways in which they cope with the occurrence of the flashes. The womens cognitive ordering of events was learned through ethnographic inquiry, using questions which were derived from respondent-generated topics. Descriptions and responses to this physiological event were similar, but interpretation differed. Middle-class Anglo American women spoke of the sensations negatively, but for Mexican American women, the menopausal hot flash had positive components of meaning.

The health and symptom care of widows.

This paper compares the ways in which Anglo and Mexican American widows perceive, interpret and respond to problems of illness. It reports on a study which followed a sample of older, low income recent widows for 15 months after their bereavement. In this account Mexican American widows were found to differ from Anglo widows in aspects affecting their health: socioeconomic background, previous histories of health, health care resources and symptom care practices.

Anthropologist of domestic care.

The title of this symposium, “The Anthropology of Nurse Anthropologists,” is ambiguous. One interpretation of the title could be that its intent is to center on the nurses who are anthropologists. What are their social structure, social organization, physical characteristics, language, modal personality, and so on? I have chosen to interpret the purpose of this symposium to be “What kind of anthropology do nurses do?” This afternoon we are the key informants, demonstrating intracultural variation among “founding parents.” This variation comes from individual psychohistories and cultural history. As in other cultures, we informants are likely to be marginal to our particular groups, nursing, anthropology, and nursing science. The anthropologist who is a nurse may be bicultural in knowledge of the content of two separate systems, biomedicine and anthropology, bilingual in the ideolects of these systems, but marginal to both fields. Despite the criterial attribute of the anthropology Ph.D., the nurse who teaches nursing may also be perceived as marginal to anthropology. Finally, the nurse who is an anthropologist is evaluated as marginal to other nurse scientists. Numbers, which come from subjective decisions in perception, interpretation, and categorization, are reified in the sciences that are favored by funds. Today, I will celebrate our marginality. Anthropology has been described as the most humane of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how basic humanities research can help to describe and predict the care that women give to themselves and their families. It narrates a personal journey. As a nurse, I have been interested in what women do to take care of their families and themselves. As an anthropologist, I learned to ask questions that could reveal this domestic care. I first saw the potential for applying anthropology to health care before ever undertaking graduate work. As a student in public health nursing in San Francisco, and afterward as a visiting nurse in New York City, I learned that