Emily Yates‐doerr
Biographic Data
| ID | 91094 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Emily Yates‐doerr |
| GIVEN NAMES | Emily |
| FAMILY NAME | Yates‐doerr |
| SIGNATURE | DOERR E Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0895-7136 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 342 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The Multiplicity of Reduction
Anthropologists have often positioned their research as complex, not reductionist. In this article, I examine a flavorful herbal broth to show that reduction is not a simple thing. I develop the argument that reduction is multiple—and deserves to be analyzed as such—through an extended conversation with a nutrition scientist who studied linear growth restriction in Guatemala. Dr. Noel Solomons, with whom I collaborated for many years, sought to i…
The Ethnographic Case
case of the cake: Dilemmas of giving and taking
The Ethnographic Case
In 26 gripping and provocative installations, the new and updated volume showcases research from influential feminist and decolonial scholars. Where anthropology has long sought to identify patterns in culture, this volume makes space for inquiry focused on particularities and advocates for an intellectual politics where that which seemingly doesn’t fit is still allowed to matter
Duo-ethnographic Methods
Duo-ethnography is a collaborative methodology in which participants juxtapose their experiences around a topic to parse multiple perspectives. It explicitly positions ethnographers as sources of information, not data collectors. This method has been used to explore racial identities, class dynamics, decolonizing pedagogies, and gender in academic life. Building on previous work, we consider our contribution to be articulating duo-ethnography as …
Global Health Interventions
Intervention" is central to global health, but the significance and effects of how intervention is practiced are often taken for granted. This review takes interventions into health and medicine as subjects for ethnographic inquiry. We highlight three lines of anthropological contributions: studies of global health interventions that serve imperial and military objectives, studies of "magic bullet" interventions arising from laboratory science, a…
Introduction
When Medical Anthropology Quarterly's editorial board met during 2021 and 2022, a consistent theme of its collective work was rethinking how the journal communicates its aims and commitments to the communities of practice that contribute to it. Our shared goal was to query the reproduction of power in the field of medical anthropology. Ideas for doing this included the publication of revised guidance for authors and peer reviewers focused on crea…
Bloodwork
In June 2021, laboratory analysis of my blood indicated dangerously low levels of iron. This article chronicles my subsequent diagnosis of uterine fibroids, the hysterectomy that followed, and the scarring that came afterward. In doing so, the article tells the story of how blood circulates-or not-through biosocial systems. It shows how the properties of blood are frequently connected to conditions of exploitation to advance the argument that pay…
Cultures of Nutrition
Nutrition policymakers frequently treat their knowledge of nutrition as acultural and universal. We analyze food guidelines in Mexico and Guatemala to draw attention to embedded, but often unrecognized, cultural values of standardization and individual responsibility. We suggest that nutrition policy would be improved by attending to the cultural values within nutrition science, and that nutrition guidelines should attend not only to other people…
Mushroom worlds and earth beings
Reworking the Social Determinants of Health
Both public health experts and medical anthropologists are concerned with how health is shaped by environmental forces. This creates an important cross-disciplinary alliance, yet crucial differences in how the two disciplines tend to evaluate health remain. In this article, I compare public health's "social determinants of health" framework with anthropological interest in the sociality of health and illness. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in G…
Antihero Care
Antihero care" offers an approach to anthropology that emphasizes the importance of fallibility over mastery and social connections over individually acquired knowledge. I draw together Le Guin'sCarrier Bag Theory of Fictionand Mol, Pols, and Moser'sCare in Practiceto analyze the challenge of carrying out fieldwork with my children in highland Guatemala. I describe how an everyday accident led me to refuse the "killer story" of the hero and to in…
Imperialist Irony
Not long ago, a US journalist released a podcast titled A Craving for Nutritional Knowledge,11 https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/blog/outrage-and-inspire/outrage-and-inspire-roger-thurow-craving-nutrition-knowledge. which described the nutritional landscape of Guatemala as “ironic”: “The main crop here was irony. The same valleys that produced a cornucopia of vegetables of enormous size ... also produced the highest rates of stunting in the Weste…
Chronic Disaster
Global Health
Global health is a field of expertise that has emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century alongside changing disease profiles, health technologies, and governance structures. This entry provides an overview of the historical conditions that have given rise to the field. It illustrates the new political and financial transformations that have made global health 'global', in contrast to earlier work on international, world, or tropical health.…
Cortes de carne
