Discipline(s):
Anthropology, Social Medicine, Medicine, Internal Medicine, Public Health, Population Health
Area(s) of Expertise:
Medical Anthropology, Critical Medical Anthropology, Immigration Studies, Migration Studies, Social Medicine, Symbolic Violence and Symbolic Power, Embodiment, Race, Governmentality, Gender, Citizenship, Latin America, North America, Urban Anthropology, Rural Anthropology, Death and Dying
E-Mail:
sh2875@columbia.edu
Background:
Seth M. Holmes is an anthropologist and physician whose work focuses broadly on the role that perceptions of difference play in the production and reproduction of social hierarchies and health disparities. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco, and his M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. He completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Holmes is finishing a book exploring social and suffering hierarchies in U.S.-Mexico migration as well as the ways in which these asymmetries come to be seen as deserved, normal, and natural. The book draws on approximately eighteen months of participant-observation, migrating with undocumented indigenous Mexicans in the United States and Mexico. This included picking berries in Washington State, pruning vineyards in California, harvesting corn in the mountains of Oaxaca, accompanying migrant laborers on clinic visits, and trekking across the border desert into Arizona. Concurrently, he is conducting an auto-ethnography of the production of the clinical gaze, exploring the subtle processes in clinical training shaping the lenses through which medical trainees perceive social difference. In addition, Dr. Holmes is initiating ethnographic research in New York jails and prisons exploring the social, cultural, and political logics for high HIV death rates of specific classes of people, notably the urban poor, ethnic and sexual minorities, and immigrants. He also maintains a continuity clinic in HIV primary care in the New York City public hospital system.
Journal Articles:
Click here for a list of Seth Holmes' available publications in PubMed.
