OCCASIONAL SEMINAR

An Occasional Seminar with Dr. Andrew Kim, Dept of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. Topic: Biological memories of apartheid: Evaluating the intergenerational effects of apartheid-based prenatal stress on birth outcomes, inflammation, and adult psychiatric morbidity in Soweto, South Africa. Since South Africa’s democratic transition from apartheid, nationalist aspirations for health equity and racial justice have continuously been met with ongoing legacies of anti-black violence and dramatic disparities in mental illness outcomes. Currently, South Africa’s rates of psychiatric disorders are among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa and disproportionately impact lower income Black communities. While the continual economic and societal aftermaths of the apartheid regime are known to exacerbate present-day burdens of mental illness, growing evidence suggests that the traumas of apartheid experienced by past generations could become biologically inherited and have lingering physiological effects that influence stress physiological mechanisms and mental health outcomes across the child’s lifecourse into the next generation. Drawing on data from a 30-year, multigenerational birth cohort study and two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this talk examines the biocultural transmission of embodied trauma from apartheid and its impacts on human biology and mental health in subsequent generations among families living in post-apartheid Soweto & Johannesburg, South Africa. I describe the applications of these findings to recent work on the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa and future research aimed at ameliorating and undoing the embodied effects of historical trauma. BIO: Andrew Wooyoung Kim is a biological anthropologist interested in the lifecourse and intergenerational health consequences of historical trauma and the contributions of such knowledge to movements for collective healing and racial justice. Dr. Kim’s current research traces the stress physiological mechanisms underlying the intergenerational effects of trauma and political violence from apartheid, as well as processes of reversibility and healing, in Soweto and Johannesburg, South Africa. His work explores these questions in collaboration with a 30-year project called “Birth to Thirty,” a birth cohort study based in Soweto & Johannesburg, South Africa that enrolled over 3000 pregnant women during the dissolution of the apartheid regime and has since documented the lives of these families across multiple generations. His secondary research combines ethnographic and epidemiological research to examine the lived experience of psychiatric patients and healthcare workers, population mental health trends, and solutions for improving public mental healthcare systems in post-colonial and marginalized settings.

Event Sponsor
Anthropology, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Marti Kerton, 808-956-7153, anthprog@hawaii.edu, http://www.anthropology.hawaii.edu

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