As a biological anthropologist, my primary interest has been in the biological consequences of social and cultural change. I have pursued this theme in both prehistoric and modern populations, acquiring training in anthropology, human population biology and nutrition. My initial work in skeletal biology concentrated on ways to identify stress, particularly nutrition and disease stress, in skeletal populations. I was concerned to identify and validate stress markers, such as Harris lines, enamel hypoplasias, and premature osteoporosis, in populations undergoing subsistence change. Working with colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, I was able to describe a malnutrition-like pattern of juvenile osteoporosis in a prehistoric population from Sudanese Nubia. My more recent work has concentrated on problems of human adaptability, particularly the ways in which human groups cope with the stressors and resources of fluctuating and rapidly changing environments. In Lesotho, my initial research dealt with seasonal changes in work, weight, and body composition in women from a remote highland district. While engaged in this research, I was asked by the World Bank to conduct a study of health care utilization in this district, and this work eventually became my doctoral dissertation. In the process of conducting these two research projects, I became aware that the greatest stressors impinging on this population were related less to conditions in the natural environment than to problems associated with economic constraints and social change. For example, major disease problems in Lesotho included malnutrition, respiratory diseases (especially tuberculosis) , and sexually transmitted diseases. While these have an environmental component, they are also related to poverty, and to the migratory wage-labor system.
My subsequent work in Swaziland and in Kenya has looked at the nutritional consequences of varying types of agricultural development. There has been considerable controversy as to the health effects of development and the circumstances under which they may be negative rather than positive. In Swaziland, I looked at food consumption and nutritional status of women and children in households cooperating with a cropping systems project. This research showed that nutritional status and food consumption were highest for households with greater investment in hybrid maize production and with more women employed off-farm. Cotton production was associated with poorer nutritional status, confirming studies in other parts of the world that have shown poor biological outcomes for groups involved in non-food cash cropping. In Kenya, I worked with economists, social anthropologists, and veterinary epidemiologists to devise noneconomic ways of measuring impact of improved livestock disease control. I am currently analyzing data to assess the potential nutritional impacts of peri-urban dairying on the Kenya coast.
In all of these projects, my aim has been to assess the ways in which access to resources influences health and biological well-being. While avoidance of stressors and access to resources are both essential parts of teh adaptive equation, I feel that resources and the strategies for their procurement have been relatively neglected within this framework. With the exception of such areas as optimal foraging theory and behavioral ecology, human biologists have paid little attention to economic behavior. I see part of my future work as being directed toward a more creative use of economic models and frameworkd within human biology. I am especially interested in looking at the interfact of economics and biology at the household level, at household and intrahousehold strategies for gaining acces to and distributing resources. This should be especially important for understanding the differential success and survival of households moving into new environments, such as urban areas. The biological outcomes of different household organizations and economic strategies should be of interest not only to anthropologists, but also to demographers and public health practitioners.
While my work to date has been concentrated on rural African populations, I am becoming more interested in the problems of urban areas. I am especially interested in the concept of urban micro-environments and the biological consequences of these. I am presently working on identifying the distinctive features of peri-urban areas that may have consequences for health and population change. I am working on this with graduate students from anthropology and demography. While we are presently concerned with peri-urban areas in the Third World, we have begun to extend the concept to First World cities as well. I see the concept of urban micro-environments as a potentially exciting framework for looking at problems in the human ecology of an increasingly urbanized world. My current work on peri-urban areas in Kenya is the beginning of what I envision as a long-term program of research that will involve data collection in Southern Africa, Papua New Guinea, and the urban US. I currently have PhD students in varying stages of data collection and analysis looking at teenage pregnancy in urban South Africa, women's work and health in urban, rural, and peri-urban Swaziland, and child growth in urban Papua New Guinea. These are examples of the types of projects I hope ot continue to pursue in collaboration with students and other colleagues.
Or e-mail me at rhashmor@sas.upenn.edu !