Eva Dale  0:00  
From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new, now.

David Staley  0:32  
I am pleased to welcome Barbara Piperata into the studio today. She is an Associate Professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. Her research applies an evolutionary and critical bio cultural perspective to the study of nutritional anthropology, food security and reproductive energetics. She is an affiliate with the Infectious Disease Institute here at Ohio State, and has been a recipient of the Michael A Little Early Career Award by the Human Biology Association. Welcome to Voices, Dr. Piperata.

Barbara Piperata  1:06  
It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

David Staley  1:08  
Well, as I'm introducing you, I'm curious about these terms. First of all, tell us what is a critical biocultural perspective?

Barbara Piperata  1:15  
Okay, so I'm an anthropologist, so I study people, and people are complicated, and so when we address questions with humans, I believe we need to look at it from multiple perspectives, because we use multiple perspectives to cope with the world, to deal with the world, and I have a lot of questions about how people adapt to their circumstances and the impact it has on their health. Particularly so when I call it critical bio cultural, I'll start with biocultural humans approach the world as biological entities, but ones that are endowed with incredible amount of mental capacity, and so culture is a huge component of how we adapt to our environment. So I have to consider how culture shapes the human experience, and I'm particularly interested in how culture shapes health. So it's both biological how we adapt to our environment, what the implications of that are for our well being, but also understanding that culture shapes the way we interact with the environment. So that's what bio cultural means to me. So that means that I integrate mixed methods, typically, and we can talk about that, so that I have data that shows how we culturally approach problems as a species, and then how we biologically approach problems, and then how that feeds back on our biology and shapes our well being. So that's about that part.

David Staley  2:24  
What's the critical part of that to refer to? 

Barbara Piperata  2:27  
So, the critical part, which I don't use in every single one of my studies, is to say that we don't want to make the mistake of thinking about human behavior as being shaped without influence by broader structures in society, so people don't have unlimited agency in that all their decisions are completely free. So one of the key ways in which critical comes into the work is thinking about the way poverty might constrain the choices people have, and then we think about those choices as potential adaptations, and we can also then, if we don't think about them critically and how choices are constrained by political and economic systems. We can make the mistake of thinking that, you know, oh, well, he or she made a bad choice. Well, we have to understand those choices within a context. So critical usually means that so we use that critical political economic perspective to think about how political and economic factors shape people's decision making and their interactions with their environment. And we also can think about it as ecological in terms of where people's bodies find themselves and what kind of conditions those are, which are also shaped by the political economic context. So we're thinking about it in terms of humans and their environment and how that environment is shaped by broader political and economic structures. 

David Staley  3:41  
So, as humans, we are shaped by both biology and culture. Care to speculate on the ratio, does one dominate more than the other?

Barbara Piperata  3:51  
Oh, that's a good question. I think it depends on what the question is. So, for some things you know, our biology may be more predictive of our health outcome, say, a particular genetic disease that one has, but that's rare most of the time. We're talking about how our lived experience is really shaped when it comes to health, which is what I'm interested in our lived experience. So the environment, to me, is probably the dominant factor for most of our health. And then now, with which I'm not an expert in, but we certainly have them on this campus, are people who study epigenetics, which are now telling us that that nature nurture debate, you know, what is it? Is it biology or is it culture that's shaping us? Well, we know it's now both, right? So the environment shapes the way our genes are expressed, and that's important.

David Staley  4:38  
Well, then tell us what reproductive energetics refers to?

Barbara Piperata  4:42  
Okay, so reproductive energetics is the work that I did for my dissertation work. So that was my earliest research. And what that was about is trying to understand, and this will come back to that term biocultural, how humans employ cultural and biological mechanisms to cope with the energetic demand. Demands that reproduction places on the body. So I was particularly interested in breastfeeding, lactation. It's extraordinarily costly. Adds about five to 700 kilocalories a day to a woman's energy budget.

David Staley  5:12  
Oh, not costly in terms of dollars or money. You mean... 

