Alexandra Brewis
Biographic Data
| ID | 74471 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexandra Brewis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexandra |
| FAMILY NAME | Brewis |
| SIGNATURE | BREWIS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Arizona State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3769-4205 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 149 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 661 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 149 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Who is a responsible woman? Understanding the scope and characteristics of responsible womanhood amongst women in Karachi
In this paper, we will construct and analyze intersecting definitions of womanhood among middle‐class women living in Karachi, Pakistan. Women are agents of their lives and are not passive voices. In this paper, we present narratives of women who resist “societal” narratives of womanhood to live a life of their choosing. We found that participants often defined womanhood through a lens very similar to the Victorian womanhood enforced on people of…
Mentoring in the social science laboratory
Graduate research programs aim to cultivate students’ abilities to conduct scientific research, including theory development and application, research design, data analysis, and transferable skills like collaboration and communication. Historically, social science training has emphasized individual rather than team-based work. This may limit knowledge creation and negatively impact student confidence and overall mental health. With a growing emph…
How to organise undergraduate lab training
The impacts of undergraduate research experiences are multiple and varied. Working in traditional laboratories (e.g. in the bench sciences) fosters many skills, including independence and critical thinking. Likewise, social science laboratories demonstrate important impacts on students with regard to clarification of career paths, understanding the research process, fostering a systems thinking approach to complex problems, and the ability to ana…
Why is water insecurity so distressing? Evidence from Iran that interpersonal conflict is key
Anthropology of Diagnosis
Diagnosis, the process through which a patient’s disease or condition is named, is a classification process that reflects historical, cultural, and political-economic concerns and priorities. There is no clear “anthropology of diagnosis,” yet diagnosis has been a fruitful domain for anthropological theory building, ethnographic research, and its practical translation (such as challenging and rebalancing power in medical encounters). Research arou…
Rethinking water insecurity's relationship to mental health
This study examines how water-related emotions explain differences in mental health outcomes associated with household water insecurity, based on randomized sampling of 685 households in 2024 in a severely water-stressed region of Iran. This extends current water insecurity research by empirically testing both negative and positive emotional mediators of mental health outcomes. In response to recent calls for better means to capture water-related…
Beyond the prescription
Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) are transforming medicine globally. Given the efficacy and the demand for these drugs for weight loss, significant and complex social implications will follow. Drawing on our current qualitative studies with users in Brazil, Denmark, Japan, the United States, and online communities, alongside our pre-GLP-1RA studies in ten additional countries, we identify nine emerging global trends. These inc…
Interacting Water Insecurity and Food Insecurity
Brewis, Workman et al. (2020) provided a basis for significant subsequent advancement in understanding the interplay between household water insecurity and food insecurity across diverse global contexts. This commentary reflects on the subsequent evolution of research and its application in the 5 years since the study's initial online publication in AJHB , highlighting dynamic mechanisms that link water insecurity and food insecurity and the impl…
Defining and Using Gender/Sex in Human Biology
Sex and gender categories are often used by human biologists in hypothesis generation, research design, data analysis, and interpretation. Many studies in human biology thus differentiate samples by “sex” and/or “gender.” But it is unclear to what extent, if any, these terms are defined or clearly operationalized. Through analysis of recent publications in the American Journal of Human Biology we assessed how these terms are defined and used in h…
Characterizing Water Insecurity Among US College Students
Objectives Food insecurity prevalence among US university students is higher than the national average, with minoritized and first‐generation students disproportionately affected. Global and domestic US research has documented the link between food and water insecurity, though research on water insecurity—particularly on college campuses—remains nascent. Methods An exploratory study ( n = 220) connecting measures of water insecurity, food insecur…
Buffering in the intra-household allocation of scarce water in urban Dhaka, Bangladesh
Household management of scarce water aligns to buffering theories, with women prioritising family members perceived to be vulnerable. These findings open new spaces to theorise how intra-household strategies of water allocation shape individual risk and safeguard human health, reconceptualise the dominant paradigm of negative experiences around living with water insecurity to encompass notions of care and shared wellbeing, and develop more sophis…
Power, structure, and health
Ethical challenges of managed retreat from centralized water systems
Why Livelihoods Matter in the Gendering of Household Water Insecurity
