Anita Carrasco, assistant professor of Anthropology, was awarded the 2016-18 Nena Amundson Professorship Award for her project: Healers, Sorcerers and Misfortune: "Indigenous Women’s Strategies for the Protection of their Health and Wellness."

The Nena Amundson Distinguished Professorship awards a faculty member with a two-year professorship that gives the recipient the opportunity to conduct research on the project he or she proposed to the selection committee during the evaluation process. Receiving this professorship gives Carrasco the opportunity to work together with a Luther student to investigate her topic in more detail. Specifically, Carrasco will identify three elements: (1) the strategies women adopt to prevent, mitigate or eliminate events that hinder their health and wellness; (2) the circumstances that drive them to decide to consult the services of healers and sorcerers in their quest to understand the sources of their misfortunes; and finally, (3) why they postpone consulting the country's medical and legal system to protect themselves.

Carrasco's interest in documenting women's understandings of health and wellness was triggered by past fieldwork experiences in Chile's Atacama desert when she heard countless stories told by indigenous women that centered on the theme of events involving a serious illness such as cancer. These women rarely searched for the help of a medical doctor as their first choice. Rather, most of the narratives pointed to the women's attempts at protecting themselves with the help of healers or sorcerers depending on the nature of the misfortune they were experiencing, as well as the different areas of expertise covered by traditional indigenous healers (locally called yatiri) as opposed to non-indigenous sorcerers.

Together with a Luther College student, Carrasco will conduct fieldwork in the summer of 2016 to begin collecting data and return to the field during January of 2018 to complete data collection. She suspects that many healers exercise a sort of 'radical empathy' and that women search for this empathetic experience in their healing process. This may provide one clue to understanding why their narratives indicate their preference for consulting sorcerers and healers instead of lawyers and medical doctors.