Barbara Piperata  5:15  
Costly in terms of kilocalories, yeah. So from an evolutionary perspective, it's been interesting to think about, how have we accommodated that demand? Because we haven't always been under conditions where you can open up a refrigerator or eat an energy bar that's got 400 calories in it and get these kind of concentrated packages of energy. That's something relatively new. So for most of the world's population, getting enough calories every day in a balanced sort of diet is not an easy task, and certainly from an evolutionary perspective, that's always been a struggle for us, is to get enough food, the right kinds of food that our bodies need to survive and to reproduce. So reproductive energetics is then that understanding how humans are accommodating, from an energetics perspective, the demands of reproduction. Some study pregnancy. I studied lactation, so breastfeeding, and I did that work in the Brazilian Amazon, because I wanted to study in a population where their access to energy, to calories, came through their own labor. So they are subsistence farmers. The work that I did was in the eastern Amazon, about two days by boat, upriver from the capital of the Eastern Amazon, which is Belem, Brazil. They are manioc cultivators, which is a root crop, and then their main source of protein is fish, and then game, meat. And so I went there to try to understand how women are accommodating those costs, both biologically and culturally. It's a biocultural study. So I studied them longitudinally. I lived there for 21 months and tracked a cohort of women from the birth of their baby to about the time that they wean them, which was about 19 months later. That was the average for the population during that period of time. I measured a lot of things about them. You got to think about from an energetics perspective. You're thinking about calories in and calories out, right? So I needed to study, then the calories coming in. So I collected very detailed data on their diet, which was very entertaining for them, because I literally measured everything that they ate to the gram. So I would be with them all day, and when they ate, we would measure what they ate, and if they were leftovers, or they ate a fruit that had a large pit, I'd have to subtract that weight from the fruit, and all those kinds of things. And then you enter those data into programs that then give you information on how much protein, calories, you know, carbohydrates, fats, are in those foods, and then therefore how many calories are in those foods, to look at the energy coming in. And then I also need to understand why they're choosing the foods that they choose, which is not necessarily biological, that's cultural. So what decisions are they making about foods? And one of the interesting things I discovered in that study was that women practiced this 40 day postpartum period, which they referred to as hes guarda, which means to guard it's like a protective period. And during that period, they had some dietary rules that they adhered to. And so I was able to actually study their diet during that restrictive period, and then I was tracking them longitudinally, so I got to see how it changed outside of that period. And there had been things written about other cultures where women also practice dietary restrictions during the immediate postpartum and people have criticized it as being limiting during a period of time when women need a large number of calories. So why would you limit the diet? 

David Staley  8:16  
Those were the rules, there were limits to the diet, limit to the calories in that period?

Barbara Piperata  8:22  
Limits to the types of food you could consum. 

David Staley  8:24  
Specific types. 

Barbara Piperata  8:25  
Yes. So they didn't eat a lot of game meat, and they felt it was irritating, because a lot of land animals were considered to be kind of aggressive, or they gnawed, or had behaviors that they thought that the meat would then be agitating to the body, and so that those would be things you'd want to avoid. They also avoided fish without scales or skin fish. Those were things that they felt were not healthy for a woman to eat and not good for the baby. And so they felt like these attributes of these foods could move through the mother and then through the breast milk into the infant and also affect the infant's health. So you know, those two things I gave you an example of are critical sources of protein, and women need extra protein, so I was interested if adhering to these restrictions was actually going to restrict their protein intakes. But it doesn't. They just eat different kinds of fish and different kinds of game. So a lot of the stuff that had been done before that was a little bit more critical, never collected the detailed dietary data. But when you see a list of restricted foods, and you look at those foods and you think those are a lot of protein sources. Wow. Protein could be limited in these women's diet, but when you measure it, you see that it actually wasn't thinking.

David Staley  9:26  
You said that they were somewhat bemused by your activities there. What was that relationship like? You had to establish a relationship before you could begin the study. 