One of the most pressing and immediate climate concerns globally is inadequate and unsafe household water. The livelihoods of smallholder crop and livestock farmers are especially vulnerable to these challenges. Past research suggests that water insecurity is highly gendered, and women are theorized to be more aware of and impacted by water insecurity than men. Our study reengages this literature through a livelihood lens, comparing gendered perc…
Men's household water fetching in India
INTRODUCTION: Household water fetching elevates physical and emotional harms, and these are generally assumed to accrue to women due to gendered labor assignments. But even in cases like India where fetching remains a highly feminized task, there are households where the primary responsibility is assumed by men. METHODS: We test the proposition that men's responsibility for water fetching is predicted by greater gender equity, reflected in measur…
Urban Nutrition in the Global South
From Gender and Sex to Gender/Sex
Integrating new methods and conceptualizations that recognize the complexity of sex, gender, and their entanglements is critically necessary to advance practice in anthropology. Gender and sex are not static concepts but evolve over time and vary across cultures, influencing societal organization and interpersonal interactions. Recognizing gender and sex as more complex than binary categories is crucial, especially for medical and biocultural ant…
New Teaching in Participatory Methods for Practicing Anthropology
Anthropologists are moving away from viewing anthropology as a solitary affair towards collaborative research, which values knowledge co-production with community members from research design to data analysis and write-up. By including the people who know most about the field site, participatory research seeks to confront power imbalances and advance social change. Building the capacity of students to fully engage with community partners is criti…
The Benefits of Using Cultural Domain Analysis in Applied Anthropology
Cultural domain analysis (CDA) is a suite of methods and analytical techniques that allow researchers to rapidly and reliably understand the ways in which people conceptualize their world. Consisting of various approaches, including free lists, pile sorts, and related interview techniques, CDA is an effective means of systematically identifying shared knowledge. This article briefly reviews the strengths of this approach, and highlights examples …
Beyond Wash
This study identifies multiple pathways connecting household water insecurity with child nutrition. Using nationally representative samples for 18 countries, we examine the mediating role of child's dietary diversity as a function of household water status, while also accounting for sanitation. We construct a latent household water insecurity score (HWI) and use Structural Equation approach to model underlying pathways. HWI affected child's HAZ s…
Facilitating Exchanges Between Applied & Academic Anthropologists
Deny, Reassure, and Deflect
Fat talk is a conversational interaction recognized through comments like “Does this make me look fat?” In the US, based on psychological lab-based investigations, fat talk is defined as highly damaging for women and actively targeted for various interventions. Using a discourse completion task (DCT), we present normative responses ( N = 313) to fat talk prompts testing women’s fat talk patterns across diverse languages and socio-cultural context…
Community-based Participant-observation (CBPO)
Community-based participant-observation purposefully combines participant-observation and community-based participatory research. While participant-observation is the core method of ethnography and foundational to cultural anthropology, community-based participatory research initially emerged from health and related applied sciences to align researchers' and communities' agendas through focused collaboration. Participant-observation and community…
Ethnographic methods
American anthropology is engaged in significant self-reckonings that call for big changes to how anthropology is practiced. These include (1) recognizing and taking seriously the demands to decolonize the ways research is done, (2) addressing precarious employment in academic anthropology, and (3) creating a discipline better positioned to respond to urgent societal needs. A central role for ethnographic methods training is a thread that runs thr…
Variations in household water affordability and water insecurity
Compounding systems of marginalization differentiate and shape water-related risks. Yet, quantitative water security scholarship rarely assesses such risks through intersectionality, a paradigm that conceptualizes and examines racial, gendered, class, and other oppressions as interdependent. Using an intersectionality approach, we analyze the relationships between household head gender and self-reported socio-economic status, and water affordabil…
Stigma and the perpetuation of obesity
Food, Water, and Scarcity
Food and water shortages are two of the greatest challenges facing humans in the coming century. While our theoretical understanding of how humans become vulnerable to and cope with hunger is relatively well developed, anthropological research on parallel problems in the water domain is limited. By carefully considering well-established propositions derived from the food literature against what is known about water, our goal in this essay is to a…
Body Norms and Fat Stigma in Global Perspective
While slim-body ideals have spread globally in the last several decades, we know comparatively little of any concurrent proliferation of fat-stigmatizing beliefs. Using cultural surveys and body mass estimates collected from 680 adults from urban areas in 10 countries and territories, we test for cultural variation in how people conceptualize and stigmatize excess weight and obesity. Using consensus analysis of belief statements about obese and f…
