Prairie Voices: Process Anthropology in Family Medicine, Vol. 1 » (1st Edition)

HOWARD F. STEIN is Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.

This book is about anthropology as a journey of mutual understanding of increasingly greater breadth and depth. It is about allowing oneself to be inspired by those whom one is studying, teaching, treating, or counseling; how that inspiration leads to a poem or story that is shared with them; and how that personal experience becomes the basis for a more grounded relationship, deeper self-knowledge, and ultimately the accomplishment of one's goals in applied anthropology. This approach does not negate other ways of knowing—participant observation, open-ended interviews, naturalistic observation, focus groups, or surveys—but complements and extends them and the kind of cultural data they elicit. It is about how another people's world (the North American Great Plains, in this case) comes alive to an observer, therapist, or consultant. Written by a prominent medical and psychoanalytic anthropologist, this work is a daring experiment in communication. It outlines an alternative for researchers and writers that can allow one individual to tune in to another individual across a cultural or epistemological boundary. It is a new step in the empathic process, one that affects and transforms the practitioner as deeply as the client. A must read for those in caring professions.

Warren Lee Holleman

This is a collection of poems and prose poems, stories and allegories, and reflective essays about life in the Midwest. The author, a family therapist and family medicine educator, attempts to convey to the reader the values, attitudes, symbols, and meanings of prairies and their people. This is a worthy objective, given the tendency of those in the healing professions to practice generic medicine, without regard to culture, context, or place. This book succeeds in capturing the essence of the health beliefs of the people of the prairie. The book targets medical educators seeking guidance in teaching students to be sensitive to the cultural values of their patients. The book will also be useful to anyone practicing medicine in the Midwest, and particularly to those foreigners from New York or wherever who, like the author, must learn to understand and value prairie ways of viewing and doing things. The book's format is unique, a montage of creativity and rigorous analysis reflecting the author's poetic and scholarly sides, his own Jewish heritage, and his training in Freudian psychology and cultural anthropology. One missing component in the montage is the visual; although this is a book about voices, photographs and paintings of the prairie and its people would enhance the pleasure of browsing through this book. This book offers rich insights and enjoyable moments of reflection for those interested in understanding the influence of geography and culture on patients' attitudes about illness and health and healing. In this age in which diversity has been applied primarily to nonwhite and non-English-speaking people, the author demonstrates that the people of America's heartland areevery bit as ethnically unique and deserving of cultural sensitivity training as, say, the Navajos of the American Southwest or the Montagnards of central Vietnam. My only criticisms of the book are its unattractive layout and its confusing use of an off-putting theoretical introduction to an otherwise intimate, personal narrative. Despite these shortcomings, medical school libraries and medical bookstores will want to purchase this book.