 |
Maria Tapias. Maria Tapias earned her PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (2001) and her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in New York (1988). Her main interests are in medical anthropology, gender and health, personhood and the anthropology of emotions. Her fieldwork was conducted in Punata, Bolivia from 1996 to 1998 during which time she worked with bi-lingual Quechua and Spanish speakers on local conceptions of health. Her research examines how illnesses of different severity are understood in Punata and how people link their maladies to particular emotions. The narratives of the women she interviewed revealed that the body and the ailments that affected it were often a medium to publicly communicate transgressions in the idealized moral and social codes that people relied on to give order and meaning to their lives. Her research also addresses how emotions are conceptualized, how they are embodied and how embodiment sheds light on the fluid boundaries of the body and its vulnerability to illness. |