City structure, obesity, and environmental justice
Stigmatized Neighborhoods, Social Bonding, and Health
The relationship between living in impoverished neighborhoods and poor health is well established, but impacts of neighborhood stigma on health are not well understood. Drawing on long-term research with Latino immigrants, we examine how neighborhood stigma and social bonding affect health in Phoenix, Arizona. During preliminary ethnographic analysis, we developed a novel neighborhood stigma scale. In survey research, we examined effects of neigh…
Water sharing, reciprocity, and need
Water sharing between households could crucially mitigate short-term household water shortages, yet it is a vastly understudied phenomenon. Here we use comparative survey data from eight sites in seven sub-Saharan African countries (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda) to answer three questions: With whom do households share water? What is expected in return? And what roles do need and affordabili…
Publically Misfitting
Living with extreme weight in the United States is associated with discrimination and self-stigma, creating structural exclusions, embodied stress, and undermining health and wellbeing. Here we combine ethnographic interviews and surveys from those with experiences of living with extreme weight to better explain how this vulnerability is created and reinforced by public cues, both physical (e.g., seatbelts) and social (the reactions of strangers)…
Disentangling basal and accumulated body mass for cross‐population comparisons
Measures of human body mass confound 1) well‐established population differences in body form and 2) exposure to obesogenic environments, posing challenges for using body mass index (BMI) in cross‐population studies of body form, energy reserves, and obesity‐linked disease risk. We propose a method for decomposing population BMI by estimating basal BMI (bBMI) among young adults living in extremely poor, rural households where excess body mass accu…
Sambia Sexual Culture
Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays from the Field. Gilbert Herdt. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999. 327 pp
Eating in the Panopticon
In this article, we explore the processes by which surveillance of eating and weight is coupled with popular and medical ideas about discipline, responsibility, and moral worth for individuals identified as fat/obese. We then follow these individuals through bariatric surgery and weight loss, paying attention to what discourses and practices shift and what remain unchanged. We argue that weight loss does not temper the intensity and constancy of …
Vulnerability to fat-stigma in women's everyday relationships
Household water insecurity may influence common mental disorders directly and indirectly through multiple pathways
Shared Norms and Their Explanation for the Social Clustering of Obesity
Objectives. We aimed to test the hypothesized role of shared body size norms in the social contagion of body size and obesity. Methods. Using data collected in 2009 from 101 women and 812 of their social ties in Phoenix, Arizona, we assessed the indirect effect of social norms on shared body mass index (BMI) measured in 3 different ways. Results. We confirmed Christakis and Fowler's basic finding that BMI and obesity do indeed cluster socially, b…
Data Collection in Cross-cultural Ethnographic Research
Collecting data for cross-cultural research is time consuming and expensive. We report on techniques for efficient and effective cross-cultural data collection, drawn from 18 cross-cultural studies we conducted in 22 countries. We discuss research design, site selection and collaboration building, ethical review, cross-site protocol design, data collection pitfalls, and data quality checks
Water sharing is a distressing form of reciprocity
Anthropological theories of reciprocity suggest it enhances prestige, social solidarity, and material security. Yet, some ethnographic cases suggest that water sharing-a form of reciprocity newly gaining scholarly attention-might work in the opposite way, increasing conflict and emotional distress. Using cross-cultural survey data from twenty global sites (n = 4,267), we test how household water reciprocity (giving and receiving) is associated wi…
Weight-related stigma is a significant psychosocial stressor in developing countries
Food Insecurity and Body Norms among Rural Guatemalan Schoolchildren
The predominant hypothesis regarding the ecology of body image suggests that contexts of food insecurity foster positive evaluations of and preferences for fat bodies as they symbolize wealth, social and reproductive success, strength, beauty, and fertility. Yet, there are few studies that empirically test this relationship or examine how experiences of food insecurity influence perceptions of thin bodies. In this study, we examine the ecology of…
Connecting the dots between climate change, household water insecurity, and migration
Rules, Norms, and Injustice
Access to water is often inequitable, and perceived as unjust by stakeholders. Based on qualitative analysis of 135 ethnographic interviews in Bolivia, Fiji, Arizona, and New Zealand, we conduct a cross-cultural analysis to test for shared notions of justice in water institutions (i.e., rules, norms). A key finding is that institutional rules are a common concern in evaluations of justice, but institutional norms were prominent in justice evaluat…
Water borrowing is consistently practiced globally and is associated with water-related system failures across diverse environments
Water problems due to scarcity, inaccessibility, or poor quality are a major barrier to household functioning, livelihood, and health globally. Household-to-household water borrowing has been posited as a strategy to alleviate unmet water needs. However, the prevalence and predictors of this practice have not been systematically examined. Therefore, we tested whether water borrowing occurs across diverse global contexts with varying water problem…