Antropólogas e antropólogos, ávidos por trazer à tona a originalidade dos povos por elas estudados, afirmam que, em contraste com uma “natureza” única no Ocidente, ontologias ameríndias possuem muitas naturezas. Mas será que relatos fascinantes sobre maneiras ameríndias de fazer-o-mundo [world-making] devem presumir tanto sobre o “Ocidente”? É sobre isso que temos dúvidas. Tomando “Ocidental” não como uma região mas como um estilo, nós exploramos…
Sick
In the 1960s George Foster, a founding figure in medical anthropology, theorized that Indigenous communities adhered to the 'Image of the Limited Good." Accordingly, good things in life were limited, with the effect that one person's good came at a cost to another. This photo essay challenges the Image of the Limited Good. I suggest that the people who spread this idea are not Indigenous but upper class and White politicians who deploy the idea o…
Disaggregating diabetes
Interest in disaggregating diabetes into numerous subtypes is growing as patients and providers recognize the limitations of standard diabetes typologies. As anthropologists, we draw attention to how 'subtyping' may reduce stigma derived from the connection between obesity and 'type 2 diabetes'. We highlight the complexities that drive diabetes and argue that an exclusive or dominant focus on diet and obesity obfuscates other underlying risks. Ye…
Whose Global, Which Health? Unsettling Collaboration with Careful Equivocation
The recent push for multidisciplinary collaboration confronts anthropologists with a long-standing ethnographic problem. The terms we have to talk about what we do are very often the same as the terms used by those with whom we work, and yet we are often doing very different things with these terms. I draw on over a decade of "awkward collaboration" with scientists working in highland Guatemala to explore how challenges of equivocation play out i…
An Unfinished War
In May 2018, the death of 20-year-old Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez was recorded and streamed on Facebook Live. A U.S. border guard shot her in the head after she crossed into Texas. She was unar
Translational competency
This article introduces the notion of 'translational competency', a skill of attending to different understandings of health and how these are negotiated between medical settings and everyday life. This skill is especially important for the design of obesity-prevention policies and programs, given the diverse values surrounding both healthy eating and desirable weight. Through its focus on communicative interactions, translational competency enta…
Where is the local
Where is the local for the ethnographer? A challenge facing anthropological interest in "local biologies" is that both biology and locality are put into practice in different ways. I draw on research with scientists, policy makers, and activists who are all grappling with the influence of nutrition on biological development to illustrate that while biologies may transform from locality to locality, locality also changes form. I juxtapose local bi…
Counting bodies? On future engagements with science studies in medical anthropology
Thirty years ago, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock outlined a strategy for 'future work in medical anthropology' that focused on three bodies. Their article - a zeitgeist for the field - sought to intervene into the Cartesian dualisms characterizing ethnomedical anthropology at the time. Taking a descriptive and diagnostic approach, they defined 'the mindful body' as a domain of future anthropological inquiry and mapped three analytic conce…
Demedicalizing Health
Attention to culinary care can enrich the framing of health within medical anthropology. We focus on care practices in six Latin American kitchens to illuminate forms of health not located within a singular human subject. In these kitchens, women cared not for individuals but for meals, targeting the health of families and landscapes. Many medical anthropologists have critiqued health for its associations with biomedicine/biocapitalism, some even…
Weight of Obesity
Intervals of confidence
The Weight of the Self
The Public Health Nutrition (PHN) community categorizes dietary-related chronic illnesses as "noncommunicable," fixing these afflictions within individual bodies where they are best managed by individual choices. Yet within clinical encounters in Guatemala, nutritionists and patients treat eating and dieting as relational, transmissible practices. Patients actively seek nutritionists' care, asserting their self-care attempts have failed and they …
Reworking the Social Determinants of Health
Both public health experts and medical anthropologists are concerned with how health is shaped by environmental forces. This creates an important cross-disciplinary alliance, yet crucial differences in how the two disciplines tend to evaluate health remain. In this article, I compare public health's "social determinants of health" framework with anthropological interest in the sociality of health and illness. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in G…
Demedicalizing Health
Attention to culinary care can enrich the framing of health within medical anthropology. We focus on care practices in six Latin American kitchens to illuminate forms of health not located within a singular human subject. In these kitchens, women cared not for individuals but for meals, targeting the health of families and landscapes. Many medical anthropologists have critiqued health for its associations with biomedicine/biocapitalism, some even…
Does meat come from animals? A multispecies approach to classification and belonging in highland Guatemala
