UW Anthropology and Public Health senior Lauren Brown is writing her senior thesis on the changing attitudes and perceptions of the residents of Yangjuan village on local Nuosu healing, traditional Chinese, and Western medical practices available in rural southwest China. Here Lauren, along with Anthropology graduate student Tami Blumenfield, asks a Yangjuan resident about their recent health problems and how they feel about the bimo, a Nuosu native priest who has historically helped to treat illness and ease suffering.

The role of the bimo and more modern healers like that of that health workers and clinicians in state-run hospitals are rapidly bifurcating, though not along typical divisions between medicine and spirituality encouraged by Chinese government campaigns. Nuosu people still seek care from native healers for medical problems as a means to define and place themselves in a changing political, social, and economic system that increasing dictates how, where, and when they can care for their health. Here villagers prepare for a healing ceremony.

Lauren Brown was named a Mary Gates Scholar and received a Researching Training Grant from the Mary Gates Endowment for her research in Yangjuan village. She will present her work at the UW's Ninth Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium in May 2006.