Community hygiene norm violators are consistently stigmatized
Blogs as Elusive Ethnographic Texts
Burgeoning online environments offer completely new opportunities for ethnographic and other forms of qualitative research. Yet there are no clear standards for how we study online texts from an ethnographic perspective. In this article, we identify barriers to the application of traditional qualitative methods online, using the example of a systematic thematic analysis of weight-loss blogs. These barriers include the influence of the technology …
ADHD-Type Behavior and Harmful Dysfunction in Childhood
Cross-cultural studies of psychiatric phenomena allow testing of assumptions of biological consistency and improved understanding of how disorders are culturally formulated. We used a comparative approach to test for population variation in degrees of harmful academic and social dysfunction associated with children's display of behaviors considered symptomatic of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Teacher ratings on psychometric sca…
Metatheme Analysis
In recent years, there has been a florescence of cross-cultural research using ethnographic and qualitative data. This cutting-edge work confronts a range of significant methodological challenges, but has not yet addressed how thematic analysis can be modified for use in cross-cultural ethnography. Thematic analysis is widely used in qualitative and mixed-methods research, yet is not currently well-adapted to cross-cultural ethnographic designs. …
The Fat Self in Virtual Communities
Weight and weight loss are major cultural preoccupations in the United States today, and stigma stemming from being socially categorized as fat appears to be steadily worsening. Online spaces and, more specifically, blogs (weblogs) provide a potentially safe and empowering space in which people struggling with weight issues can create new, virtual selves. We report on cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of the narratives of 234 US-based wei…
Modeling the prehistoric Maori population
Skeletal and comparative evidence of mortality is combined with fertility estimates for the precontact Maori population of New Zealand to determine the implied rate of precontact population growth. This rate is found to be too low to populate New Zealand within the time constraints of its prehistoric sequence, the probable founding population size, and the probable population size at contact. Rates of growth necessary to populate New Zealand with…
Sex ratios at birth in a Micronesian atoll population
The recent suggestion that typically masculinized sex ratios at birth in Micronesian populations may be related to a distinct "Micronesian pattern" of life-course coital behavior is applied to data on the sex ratio of livebirths on Butaritari Atoll in Kiribati. The data show that sex ratios on Butaritari are highly masculinized and do not vary significantly with changes in maternal age. However, there is a discernible relationship between the len…
Sex ratios at birth in Micronesia
In response to comments of William H. James on the authors' articles, it is stated that Micronesian populations are now and have been in the past characteristically highly masculinized at birth (i.e., secondary sex ratios [SSR] of over 108-110). It is fascinating to examine how this finding may reflect microevolutionary change in this island setting. Aspects of reproductive behavior in Micronesia were examined for clues to proximate/remote mechan…
Coital rates, sex‐selective infanticide, and sex ratios at birth
In response to Jamess remarks concerning their article on sex ratios in Micronesia the authors reply that there is no evidence that sex-selective infanticide was ever practiced by the native populations of Butaritari and Guam. There is ample historical and ethnographic evidence to the contrary in the Mariana Islands and Butaritari. Historical accounts begin in 1602 with the comments of Fray Juan Pobre de Zamora who observed the exceptional affect…
Birth Non-Seasonality on the Pacific Equator
Population Dynamics of a Philippine Rain Forest People
Population Dynamics of. Philippine Rain Forest People: The San Ildefonso Agta. John D. Early and Thomas N. Headland. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.208 pp
The Accuracy of Attractive-Body-Size Judgment
Body image, body size, and Samoan ecological and individual modernization
Idealization of slim bodies is a powerful cultural value in economically advantaged Western societies, and this value appears to be taking global dimensions. To examine the relationship between increasing ecological and individual modernity and acculturation to slim ideals, Samoans living in three environments with different degrees of modernization (Samoa, American Samoa, Auckland) were compared on actual and perceptual measures of body size. Wo…
ADHD-Type Behavior and Harmful Dysfunction in Childhood
Cross-cultural studies of psychiatric phenomena allow testing of assumptions of biological consistency and improved understanding of how disorders are culturally formulated. We used a comparative approach to test for population variation in degrees of harmful academic and social dysfunction associated with children's display of behaviors considered symptomatic of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Teacher ratings on psychometric sca…
Sambia Sexual Culture
Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays from the Field. Gilbert Herdt. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999. 327 pp
Population variation in children's behavioral symptomatology