Barbara Piperata  9:35  
Yes, so I was down there for a while, and I, you know, I did arrive with horrific Portuguese. I could speak Spanish, but my Portuguese was very bumpy, and I was a novelty. You know, it's not common for them to have outsider staying and hanging out as much as I did, and the people were incredible. I mean, they accepted me. They got a kick out of me, because I made so many cultural faux pas, you know, I broke things. All of the time, I'm so much larger in terms of how much taller I am, and therefore how much more I weigh than the average person there. So everything I did was I just felt so large in that environment. And they would always joke about how I was going to break chairs, or I one time, you know, they have their little peers going out to their dugout canoes, and I would sometimes step on a board wrong, and I would break the mail off, and they would laugh, but and then also just the language barrier, as I got more and more proficient with Portuguese. But they kept me alive. I mean, I ate with them. I lived in their homes with them, and they were extraordinarily generous. These are some of the poorest people on this planet, and they made sure that I was very well taken care of. And they shared their life with me and changed my life forever.

David Staley  10:44  
You recently gave a talk for our science Sundays program. It was titled "Food Insecurity and Mental Health", and I wonder if you'd share with us or to summarize, whereas maybe the talk that you gave.

Barbara Piperata  10:56  
Sure. So my interest in food security actually came out of that breastfeeding study that I did in the Amazon. So I went there to study reproduction, and what it drew my attention to is the fact that food's hard to get, and the broader political, economic conditions in which people were living limited their access to health care, to other kinds of resources, in my education, and so I became a lot more interested in poverty. I went to a place that was poor, but to study a non poverty related question that wasn't the focus, but I saw how important poverty was in shaping everything that people were doing, because it was limiting the things that they could do. So I got the job here in 2006 and I graduated in 2005 from University of Colorado in Boulder, and I came here in 2006 and after I was here for a few years, I was approached by folks on campus about doing some international research. They were wanting to expand the profile of Ohio State doing international work. And so they approached a number of faculty members. They asked, you know, where would you go in Latin America? Would you go to a Spanish speaking country? You know, want to open opportunities for students to potentially go abroad and get research experience and do some study abroad programs? Would you want to do something like that? And so I wound up getting hooked up with some colleagues somewhere in the business school at the time, and then particularly my colleague, Cami schmeer, who's in sociology, we were just brought together as part of this initiative to try to get a work off the ground. And it's a long, drawn out story. We thought about several different places in Latin America, and Nicaragua came to the fore as a potential place, and so we went down there. And because of the work in the Amazon, I was very interested in looking at a study of food security, and so we decided to go ahead and launch a study there together. So she's a sociologist, so together we built a collaboration with the Center for so it's called Sid. CIDs is the acronym, and it's the Center for investigations and demography and health is what it stands for. And they were our colleagues at the National Autonomous University in Leon. And so together, we built a large Leon in Mexico. No? Leon in Nicaragua. In Nicaragua, yes. And so it's their oldest university, very prestigious University, has a medical school. Our colleagues there were trained in medicine. Some were medical doctors, but they also had training in public health. So they kind of complemented my anthropological perspective, and then Dr schmear sociology perspective. And so together, we built a study that had a large survey component to it that dealt with the household and family structure and education and income and assets and all those sorts of things. Then we administered questionnaires about people's perceptions of their food security. And then we also measured mental health through a questionnaire where we talked to women. We used something called the SRQ 20, which is a 20 question. It's called the self Reporting Questionnaire, is what the SRQ stands for, and it's a 20 question questionnaire that asks about a lot of symptoms and signs, both physical and mental, of anxiety and depression. And so the higher the score you get on that, the worse their situation is in terms of mental health. And then the food security was measured in a variety of different ways. We used a questionnaire which is called the acronym for that is elxa, which is basically built off of the household food insecurity and access questionnaires that we use in the United States. It's 15 questions, and it begins by asking about anxiety over running out of money in order to access food. Those are the initial questions people making coping strategies that follow that when you don't have enough to get the food you need. So do you make changes to the quality of the food? Do you buy different kinds of things, you know, the kinds of foods that fill the belly, but not necessarily the most nutritious foods, right? Like eating more dietary staples and less safe fruits and vegetables. So you tend to see that pattern even in the United States. That's exactly what we observe, right? And then the questions move into making changes about quantity to the diet. Do you skip meals, or do you reduce the portion sizes? And they first start asking about adults doing that, and eventually move on to do children in the household. Were they forced to make those kinds of sacrifices? Did you serve them less, or did you skip a meal? And so again, like the SRQ, the higher the score, the worse the situation is. So we administer those so there's a big survey component. And then. I did focus group interviews, six of them with women in rural and urban areas. So each of them had about eight to 11 or 12 women in them. There was 45 total over the six focus groups, and we dug into experiences with food insecurity. I never asked them directly about their mental health, because I wasn't trying to probe them in that way. I wanted that to come from them, if that was a factor, but we talked a lot about their experiences being mothers trying to feed their children under the conditions of poverty, what that was like, the kinds of strategies that they used, and how they felt about those things. And so I used that qualitative data to kind of put the meat, I would say, on the bones of what that survey instrument gave us in the talk that I gave as part of science Sundays, I talked about the results of that survey instrument, and then what the qualitative data added to that. One other thing we actually did in that study that I also talked about there was asking the question, does social support matter? Because we know that people with robust social support networks tend to have better mental health. So the question was, could social support act as a sort of mediator between food insecurity and a mental health outcome? Could it be a buffer in there? So we looked at social support that could come from a social network, like we asked them questions about their social network, then the spouse...

