By Ashley Pereyra
Reporter
Students can come see anthropology meet health sciences this afternoon.
Assistant professor of anthropology candidate Carla Pezzia’s lecture, “Faces We See, Hearts We Do Not Know: Intersubjectivity, Mental Health, and Environment amongst the Kaqchikel Maya,” combines public health and anthropological approaches to analyze indigenous populations.
The lecture will take place at 3:30 p.m. today in C105 Baylor Sciences Building.
Pezzia has a master’s degree in Public Health from the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth.
“I really try to bring in both anthropology and public health to bring in my background in environmental health and epidemiology,” Pezzia said. “So the prevalence work, the prevalence survey that I did, was more a public health approach as opposed to a traditional anthropological approach.“
The lecture will cover Pezzia’s work in the western highlands of Guatemala.
There, she worked on her doctoral dissertation — studying alcoholism in the communities. Part of her talk will focus on alcoholism.
In particular, she will talk about the pathways to recovery and what barriers the people she researched face when they look into recovery.
Pezzia said that she is going to also focus on the prevalence of mental illness in the Kaqchikel Maya community.
For example, she will cover what percentages and types of mental illnesses that occur.
For more information on this lecture, call the department of anthropology at 254-710-4084.