Previous anthropological studies identified significant interpopulation consistencies in the frequency and symptoms of adult depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Tests of the degree of variation of such behavioral phenomena across contemporary populations are significant for the study of human evolution because universality or near universality suggests specific evolved aspects of human behavior. The aim of this research was to provide a preli…
Does School, Compared to Home, Provide a Unique Adaptive Context for Children's ADHD-Associated Behaviors? A Cross-Cultural Test
Adaptive explanations of the high frequency of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in contemporary settings propose that the disorder represents otherwise normal behavioral strategies that become maladaptive in such evolutionarily novel environments as the formal school classroom. The authors use cross-cultural testing to assess whether classrooms are a uniquely maladaptive context for these behaviors when compared to home. The sample…
Social and biological measures of hyperactivity and inattention
The relationship between 27 different measures of hyperactive, impulsive, and inattentive behavior, including those considered to be more objective and those considered more influenced by social factors, is examined using a normal sample of 219 Mexican children, ages 6 to 12. Measures were based on activity monitoring by accelerometry, ethological observation of attentional and movements states in the classroom, cognitive testing using the TOVA c…
On the Biocultural Study of Children's Hyperactive and Inattentive Behavior
Biocultural aspects of obesity in young Mexican schoolchildren
Obesity related to over‐nutrition is investigated in a sample of 219 Mexican children from affluent families, ages 6–12 years. Defined as weight‐for‐age at or above the 95 th percentile, obesity rates in middle childhood are very high in this population, being 24.2% of children (29.4% of boys and 19.1% of girls). Binary logistic regression shows that children are more likely to be obese if they are boys, from small households with few or no other…
Gender Variation in the Identification of Mexican Children's Psychiatric Symptoms
We test empirically how caregiver reports of DSM‐IV symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) vary by child 's gender in a sample of 206 middle‐class Mexican children, ages 6–12 years. Objective measures of children's hyperactive and inattentive behavior, derived from ethological observation and activity monitoring, are used as a control in regression analyses. When these objective measures of behavioral differences are taken in…
Marital Coitus Across the Life Course
It remains unclear whether the frequency of marital coitus does in fact decline universally across the life course, what shape that decay normally takes, and what best accounts for it: increasing marriage duration, women’s age or age of their partners. Using cross-sectional Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data of 91,744 non-abstaining women in their first marriage, a generalized linear model is used to determine if there is a consistent patte…
Demographic Evidence That Human Ovulation Is Undetectable (At Least in Pair Bonds)
Biocultural construction of obesogenic ecologies of childhood
Human biologists recognize the centrality of parental feeding beliefs and related practices in structuring children's under-nutrition risk in food-insecure settings. By contrast, how they might similarly structure children's nutrition-related health risks in calorically rich ecologies has barely been considered. Using the case of 3- to 6-year-old children in a rural Southeastern U.S. community with very high obesity rates, we use cognitive method…
Does less autonomy erode women's health? Yes. No. Maybe
Understanding the determinants of health is a central objective of human biology and related fields. Female autonomy is hypothesized to be an important determinant of women's health as well as demographic outcomes. The literature relating women's health to their everyday autonomy has produced conflicting results, and this may be due in part to the application of different measures of autonomy and different measures of health. Using secondary data…
Paradoxical malnutrition in mother–child pairs
Children's Autonomous Food Acquisition in Mexican Shantytowns
Children's independent food-acquisition behaviors have been rarely studied outside of hunter-gatherer contexts, yet millions of children worldwide search, work, trade, or beg for food. This study uses observational, anthropometric, dietary, and ethnographic data to understand preliminarily the nutritive and possible social contexts of autonomous middle childhood food-gaining behaviors in Mexican shantytowns. While we find children forage, work fo…
City structure, obesity, and environmental justice
Children's work, earnings, and nutrition in urban Mexican shantytowns
For many children living in conditions of urban poverty, earning money can provide additional resources to them and their families, and this raises interesting questions about the potential biological consequences (costs and benefits) of children's work in ‘modern’ settings. This study uses time allocation, ethnographic, dietary, and anthropometric data collected with 96 urban Mexican shantytown children (aged 8–12 years) and their older and youn…
Nonprescription Antibiotic Therapy
Antibiotic resistance is a global public health threat exacerbated by medically unwarranted or improper antibiotic use. Pharmacy counters at the U.S.-Mexico border provide an example of where lay decisions to use antibiotics in ways considered "risky" may be initiated and negotiated. We test how cultural and public health knowledge of antibiotics is distributed among pharmacy staff, local Mexican clients, and U.S. medical tourists in the borderto…
Sociology (81 works) · Psychology (80 works) · Medicine (66 works) · Geography (52 works) · Social Psychology (42 works) · Political science (35 works) · Economics (31 works) · Obesity and Health Practices (31 works) · Obesity (30 works) · Psychiatry (30 works)