Forschungsgruppe "Ethnologie des öffentlichen Gesundheitswesens"

Since August 2011, Professor Kim Gutschow chairs the research group in the Anthropology of Public Health and is a member of the Goettingen International Health Network. She also serves as Lecturer in the Institute for Anthropology and Religion at Williams College in the USA and has taught at Wesleyan University and Brandeis University. Prof. Gutschow is the author of the award-winning ethnography Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas (Harvard University Press, 2004) and over 20 essays on a range of topics including maternal health in Ladakh; the role of gender, sexuality, and celibacy in Himalayan Buddhism; gender hierarchies in Buddhism; social power and irrigation in Ladakh, oracles and shamans, and the economy of merit in Buddhist practices. Most broadly, her research attends to transnational flows in Buddhism and biomedicine that shape local practices around gender, bodies, and social status.

Her research group will combine teaching and research using a variety of social science disciplines including medical anthropology, socio-cultural anthropology, gender studies, sociology, and public health to explore coordinated themes of gender, power, and sexuality in relation to reproductive health. The group will study the relationships between religion and reproduction in India, maternal mortality and the medicalization of childbirth in India and the US, body politics and social power, and the shifting landscape of family planning and sexual identity in relation to culture, religion, and politics in India and the US.