David Staley  16:16  
Family, friends, that sort of thing? 

Barbara Piperata  16:19  
Exactly like, are there people,you could lean on for money if you needed it, or get food from if you needed it, or who could help watch your children if you needed to go do a task or work or things like that. So it was kind of like different types of social support, emotional support, like someone you could talk to. Instrumental support, could you go to someone for money or for food, that kind of stuff? Informational support, that's another type of social support. Like, is there someone that you could get advice from in dealing with your situation? Like, maybe your mom could tell you how to stretch some food items right, to make it feed more people, or prepared in a way that can get the kids to eat it, or something like that. So we looked at those kind of different dimensions of social support. Asked them if they had people in their life they could routinely get that from. Then we asked them if their spouse was present in the home and served as a source of social support. And then we asked them if they lived in a household that was extended, where their parents were there, and it could be their in laws, because this is all from the mother's perspective, their in laws or their own parents. And we didn't divide that out, because the vast majority of those who lived in a parental extended household, which was just over 50% of them, so a lot. And you see that in poverty, because people you know join up to combine resources to cope, right? The majority of those who did live in a parental, extended household were living with the wife side of the family. So we threw all those things in models to look and see how that worked out. Well, the first thing we found is that no one should be surprised by this, higher rates of food insecurity, or higher reported food insecurity, poor mental health. That's been found in other studies, several in Africa, very little in Latin America. This is really the first one that did this systematically in Latin America. And then we asked, well, let's see. We put in the mediators of this, forms of social support. Did any of them diminish the impact? And the social network did not. Having a greater social support network was correlated with better mental health, but not in relation to this food security thing. So when it was plugged into the model with the food security, it didn't have that buffering effect. And I will talk about how the qualitative data helps us understand that. And then the spouse being around also had no effect on their mental health. Unfortunate. We'll talk about that in a second. And then the last one having parents in the household was the one that had quite a significant buffering effect. So with those quantitative data, which are great, because that's like almost 500 households, so it's a good, robust sample where we can look at these dynamics, you have the correlation, but you really don't understand why these things work or don't work. Why is having a parent there but a spouse necessarily different? So the qualitative data, again, helps put the meat on those bones. So in those conversations, women talked about a number of things that they experienced, being food insecure. And one of the things that comes up here is that food insecurity in Nicaragua is very stigmatized, so women were very reluctant to share their inability to feed their children with just anybody. So even though they might have a broad social support network, they were very cautious about who within that network they would share that kind of information with. Does that include you? Sharing this with you? So that's a good question, and we did reflect on that, and they didn't seem to be as bothered to share it with me, because I think they see me as an outsider, and I was there with my colleagues from the University, and I think they saw us as the sort of academic outsider. We were a totally different socioeconomic status. Culturally, I'm totally from outside their culture, they were quite happy to talk about their situation, which was amazing for me, because it allowed me to understand things that you know are difficult things to talk about that people might not be willing to share. But in this context, they did, and they did share it with one another, and it actually had, you know, at least from our perspective as the researchers in the room, women seemed to experience some relief of sort of sharing that situation in a place where, I guess they felt like this was kind of separate from everyday life. You know, they're at. Their context. We're not in their home. We did it on the university campus. So we were separated from, you know, their environment, and the women, the other people in the room with them were not necessarily people they knew. They were just other women of similar age and socioeconomic status. So I think it kind of took some of that pressure off of sharing it in a group where maybe it wouldn't come back to kind of haunt you. So they were worried about people talking about them, gossip about you being not a good mother. The critical Anthro that comes in here is that the reasons why these women are so poor is they're living in a context where there's 40% unemployment, there's very little protection for women, and there's discrimination against women in the workplace. There's a lot of jobs women can't have. Most of them that did work worked in the informal economy, selling things on the street, working as domestics in people's homes. And so their life is very unstable. Some days they have more money than others. Some days they don't have work. Some women talked about, you know, iron clothes of neighbors when they could get that work, and then whatever they earn from that puts food on the table. So they're in a very precarious sort of state, but yet they internalize the inability to feed their children, and they make it about their own personal failure. So that's a very sort of neoliberal type of talk, where these structural problems in society are internalized and made to beat their own problem of poverty. And you see them doing that, which is devastating, I think, to the psyche, because they can't solve this problem. This is a problem that goes well beyond their ability to solve, and then they take the responsibility for not solving it on themselves, rather than thinking about the way in which society is not working, you know. So I think we're having those same conversations in the United States right now.

