A decorated warrior for a better world
- Wits University
Lenore Manderson, Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology at Wits can do more in a day than most people
Professor Manderson is also a Wits Australia Board Member, can do more in a day than most people can do in a year.
When in 2013 she was offered the position at Wits, along with a similar one at Brown University in the US, she thought she’d do “50% at Wits, 50% at Brown and 50% in Australia”, where she’d been working as a full professor at various universities since 1988.
Manderson has received many laurels in her illustrious career — including the Society of Medical Anthropology Career Achievement Award, Member of the Order of Australia and the 2023 Bronislaw Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology, which honours an outstanding social scientist in recognition of efforts to understand and serve the needs of the world's societies — but this year was the first time an actual laurel wreath was placed on her head.
The leaves are “drying nicely” she says. The more permanent wreath is engraved on a gold ring on her finger. Both were received at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, among the oldest places of learning in the world, which bestowed on her an honorary doctorate.
She delivered her acceptance lecture, titled After Covid: Signposts and Moral Imperatives, at the Humanist Theatre at the University on 25 January. In the abstract to this, she wrote: “For applied and public anthropologists, COVID-19 afforded us opportunities to draw on our broad interests and analytic tools to interrogate the persistence of social and political schisms that were distended by the pandemic's effects. I reflect on the limits to the public health and fiscal interventions set up in certain settings to manage the pandemic, consider its financial and scientific gains, and revisit features of social and political life which the pandemic laid bare in diverse settings. In considering this, I argue that the pandemic has reinforced our responsibility to act ethically in the face of multiple global crises. This has powerful implications for all fields of knowledge production, and for our own roles as moral actors.”
Before her five-year US visa ran out, Manderson was also visiting distinguished professor of environmental science at Brown and curated and produced a series of science interventions. At Wits she has continued her exploration of the effects of climate change, particularly in the massive Watershed project.
“My day job at Wits is mostly focusing on health components,” she says. “The social justice component comes in because you cannot have good health — nor can you have water, food and energy -- the other project I’m doing — if you’ve got 50% of the population living below the poverty line. Part of my work, at an advocacy level, is making that point as an anthropologist. Anything that doesn’t work or that goes wrong in any country in the world is going to affect poor people much more than others.”
Climate change is an element in all those areas, she says. “It threatens lives, housing, water, food security and supply, and changes in the pattern of diseases. It causes direct deaths, as in heat stress. I do not think anyone can work in any area of health and many other fields without building an awareness of the concern about climate change and the sluggishness with which many countries are addressing that. There is an urgent need to speed up the energy transition. It has to happen now.”