Genese Sodikoff is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, Newark. She completed her PhD at the University of Michigan after having spent a couple of years in Madagascar doing fieldwork, and, before that, a couple of years in the Comoro Islands as a Peace Corps Volunteer. She has done research on rain forest conservation and low-wage labor, human-animal relations, and biotic and cultural extinction. Her books include Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere, and The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death. She is learning now about epidemiology and launching a new project in Madagascar on environmental change and zoonosis, disease that jumps from animals to humans. Email: sodikoff@andromeda.rutgers.edu
by Genese Sodikoff The story of kuru is a classic one in anthropology and medicine. Called the "laughing death" in the Australian newspapers, the disease swept over the Fore population of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands over the course of the 20th century, peaking in the late '50s and early '60s. Victims experienced body aches…
by Genese Sodikoff One does not normally think about infection, illness, and recovery in terms of a three-staged "rite of passage" as European ethnographer Arnold van Gennep defined it, although catching a disease certainly involves a period of physical transition and disruption of our sense of self. Of course, a "rite of passage" conventionally refers…
by Genese Sodikoff In this political climate of upheaval and uncertainty, writing about emerging pandemics seems, all of a sudden, off-topic. Why dwell on disease when the bedrock of liberalism is being pulverized? We are entering unknown waters on a rising tide of anger and fear. The United States, the second largest CO2 emitter after…
by Genese Sodikoff For thousands of years, people on every continent (save for uninhabitable Antarctica) have recognized the behavior of rabid animals and seen the ravages that rabies inflicts on the human mind and body. While the biological symptoms of rabies are universal, it, like many global diseases, manifests in different places with unique cultural…
by Genese Sodikoff Recent outbreaks of the bubonic plague in Madagascar offer a glimpse into the dynamics of past outbreaks, the Plague of Justinian (sixth to eighth centuries), the Black Death (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), and current wave of “Third Pandemic” plagues that began in the nineteenth century. Over the past few years, genetic studies…
by Genese Sodikoff The rabid opposition of American gun owners to stricter gun regulations in the wake of mass shootings is reminiscent of dog owners' opposition to rabies-control measures amidst rashes of “mad dog” attacks in in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Poodles in the 1920s were especially mad, for some reason). Every…
by Genese Sodikoff There is the nightmare of fecundity and the nightmare of the multitude. There is the nightmare of uncontrolled bodies and the nightmare of inside our bodies and all over our bodies. There is the nightmare of unguarded orifices and the nightmare of vulnerable places. There is the nightmare of foreign bodies in…