ANTHROPOLOGY: What is it?

Linda Nyquist's story moved many WAISers. She comments:

"My professors did not want us to actively intervene and help people. Obviously, the outcomes we would document would be completely different. A young mother being successfully treated for TB and then successfully raising her own children, is a very different story from that of a maternal death, orphaned children, the acquisition of a second wife, this wife's refusal to accept the children of the first wife, those children being mistreated and/or abandoned, etc. Both cases are true. In one case a young woman was treated for several months for TB in Puebla, and lived. In the other, the young mother died, as her mother-in-law refused to allow us to seek help for her and the word of the mother-in-law in the village where I worked was law. Even after so many years, I remember these individuals and their suffering as though it were yesterday. I am not sure I shall ever be able to think of them without tears."

Ronald Hilton - 8/30/00