Emily Martin (anthropologist) facts for kids

Emily Martin (born 1944) is a sinologist, anthropologist, and feminist. Currently, she is a professor of socio-cultural anthropology at New York University. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and her PhD degree from Cornell University in 1971. Before 1984, she published works under the name of Emily Martin Ahern.

Career

After earning a Ph.D. in anthropology, Martin was on the faculty of the University of California, Irvine and Yale University. In 1974, she joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University; she was the Mary Elizabeth Garrett Professor of Arts and Sciences there between 1981 and 1994. She was a professor at Princeton University from 1994 to 2001 and then became a professor at New York University. In 2019, she was awarded the prestigious Vega Medal by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in recognition of her signal contributions to anthropology. In the same year she was also awarded the J.D. Bernal Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science.

Sinology

Martin's work on sinology focused on topics both in Mainland China and Taiwan. These topics included Chinese religion and rituals, architecture, politics, traditional Chinese medicine, Chinese women's culture, Chinese rural culture, Chinese lineages and genealogies, etc.

Anthropology of science and feminism

Martin focuses the anthropology of science and analyzes science from a feminist perspective. Her work includes detailed analysis on human reproduction and related things. From her feminist perspective, Martin argues that current scientific literature is gender-biased, and that such bias has become entrenched in our language.

Martin began researching the analogies used in science education starting in 1982. Pregnant with her second child, Martin noticed a pattern in her expecting parents' class how the woman's body and its parts were described and referred to "as if these things weren't a part of us." Martin began with interviews with women regarding their perspective on female reproductive issues and compiled her research of interviews into a book called The Woman in the Body (1987). Martin began to expand on her research by interviewing scientists and including the topic of male reproductive processes.

Martin's analysis yields four main lessons: 1. We think we know a lot because of science in this age, but the truth is, the way we interpret science is sexist and it actually makes us ignorant (even worse, we are unaware of our ignorance for the most of the part). 2. Such gender bias reinforces gender inequality and continues to keep our traditional misogyny alive. 3. We have to realize our mistakes and strive to achieve a new understanding with total fairness. 4. We must ensure we will not pass the mistakes to the future generations, since they are really harmful for human understanding as well as gender relations.

Bipolar disorder

Martin drew on her own experience with bipolar disorder to write Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture. In it, she argues that mania and depression have a cultural life outside the confines of psychiatry and that the extravagances of mood which might be dubbed 'irrational' are also present in the most 'rational' side of American life (for example, economics and the stock market.)

Books

• The Woman in the Body (1987)