In the Guatemalan highlands, distinctions between human and animal are often irrelevant to the treatment of an object as meat. I draw from my ethnographic fieldwork on eating practices in that region to suggest that if the recent social science turn to species is to be a departure from the limitations of Euro-American humanism, it must take species not as a genealogically mappable identity but as a coherence situated amid ever-transforming divisi…
Chronic Disaster
Antihero Care
Antihero care" offers an approach to anthropology that emphasizes the importance of fallibility over mastery and social connections over individually acquired knowledge. I draw together Le Guin'sCarrier Bag Theory of Fictionand Mol, Pols, and Moser'sCare in Practiceto analyze the challenge of carrying out fieldwork with my children in highland Guatemala. I describe how an everyday accident led me to refuse the "killer story" of the hero and to in…
Cuts of Meat
Anthropologists, eager to bring out the originality of the people whom they study, have claimed that in contrast to a singular 'nature' in the West, Amerindian ontologies have many natures. But should fascinating accounts of Amerindian ways of world-making presume so much about the 'West'? is is what we doubt. Taking 'Western' not as a region but as a style, we explore Western animal/human relations by describing various ways of enacting 'meat'. …
Whose Global, Which Health? Unsettling Collaboration with Careful Equivocation
The recent push for multidisciplinary collaboration confronts anthropologists with a long-standing ethnographic problem. The terms we have to talk about what we do are very often the same as the terms used by those with whom we work, and yet we are often doing very different things with these terms. I draw on over a decade of "awkward collaboration" with scientists working in highland Guatemala to explore how challenges of equivocation play out i…
Counting bodies? On future engagements with science studies in medical anthropology
Thirty years ago, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock outlined a strategy for 'future work in medical anthropology' that focused on three bodies. Their article - a zeitgeist for the field - sought to intervene into the Cartesian dualisms characterizing ethnomedical anthropology at the time. Taking a descriptive and diagnostic approach, they defined 'the mindful body' as a domain of future anthropological inquiry and mapped three analytic conce…
The Opacity of Reduction
This article explores the process of consolidating technical and historically contingent ideas about nourishment into seemingly straightforward terms such as vitamins and minerals. I study the adoption of scientific principles of abstraction and reduction as a strategy of nutrition education in three Guatemalan highland sites: an elementary school classroom, a rural clinic, and the obesity outpatient center of Guatemala's third-largest public hos…
The world in a box? Food security, edible insects, and “One World, One Health” collaboration
Where is the local
Where is the local for the ethnographer? A challenge facing anthropological interest in "local biologies" is that both biology and locality are put into practice in different ways. I draw on research with scientists, policy makers, and activists who are all grappling with the influence of nutrition on biological development to illustrate that while biologies may transform from locality to locality, locality also changes form. I juxtapose local bi…
Cultures of Nutrition
Nutrition policymakers frequently treat their knowledge of nutrition as acultural and universal. We analyze food guidelines in Mexico and Guatemala to draw attention to embedded, but often unrecognized, cultural values of standardization and individual responsibility. We suggest that nutrition policy would be improved by attending to the cultural values within nutrition science, and that nutrition guidelines should attend not only to other people…
Global Health Interventions
Intervention" is central to global health, but the significance and effects of how intervention is practiced are often taken for granted. This review takes interventions into health and medicine as subjects for ethnographic inquiry. We highlight three lines of anthropological contributions: studies of global health interventions that serve imperial and military objectives, studies of "magic bullet" interventions arising from laboratory science, a…
Translational competency
This article introduces the notion of 'translational competency', a skill of attending to different understandings of health and how these are negotiated between medical settings and everyday life. This skill is especially important for the design of obesity-prevention policies and programs, given the diverse values surrounding both healthy eating and desirable weight. Through its focus on communicative interactions, translational competency enta…
Obesity Science and Health Translations in Guatemala
Additional informationNotes on contributorsEmily Yates-DoerrEmily Yates-Doerr is a postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Her research on the emergence of the diagnostic category of obesity in the Guatemalan highlands attends to collisions between global and Indigenous politics, translations between research and policy in the food sciences and the practice of “engaged anthropology.” She has conducted ethnograp…
Imperialist Irony
