Susan DiGiacomo
susan@hsjdbcn.org
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Susan DiGiacomo susan@hsjdbcn.org |
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American Anthropological Association
Anthropology and International Health
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Digiacomo, Susan M. 1987. Biomedicine as a cultural system: An Anthropologist in the kingdom of the sick. IN Encounters with Biomedicine: Case Studies in Medical Anthropology. H. A. Baer, pp. 315-347. New York: Gordon and Breach.
2003 Social and Cultural Lives of Immune Systems (Editor). (Theory and Practice in Medical Anthropology; Susan DiGiacomo, editor). New York: Routledge.
Who was the best teacher you had in school growing up and why?
My thesis advisor, Susan DiGiacomo, at Middlebury was terrific. A thesis can
overwhelm you at times, and she was great at teaching me how to ration my time
between academics and athletics, which at a school as competitive as Middlebury,
can be challenging. I ended up getting 'highest honors' in Medical Anthropology,
and a majority of it was due to her efforts.
Terrorism and Spanish Democracy
by Susan DiGiacomo
A firsthand report from Barcelona about the ousting of the Partido Popular days after the March train bombing in Madrid.
http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/
MS. Immune Metaphors Our Bodyminds Live By? To appear in Social and Cultural Lives of Immune Systems, J.M. Wilce, ed. Pp. 107-153. Routledge (Medical Anthropology Series; Susan DiGiacomo, editor).
Comissió de la Dignitat Papers de Salamanca
DiGIACOMO, SUSAN M. (1987): “Biomedicine
as a Cultural
System: an Anthropologist in the Kingdom of the Sick”. En
Baer, Hans A. (ed.), Encounters with Biomedicine. Case stu -
dies in medical anthropology. Nueva York, Gordon & Breach,
(pp. 315-346).
Susan DiGiacomo provides a fascinating discussion of the contested
place of Catalan, both within Catalonia and in relation to the rest of
Spain, as seen in language debates surrounding the holding of the 1992
Olympics in Barcelona. She highlights here both the role and influence
of Catalan as a feature of Catalan nationalism within the wider Spanish
state and the equally nationalist positioning of centralist Spanish nationalists
who regard Castilian (Spanish) as the sole marker of Spanish
identity. In similar vein to Billig’s (1995) conception of ‘banal
nationalism’,
she argues that while both nationalisms exhibit a degree of essentialism,
‘some essentialisms are more essentialized than others more
naturalized and thus less “marked” and problematic and this is
the
case with Spanish nationalism, because it possesses the state’ (p. 131).
From this, DiGiacomo also usefully critiques the differential apportionment
of status and value accorded to Catalan and Castilian as provincial
and ‘modern’, respectively a process clearly reflected in both
the
academic and media debates at the time. As she concludes: ‘It is the
ironic condition of stateless nations like Catalonia that the “imagined
community” … is always challenged, by putatively objective scholarship
as well as by the state and those who share its interests, as merely imaginary,
while the imagined community of state nationalism is treated as
objectively real, part of the natural order’ (p. 131).
Jan
Blommaert, Language Ideological Debates. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, 1999, 447 pp.
