Vania Smith-OkaAssistant Professor of Anthropology and Kellogg Faculty Fellow "Analyzing the Unforeseen Local Complexities of National Development Policies in Mexico" Tuesday, February 5, 2008 AbstractOportunidades is a Mexican government aid program that gives conditional money transfers to rural women for their children’s health, nutrition, and education and has received very positive accolades from the international public policy sector. However, the program is reinterpreted at the local level by all the parties involved in ways that are not observed by the international monitoring agencies. Drawing upon ethnographic research in a Nahua village in Mexico, this paper explores the interplay between development, power, women, and health in order to analyze the complexities of this program and the people involved. My analysis explores the inadvertent effect of these health programs on indigenous women’s decision making and the maintenance of social inequities at the local level. BiographyVania Smith-Oka is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her current research focuses on how marginal peoples around the world respond to the impact that globalization has on their health needs and local knowledge by looking at how the least powerful members of a community, i.e. women, are responding to this globalization. |
Copyright 2007 • the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the University of Notre Dame
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