Not long ago, a US journalist released a podcast titled A Craving for Nutritional Knowledge,11 https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/blog/outrage-and-inspire/outrage-and-inspire-roger-thurow-craving-nutrition-knowledge. which described the nutritional landscape of Guatemala as “ironic”: “The main crop here was irony. The same valleys that produced a cornucopia of vegetables of enormous size ... also produced the highest rates of stunting in the Weste…
Sick
In the 1960s George Foster, a founding figure in medical anthropology, theorized that Indigenous communities adhered to the 'Image of the Limited Good." Accordingly, good things in life were limited, with the effect that one person's good came at a cost to another. This photo essay challenges the Image of the Limited Good. I suggest that the people who spread this idea are not Indigenous but upper class and White politicians who deploy the idea o…
Disaggregating diabetes
Interest in disaggregating diabetes into numerous subtypes is growing as patients and providers recognize the limitations of standard diabetes typologies. As anthropologists, we draw attention to how 'subtyping' may reduce stigma derived from the connection between obesity and 'type 2 diabetes'. We highlight the complexities that drive diabetes and argue that an exclusive or dominant focus on diet and obesity obfuscates other underlying risks. Ye…
An Unfinished War
In May 2018, the death of 20-year-old Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez was recorded and streamed on Facebook Live. A U.S. border guard shot her in the head after she crossed into Texas. She was unar
Meeting the demand for meat
Renewed fears expressed by the United Nations about worldwide population growth have coincided with international concerns about the increased consumption of meat. This article, which draws upon long‐term fieldwork in the Guatemalan highlands and ongoing scientific research in the Netherlands, examines the ways in which global organizations are framing and responding to these concerns. Economists generally address the problem of increased meat co…
Introduction
When Medical Anthropology Quarterly's editorial board met during 2021 and 2022, a consistent theme of its collective work was rethinking how the journal communicates its aims and commitments to the communities of practice that contribute to it. Our shared goal was to query the reproduction of power in the field of medical anthropology. Ideas for doing this included the publication of revised guidance for authors and peer reviewers focused on crea…
Bloodwork
In June 2021, laboratory analysis of my blood indicated dangerously low levels of iron. This article chronicles my subsequent diagnosis of uterine fibroids, the hysterectomy that followed, and the scarring that came afterward. In doing so, the article tells the story of how blood circulates-or not-through biosocial systems. It shows how the properties of blood are frequently connected to conditions of exploitation to advance the argument that pay…
La política exterior de una revolución
This article introduces the feminist praxis of duoethnography as a way to examine the COVID era. As a group of diverse, junior, midcareer, and senior feminist scholars, we developed a methodology to critically reflect on our positions in our institutions and social worlds. As a method, duoethnography emphasizes the dialogical intimacy that can form through anthropological work. While autoethnography draws on individual daily lives to make sense o…
No Story Is Ever Just a Story
The 41 films at the 2004 Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival showcased a multiplicity of styles and approaches, thus widening the perspective of "what counts" as ethnographic film. The two main events-A Tribute to Jean Rouch and Native Voices-epitomized the festival's commitment to diversity and creative talent. Despite the festival's awkward location in the American Museum of Natural History, the films tackled challenging political subjects an…
B roccoli and D esire by Edward F. Fischer and Peter Benson
(2010). Broccoli and Desire by Edward F. Fischer and Peter Benson. Food, Culture & Society: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 299-302
C heap M eat
Mixing methods, tasting fingers
This article was published in the HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory [ © 2011 School of Social and Political Sciences ] and the definite version is available at : http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau1.1.009\tThe Journal's website is at: http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/issue/view/hau1.1
The complexity of reduction. Perspectives on nourishment in the Guatemalan Highlands
The Adventure of the Real
The Opacity of Reduction
This article explores the process of consolidating technical and historically contingent ideas about nourishment into seemingly straightforward terms such as vitamins and minerals. I study the adoption of scientific principles of abstraction and reduction as a strategy of nutrition education in three Guatemalan highland sites: an elementary school classroom, a rural clinic, and the obesity outpatient center of Guatemala's third-largest public hos…
Meeting the demand for meat
Renewed fears expressed by the United Nations about worldwide population growth have coincided with international concerns about the increased consumption of meat. This article, which draws upon long‐term fieldwork in the Guatemalan highlands and ongoing scientific research in the Netherlands, examines the ways in which global organizations are framing and responding to these concerns. Economists generally address the problem of increased meat co…
Cuts of Meat
