Doctoral student Clinton D. Humphrey, supervised by Dr. Paul V. Kroskrity, will undertake research on how social, political, and economic contexts affect people's understanding of their own physical and psychological experience. The project is important because it will contribute to a growing body of research in the social sciences that examines how socio-cultural processes may configure the ways in which individuals attend to, perceive, and conceptualize bodily sensations in times of illness.
The research will be conducted for 14 months with Miskitu lobster divers on the Autonomous Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. The Miskitu divers' livelihoods depend on deep diving but it too frequently results in chronic and debilitating decompression illness, also known as the bends. The researcher will use a unique video analysis technique to delineate how discourse, patterns of embodied interaction, and cultural resources shape Miskitu encounters with this illness. His video recordings of lobster divers will allow him to conduct microanalyses of discourse, gesture, gaze, and bodily movement, to determine how these divers attune their senses and navigate their working bodies in the unique undersea environment as they simultaneously attend to signs of danger and sickness. Follow-up interviews and participant observation with targeted research participants will explore local explanations of illnesses. Collectively, these data will guide an investigation of how Miskitu lobster divers perceive, endure, and endeavor to make sense of the ailments they feel in their bodies in different social and environmental contexts.
This study advances research on sensory experience with a distinctive micro-analytical emphasis on discourse, embodied-communicative interaction, and political-economic processes. The researcher will share research findings with local programs designed to assist these commercial divers and their families. Supporting this research also supports the education of a graduate student.
with the aim of understanding the ways in which these men perceive and manage their dangerous occupation and conditions of chronic illness on a day-to-day basis. In pursuit of this goal, I recruited twelve active and seven non-active lobster divers–along with their boat crew members–for participation in detailed interviewing and specialized ethnographic video recording methods over the course of thirteen months (eight months NSF funded). Four different types of interviews were conducted among 52 research participants to examine topics such as: (1) the types of illnesses these divers suffer from and the perceived causes; (2) the social and institutional resources available in the community and the forms of medical treatment sought by lobster divers; (3) the sociopolitical and economic environment that enables such a dangerous occupation to continue; and (4) the specific diving practices and their relationships to injury and illness. Extensive participant-observation methods entailed video recording everyday activities when accompanying divers at sea and undersea, in their homes with their families, and during casual social events. To identify the details of specific dive practices, underwater video footage– shot while divers were working–was played back to them so they could describe their actions and decision making processes. Fieldwork produced roughly ninety hours of video footage of daily social interactions and undersea work. By way of discourse analysis and the construction of detailed models of embodied interaction and sensory attunement, I document the complex ways in which these ailing men simultaneously navigate (1) racialized political-economic conditions in the Autonomous Atlantic Coast and access to medical care, (2) chronic illness and shifting social relationships, and (3) the dangerous underwater environment where they perform their work. Below I add some detail to each of these three issues and address their impacts. (1) Racialized political-economic conditions: Nicaraguans with the political and economic power to bring medical resources and safety regulations to these divers—usually non-Miskitu—have failed to provide effective interventions and have begun to blame the propagation of decompression sickness exclusively on the divers themselves in the national media. Racializing discourses have characterized it as an illness of the Miskitu that proliferates because of the ignorance and cultural superstitions of non-modern national subjects on the remote Mosquito Coast. This research is tracing the circulations of racializing medical discourses and how they create a "geography of blame" (Farmer 1992), recasting citizens as denizens, and impacting the organization and delivery of vital medical services. Miskitu people often explain this as a type of medical profiling. The research applies a unique anthropological, discourse-centered theoretical approach to processes of racialization, treating racializing talk as the socio-political practices of persons oriented toward historical institutions and global processes of modernity. This project demonstrates how some types of discourses not only reflect racial attitudes but also constitute racialized social relationships, subjective illness experiences, and the administration of vital medical services. (2) Chronic illness and shifting social relationships: The research plan allowed for prolonged fieldwork to track the profound changes brought to people’s lives as they struggled to contend with chronic illnesses. Suffering individuals attempted to help themselves with efforts to mobilize friends, family, communities, and government institutions with varying success. This research documents how and why some Miskitu lobster divers where more successful than others at navigating social and institutional resources, and clearly illustrates the power of poverty in preventing people from accessing and exploiting resources that were supposedly developed for them by the State. (3) The dangerous underwater environment where they perform their work: This research examines the profound changes brought to perception, proprioception, and action for the submerged body, and explores how the initial sensory confusion and disorientation experienced underwater by Miskitu divers is transformed to purposeful undersea navigation and performance. The process is illustrated by constructing detailed models of interaction, including habitual uses of specific tools and movements that generate new embodied modes of attention and structures of tacit embodied knowledge. Detailed analyses of underwater movement and culturally conditioned uses of the senses demonstrates the specific ways in which these men protect themselves from injury and helps explain their interpretations of various illnesses. Many Miskitu men who incur neurological damage and partial paralysis in dive accidents subsequently experience disorientation while on land. These physically disabled men, however, are still able to effectively navigate themselves underwater because of their embodied attunement to the weightlessness experienced when undersea. They are left feeling like the job that almost killed them is the only one they are capable of doing. The perception of illness and adaptations to partially paralyzed limbs while underwater will offer significant insights to cognitive and sensory studies across many different academic fields.
