Counterpunch February 27, 2012 An Interview with War Correspondent Turned Anthropologist Sandy Smith-Nonini Killing the Doctors When They Refused to Cry Uncle by BRIAN McKENNA Last week the world lost a brave war correspondent, Marie Colvin, when she lost her life covering the strife in Syria. Marie was first an anthropologist before becoming a journalist, graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree in the field from Yale in 1978. During her undergraduate years she attended a seminar with John Hersey, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who’d written about the aftermath of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. So impressed was Colvin that she abandoned the Ph.D. quest for the rigors of reporting the world’s troubles. I told her story to my anthropology undergraduates last week. They struggle, as did young Colvin, with how to apply their critical skills after graduation. “You need to add Colvin to your reading list,” I said, “learn everything about her.” Coincidentally this semester I am teaching about another war correspondent and anthropologist, Sandy Smith-Nonini. Like Colvin, she risked her life on the front lines, documenting military attacks on rural clinics in Nicaragua and El Salvador as a health rights activist and journalist in the mid-1980s. Her daily reality included day-long hikes across war zones, being detained by soldiers, and police raids on her house and office. Only in late 1989, after death threats to herself and her young son, did she leave the region and return to the U.S. Unlike Colvin, Smith-Nonini did it backwards. She was first a journalist and then became an anthropologist, going all the way to the Ph.D. She’s just written a book about her war experience , Healing the Body Politic, El Salvador’s Popular Struggle for Health Rights from Civil War to Neoliberal Peace (Rutgers University Press, 2010). I interviewed Sandy in early February to learn more about her strange trajectory as an activist-anthropologist, and what lessons she had for us. BMcK: Why did you decide to go to graduate school in anthropology after a decade working as a war correspondent and a health activist? full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/27/killing-the-doctors-when-they-refused-to-cry-uncle/
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