Gretchen Ritter  21:41  
Hi, I'm Gretchen Ritter, Executive Dean and vice provost for the Ohio State University's College of Arts and Sciences. Did you know 16 of our programs are ranked in the top 25 in US News and World Reports, with nine of those 16 in the top 10? That's why we say that the College of Arts and Sciences is the intellectual and academic core of the Ohio State University. Learn more about the college@artsandsciences.osu.edu.

David Staley  22:16  
I'm interested to know about your next research project, in eco-culturing the infant gut microbiome.

Barbara Piperata  22:29  
Ah, yes. So this is the new National Science Foundation project. This is another interdisciplinary adventure for me. I love interdisciplinary projects. I like working with scholars. That's why I like these institutes that OSU has formed over the years that bring people out of their little silos, so that we can have exchanges of ideas and come up with new, cool projects. And so this project is about trying to understand how culture and then some ecological parts of the environment, particularly pathogens. So gut pathogens, how exposure to gut pathogens, which is shaped by the socioeconomic conditions in your home, but also by culture, and the way in which that structures children's routines every day, how they interact with their environment, what foods we give them, what environments we allow them to move around. Do we put them on the floor? What are they touching? What are they interacting with? Do they have contact with domestic animals? Do they have contact with potentially contaminated water. So looking at how culture and then the socioeconomic context of the household come together to create what we call a developmental niche. So this environmental condition in which children are experiencing their growth and development, and then looking at how that shapes their gut microbiome. So this project is with my colleague, Jiyoung Lee, who is in the College of Public Health, and Vanessa Hale, who is in the College of preventative veterinary medicine. I'm the PI they're my co PIs on the project, but I see it as like this three women project, and we all bring our different expertise, so I'm the anthropologist on the project. I have a lot of experience working in households, collecting detailed data on diet, on people's routines. I had to do that for the reproductive energetics project. I watched all the work women did and quantified it. So do similar things with children's routines. Here, collect detailed data on their dietary intake, because diet is a major shaper of the gut microbiome. But then also, Jiyoung Lee is a water microbiologist, so she's very interested in how pathogens move in the environment. So we're going to be measuring the pathogens in the environment, enteric pathogen in particular, and looking at where they are through swabbing surfaces that children have a lot of contact with, but then also looking at the water that's being used to cook the food that they consume, as well as that they drink. So we're going to bring all that together. Dr Hale has a lot of expertise in measuring and studying the gut microbiome, and does that in humans and in other animals. So we bring those expertise together, and we're doing this study actually in the mouth of the Amazon in the city of Belem. So I'm going back to Brazil for this project, and my colleagues that came out of work I did back when I was doing my dissertation, when I was out in the field, in the rural community. Is one of the Brazilian scholar who was an ichthyologist. So he's studying the fish in the Amazon. I'm studying the fish that the people are eating. So we had a natural link. He helped me get all the species names for the 72 different species of fish that I documented in their diet. And so we bonded from early on. And so he's actually a professor now the university that's there in Belem, at the Federal University in para. So he's going to be on the project. Some of his grad students are on the project. We've got students that are from the anthropology department there, because serendipity, one of my colleagues, who's an anthropologist in Belem, he got his PhD here in the OSU anthropology department in 1999 and then another student from Brazil came here much more recently and got his PhD in this department. Now they're both professors at that university, so it's like, this kind of coming together of these folks that I've had contact with in my past. So we're bringing that whole team together and training students, and so we'll start that. We just got the money late last year, so we're starting the project now. So we're in the stage of, like, building all the protocols for collecting fecal samples from the babies and collecting water in the households, and collecting swabs of surfaces in the household, and then how to collect routine data on the children's activity patterns and then the dietary data. So we're building all of our protocols. And then we'll go down and train the team and bring some OSU students down there, one of my PhD students, Stephen Rue, will do his dissertation work down there on water security and looking at how households are coping with inadequate access to safe drinking water. So it's exciting, you know, I'm really excited too. 

