Extremely personable and willing to talk with her students, Professor Clara Han was more than willing to sit down with The News-Letter to talk about her work and research experiences:
I went to Harvard; had a Fulbright [Scholarship] after graduation from Princeton, where I ended up working on, basically, looking at the issue of street children in Nairobi in relation to the burgeoning HIV epidemic with the very little treatment options that were available at the time. I was working on that issue.
And then I moved back to Harvard where I started graduate school in medical anthropology and also I started a medical degree and went to medical school for four years. So it turned into a nine year project.
I actually started to get interested in medical anthropology as an undergrad. I took a course freshman year - Intro to med. Anthro. It was probably one of the most amazing courses I've taken in my life. It completely changed the way I saw health and illness and different kinds of interventions. My interest in med anthropology was to understand how larger questions of political violence and economy get woven into everyday life, and also how the medical discipline and public health discipline seeks to help address those issues.
There are crossovers [between social medicine and public health or medical anthropology] - it's hard to define boundaries. There's a certain social medicine perspective at Harvard; historical perspective and better health delivery systems to people so that they can have the treatment that is available in other places. How is it that you can get pharmeceuticals to everyone in the populations - it is very public health oriented ... these lines are getting increasingly blurred.
So I actually work in Santiago Chile. I still work there; I imagine that I'll be working there for a really long time. I got interested in working there because a colleague of mine invited me to work on a project with him on post traumatic stress disorder, in terms of political violence and how communities have had post traumatic stress disorder from political violence. I went to Peru first. [I was] Feeling profoundly uncomfortable with how this kind of discourse of post traumatic stress disorder was framing the communities devastated by political violence.
I was creating an epidemiological profile of people who have post traumatic stress disorder; people have to talk about their symptoms that way. I just really didn't like the project. I just didn't want to participate in that kind of thing, so I ended up going to Santiago, Chile because another colleague of mine, who's a psychiatrist, invited me there; so I ended up working with a feminist NGO that during the Pinochet regime had been the umbrella organization for leftist feminist groups.
One [part] is looking at economic indebtedness in households. People need loans to buy groceries, but loans are marketed to the poor; so people will try as hard as they can to pay back the credit because if you don't pay them back ... I look at household economies over time for creating a database from where alternative organizations can launch social projects. Part of my book will come out of this.
The other part: Is how the epidemiologists and psychiatrists have mobilize around the depression in Santiago ... social change. I am looking at how they designed the national social program to deal with women who are dealing with depression; I worked on one of the teams that looked into this, [specifically the use of] antidepressants in massive populations taking them sporadically - circulation - what happens; how this ties back into the legacy of Pinochet.
Professor Han is currently making a documentary about the results of her research in Santiago, Chile.
[Her first film is] Ongoing for years - since [my] days at Harvard; training in video editing, camerawork ... you just kind of tinker with it for a while. I attempt to have an alternative look at what's going on in Chile - how economic instability and precariousness interweaves into everyday life. I spent time filming everyday life; 80 hours of footage, will make a 55-minute version; I am still editing.
I'm deeply committed to what I do. I've learned not to 'other' the other ... in the sense that there are many that face extreme situations of economic scarcity - but is poverty an identity? We think of them [the poverty stricken] as a blanket, homogeneous group. Is that how we want to think about the conditions of poverty? That's how it affects me, in a sense. To know that there's an imperative to think more complexly about these situations and about people's lives and not to pigeon hole.
I've met such wise people in my work, both in the academic scene as well as people ... where I've done my work. There are so many wise people [who] say things, I'm just amazed. It's hard to say that there's one person who's this central figure.
I think that in these everyday interactions that I have with people there are always these drops of wisdom everywhere that I find really inspiring. Even students - sometimes they ask just the most interesting questions ... a question that I feared to ask myself.
Clara Han is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department. She is currently teaching "Poverty's Life: Anthropologies of Health & Economy."