Anthropologists, eager to bring out the originality of the people whom they study, have claimed that in contrast to a singular 'nature' in the West, Amerindian ontologies have many natures. But should fascinating accounts of Amerindian ways of world-making presume so much about the 'West'? is is what we doubt. Taking 'Western' not as a region but as a style, we explore Western animal/human relations by describing various ways of enacting 'meat'. …
The Weight of the Self
The Public Health Nutrition (PHN) community categorizes dietary-related chronic illnesses as "noncommunicable," fixing these afflictions within individual bodies where they are best managed by individual choices. Yet within clinical encounters in Guatemala, nutritionists and patients treat eating and dieting as relational, transmissible practices. Patients actively seek nutritionists' care, asserting their self-care attempts have failed and they …
The world in a box? Food security, edible insects, and “One World, One Health” collaboration
Obesity Science and Health Translations in Guatemala
Additional informationNotes on contributorsEmily Yates-DoerrEmily Yates-Doerr is a postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Her research on the emergence of the diagnostic category of obesity in the Guatemalan highlands attends to collisions between global and Indigenous politics, translations between research and policy in the food sciences and the practice of “engaged anthropology.” She has conducted ethnograp…
Weight of Obesity
Intervals of confidence
Alimentary uncertainties
The open question
The open question: Medical anthropology and open access
Does meat come from animals? A multispecies approach to classification and belonging in highland Guatemala
In the Guatemalan highlands, distinctions between human and animal are often irrelevant to the treatment of an object as meat. I draw from my ethnographic fieldwork on eating practices in that region to suggest that if the recent social science turn to species is to be a departure from the limitations of Euro-American humanism, it must take species not as a genealogically mappable identity but as a coherence situated amid ever-transforming divisi…
Demedicalizing Health
Attention to culinary care can enrich the framing of health within medical anthropology. We focus on care practices in six Latin American kitchens to illuminate forms of health not located within a singular human subject. In these kitchens, women cared not for individuals but for meals, targeting the health of families and landscapes. Many medical anthropologists have critiqued health for its associations with biomedicine/biocapitalism, some even…
Where is the local
Where is the local for the ethnographer? A challenge facing anthropological interest in "local biologies" is that both biology and locality are put into practice in different ways. I draw on research with scientists, policy makers, and activists who are all grappling with the influence of nutrition on biological development to illustrate that while biologies may transform from locality to locality, locality also changes form. I juxtapose local bi…
Counting bodies? On future engagements with science studies in medical anthropology
Thirty years ago, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock outlined a strategy for 'future work in medical anthropology' that focused on three bodies. Their article - a zeitgeist for the field - sought to intervene into the Cartesian dualisms characterizing ethnomedical anthropology at the time. Taking a descriptive and diagnostic approach, they defined 'the mindful body' as a domain of future anthropological inquiry and mapped three analytic conce…
Translational competency
This article introduces the notion of 'translational competency', a skill of attending to different understandings of health and how these are negotiated between medical settings and everyday life. This skill is especially important for the design of obesity-prevention policies and programs, given the diverse values surrounding both healthy eating and desirable weight. Through its focus on communicative interactions, translational competency enta…
Global Health
Global health is a field of expertise that has emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century alongside changing disease profiles, health technologies, and governance structures. This entry provides an overview of the historical conditions that have given rise to the field. It illustrates the new political and financial transformations that have made global health 'global', in contrast to earlier work on international, world, or tropical health.…
Cortes de carne
Antropólogas e antropólogos, ávidos por trazer à tona a originalidade dos povos por elas estudados, afirmam que, em contraste com uma “natureza” única no Ocidente, ontologias ameríndias possuem muitas naturezas. Mas será que relatos fascinantes sobre maneiras ameríndias de fazer-o-mundo [world-making] devem presumir tanto sobre o “Ocidente”? É sobre isso que temos dúvidas. Tomando “Ocidental” não como uma região mas como um estilo, nós exploramos…
Sick
In the 1960s George Foster, a founding figure in medical anthropology, theorized that Indigenous communities adhered to the 'Image of the Limited Good." Accordingly, good things in life were limited, with the effect that one person's good came at a cost to another. This photo essay challenges the Image of the Limited Good. I suggest that the people who spread this idea are not Indigenous but upper class and White politicians who deploy the idea o…
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (15 works) · Medicine (13 works) · Anthropology (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Culinary Culture and Tourism (10 works) · Ethnography (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (9 works)