David Staley  26:29  
It sounds all very visceral. I'm curious to know, how did you end up as an anthropologist? What was your journey to becoming an anthropologist?

Barbara Piperata  26:38  
It was a strange journey. There's a lot of things that fed into it, but my bachelor degree is actually in biology, okay? And I didn't know what Anthro was when I was a undergraduate. Never took an anthro class. Had no idea what it was. 

David Staley  26:49  
Why biology? Why did you choose that as an undergraduate major?

Barbara Piperata  26:52  
I don't know why I like science. I didn't. I mean, this is gonna sound terrible, but I never had particularly good science teachers in high school, but I think I was always fascinated with just the environment. I've always been interested in animals. I was just interested in natural things. I think I grew up in New York City, there wasn't a lot of natural things, but my parents took us a lot to the American Museum of Natural History, and I was always fascinated with those dioramas and looking at people living in these different environments. I loved that part of the museum, and I'll never forget coming up the escalator in that museum, and there were the hominin heads there, and fascinated with that. I knew nothing about what they were. I knew they looked kind of like humans, but I wasn't really sure. So I think that there were early seeds that were planted from that experience. And then when I was 11, my parents decided to move us from New York City to Albuquerque, New Mexico. And that is a culture shock, shock. And I think that learning to adapt to a new culture, even if you're in your same country, but it was so different. The environment totally different. People spoke Spanish a lot. I never, I mean, I heard a lot of languages in New York City, but, you know, you tend to live in enclaves where, you know, people have similar kinds of backgrounds, at least. That's where it was in the 70s and early 80s. So I came from that to this place where there was large, robust, Native American eclectic culture, and then a very strong Hispanic culture, so very different. So I think seeds there planted about how different people see the world the way they think about the world. That's all Anthro, right? But I didn't know it at the time. After my bachelor's degree, I worked as an analytical chemist. I got married right after I got my degree, and we moved up to Boulder, Colorado, because my husband wanted to get his master's in aerospace engineering there, so we moved up there, and he started grad school right away, and I worked as an analytical chemist, which was great that my biology degree get me that good job. And I learned a ton of stuff in the lab, and I enjoyed it very much, but I knew it wasn't for me to be in that closed environment, it just wasn't for me, and I was learning fast, and I realized, hey, I can do this like I'm good at this, you know, and I enjoy it, and I like learning, and I like these challenges, so I think I want to go back to school. And they were very supportive. So I went back and started taking classes in molecular genetics, thinking that was what I was going to do. And one of my classes got canceled for what low enrollment, so I was already on campus, so I looked around, and there was a class in human ecology, and like I was saying, I always liked the environment, and when I was getting my bachelor's degree, I took a lot of classes in evolution and ecology, because I really liked that, and I'd never had humans integrated into that. And I thought, Wow, I'm gonna go check that out. That's all she wrote. That's as they say, I took that class, and I was fascinated. And the professor, I found her to be just amazing. And she did her work in the Northwest Amazon, where she had to canoe in to these indigenous communities, and studied dietary adaptations to that environment, where they were growing bitter manioc, which is loaded with cyanide and requires, like, enormous processing to be able to extract the cyanide to make it safe for consumption. And I was just fascinated. And then she covered, how do people adapt to high altitude? How do people adapt to cold stress? And I'm like, this is where I want to be. So I went to her and I said, I think I want to get a graduate degree in Anthro says, What's your background? I said, I got a biology degree and we could work with that. There it was. So I applied. I got in there, and then that's all she wrote.

