Speaker: Claire Wendland
Time: 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm CST
Venue: 206 Ingraham Hall
This in-person event will be livestreamed (Click here to Zoom in)
Talk Description
Were people of African descent disease-resistant, or vulnerable, or suited only to tropical climes? Did their cultural practices protect individual and social health, or were they harmful and backward? US Progressives and colonial officials alike asked such questions in the early 20th century. Both medicine and anthropology generated pseudoscientific answers that pathologized Africans and justified white domination. But both disciplines also pushed back against spurious racial hierarchies. Medically trained African intellectuals engaged in those efforts—and moved between Central Africa and the Jim Crow South more widely than has been appreciated. I trace one part of this history through the story of Malawi’s first medical doctor (and sometime anthropologist), Daniel Sharpe Malekebu.
Speaker’s Bio
Claire Wendland is a professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Obstetrics & Gynecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The author of A Heart for the Work: Journeys through an African Medical School (Chicago, 2010) and Partial Stories: Maternal Death from Six Angles (Chicago, 2022), she has done field research on medical training, on maternal health, and on social precarity in Malawi.
The event is free and open to the public.