In this conversation, Nikita Taniparti interviews Dr. Carolyn Rouse, who gives us a preview of her forthcoming book. Based on almost a decade of fieldwork in Lake County, CA, her book looks at an economy of care as opposed to an economy of things, and how the relations that emerge through care work are linked to life expectancy and health outcomes. Dr. Rouse explains her interlocutor’s search for freedom, and the narrative threads of hope that emerge to bind a community together.

Today’s guest is Dr. Carolyn Rouse. She is the Ritter Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her work is wide-ranging and has focused on issues of race, religion, inequality, political and economic development, and more. Her first book, Engaged Surrender: African-American Women and Islam (2004), is an ethnography of African American Sunni muslim women in Los Angeles, CA – the book shows how the teachings of Islam give these women a sense of power and control over interpretations of gender, family, authority, and obligation. Her next book, Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease (2009) provides an examination of what it means that black Americans are sicker and die earlier than white Americans and the implications for health care in the United States. This book provides important framing to our discussion today, which is about Professor Rouse’s forthcoming book on declining life expectancies of white Americans. Her book Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment, co-authored with John Jackson Jr and Marla Frederick and published in 2016, argues that African American religious media has long played a key role in humanizing perceptions of African Americans by claiming that they are endowed by God with the same gifts of goodness and reason as whites, if not more, thereby legitimizing black Americans’ rights to citizenship in the United States. As a filmmaker, Prof. Rouse has also produced and directed numerous documentaries, including Chicks in White Satin (1994), Purification to Prozac: Teaching Mental Illness in Bali (1998), Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought (2015), and more. She is dedicated to expanding forms of visual anthropology, a theme that we’ll touch upon a bit later in this episode. Her forthcoming book builds on her decades of research on racial disparities in health and medicine, development and policy efforts, and ongoing political and economic shifts in the US. The book project began when she visited Lake Country in Northeast California in 2016 to investigate research claims being made at the time that showed that life expectancies for white Americans was declining. Today she’ll talk about that ongoing research and how it is linked to the emergence of hope, trust, and community.

Links:

https://anthropology.princeton.edu/people/faculty/carolyn-rouse

https://www.epicpeople.org/racist-by-design/