David Staley  29:59  
Well, I'm curious to know what classes you teach in the anthropology department. 

Barbara Piperata  30:03  
Okay, so I teach a variety of classes. Teach a lot of undergraduate classes. I do teach some grad seminars. But in terms of undergraduate classes, I teach modern human physical variation, which is a really boring way of saying human biological diversity, which is what we should probably change the title to, looking at genetic variation in humans, but then also the ways in which we physiologically and culturally adapt to all the environmental stressors that are thrown at us at any given time. So I teach that class. I'm actually teaching that right now. It's what I was doing right before I came here. And then I teach a variety of classes that are in the new major in medical Anthro. So we've got a new major. It has both a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor's of Arts degree options, and the major is meant to fill a very critical gap that I saw in arts and sciences in general, which is to try to teach students to understand humans in context. In other words, going back to this biocultural idea that health is shaped by understanding people in their environment, and oftentimes with modern biomedicine, it's great at diagnosing disease. It's fantastic at that. You're never going to hear me say anything bad about biomedicine. Nothing against it. But medicine's supposed to be about healing, and to heal requires you to understand the human condition, because we are more than just a body, right? We are a body embedded in a society, in a culture, and so we need to understand that body in context. So the medical Anthro degree is geared towards trying to give students the experience of understanding humans in this more complex biocultural way. So they take a variety of classes that are more on the biological end of anthropology. So they take human evolution and things like that. And then I teach a class in evolutionary medicine that looks at how principles of evolution can be used to understand human health today. A lot of that's based on the mismatch of our bodies, which, you know, evolved for millions of years in a very different environment in which we place those bodies in now. And so understanding how these new stressors that we face are very novel for us, and so our bodies are often mismatched to that. So that class covers a lot of those things, and then I teach stuff that's more on the cultural side of the equation. So I teach a class, for example, in women's health and global perspective, and looking at how both cultural parts of women's lives put their biologies at risk. So we look at women from birth all the way through to older age, looking at how different socio and economic factors cultural practices can either enhance women's well being or undermine it. And so we look at sex selective abortion, for example, the fact that many girl babies are not wanted in some places. And so how that changes sex ratios, and how that changes the experiences of young girls' lives and their growth and development. We look at reproduction and study, you know, how different kinds of cultural practices enhance birth outcomes. One of the things that's really interesting that came out of that Amazon work that I did is that these practices in the postpartum there's data out there indicating more and more that they may be protective against postpartum depression, and a lot of different cultures practice those things. So we think about how we can utilize cross cultural data to improve women's health here, because we have pretty high rates of postpartum depression in the United States. How can we learn from other cultures about things that are protective? How could we enhance women's experiences in the postpartum to combat those sorts of things? So I teach that class, and then I have a class in food security that I haven't taught for a while, but I'm anxious to get back to it as part of the major, and then a class in health and healing in Latin America. So there's a variety of different classes that we've got. It's an exciting time in Anthro I want students to get this degree and not become anthropologists. I want them to go out and be great doctors, you know? I want them to understand that the person comes in your office, but when they leave, they go back into the environment that they were in. And we have to understand that experience if we want to heal them. Experience if we want to heal them. So that's the goal. 

David Staley  33:45  
Barbara Piperata, thank you.

Barbara Piperata  33:47  
Thank you. 

Eva Dale  33:48  
Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Technology Services Studio. Sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer, produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai