Papers by Lawrence Hammar
This paper applies a qualitative perspective and method to a highly quantitative dataset. Data on... more This paper applies a qualitative perspective and method to a highly quantitative dataset. Data on 4275 consecutive patients with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) who reported to the Daru General Hospital STD Clinic between 1980 and 1992 are critically examined. Prevailing public health approaches to the epidemiology of STDs presume a linguistic, social, cognitive and geographical fixity to both STDs and the people whom they afflict in ways that are empirically unsound. Some of the problems of and some of the problems with the presentation and treatment of gonorrhoea, syphilis and donovanosis are discussed. Because Daru is characterized by high levels of sexual violence, low levels of condom usage and a deeply entrenched sex industry, this total of 4275 is surely a dramatic under-accounting. In particular it misses the embodied, highly gendered nature of disease. Male and female STD Clinic patients appear to think about, feel and report their problems in greatly different ways.
Counseling Psychologist, 2005
Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse, 2011
Despite the continuing problem of repeat drunk driving (DUI) offenders, little is known of the ch... more Despite the continuing problem of repeat drunk driving (DUI) offenders, little is known of the characteristics of this population. This article reports findings from qualitative interviews with 12 incarcerated men who had been convicted for 5 or more DUIs. Participants' sociodemographic characteristics, patterns of substance abuse, treatment history, attitudes toward positive behavioral change, and recommendations for improving treatment are described. Three groups were identified in regard to the degree of recognition of substance abuse and level of motivation to engage in treatment and post-release rehabilitation. Participants also offered suggestions to improve treatment strategies for repeat DUI offenders by tailoring diverse educational and counseling programs that target the differing types of DUI recidivists. The findings provide preliminary qualitative insight into a unique population that may be used to inform future studies.
Agricultural History, 1996
... George, an ethnic majority Kiwai man, is married to a Suki woman, Koria. She is stigmatized a... more ... George, an ethnic majority Kiwai man, is married to a Suki woman, Koria. She is stigmatized as uba pe, literally, "bad canoe," a canoe that has holes in it, a sexually promiscuous person, a moniker leveled particularly at women from Bamu, Kiwai, and Suki villages. ...
American Ethnologist, 1991
Transforming Anthropology, 1999
Luise White's (1991) framework for studying prostitution empirically, in terms of its "labor form... more Luise White's (1991) framework for studying prostitution empirically, in terms of its "labor forms," uncovers the structure and function of "sex industries." In this essay I describe and analyze four such labor forms based upon fieldwork conducted during 1990-92 on Dam island, capital of Papua New Guinea's Western Province. Those forms are: 1) family, 2) freelance, 3) sex broker, and 4) outdoor bush. Amidst these different forms of sexual networking, including marriage, women are caught between their opportunities to act agentially and the structures of domination that impinge upon them — patriarchy, capital, heterosexuality, and the state. Using what Allen Feldman calls "zones of terror" to develop an ethnography of violence, and to sharpen our sense of anthropological praxis, 1 clarify the difference between gender violence and gendered violence. Gender violence consists of social, economic, political, and cultural double standards that are multiplying in form and intensity through Papua New Guinea. Gendered violence, or sexually embodied violence wrought through genitalia, is likewise multiplying and becoming eroticized. I conclude that anthropological praxis requires not only doing "good enough" ethnography but situating violence in an expanded, reflexive field that includes ethnographers.
The Journal of Medical Humanities, 1997
Medical experimentation on humans with “classic” sexually transmitted diseases (e.g., syphilis, g... more Medical experimentation on humans with “classic” sexually transmitted diseases (e.g., syphilis, gonorrhea) is not generally well known, but experimentation with others such as Granuloma inguinale, or Donovanosis, is even less so. Endemic to non-existent here, hyper-epidemic there, between 1880 and 1950 Donovanosis was linguistically and morally “constructed” as a disease of poor, sexually profligate, tropical, darkly-skinned persons. It was also experimentally produced on and in African-American patients in many charity hospitals in the American South. This essay analyzes Donovanosis literature of the period that heavily featured skin color, climate and tropicality, venereal sin, and racial susceptibility. It then recounts the history of human experimentation with it, and explains both its linguistic construction and its biomedical experimental history in terms of “disease narratives” produced not only by but for venereologists.
Uploads
Papers by Lawrence Hammar