User:Rehansen/sandbox

Priscilla Alden Copeland Reining (March 11, 1923 – July 19, 2007) was a noted applied anthropologist, who died in her home, aged 84, from complications due to lung cancer Thursday July 19, 2007. She was most remembered for her extensive work with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, especially on the African Continent. Priscilla Reining was the recipient of three anthropological degrees, all three from the University of Chicago. Reining’s field of specialization was centered mainly on the sub-Saharan region of Africa; she worked for several years with the Haya people located in Tanzania in the early 1950’s becoming one of the uppermost authorities on the village life of sub-Saharan peoples. One of her more notable studies was that of the Haya Land Tenure:

“We have examined the two forms of landholding and tenancy in the Haya system of land tenure. Although they co-exist, they have different bases, the one as an aspect of the traditional structure and the other as an aspect of the structure developing at the time of the study. The significance of each derives from the particular characteristics of Haya land which is valuable but limited in quantity. In the traditional structure, the land formed the base or medium through which the institution of clientship was expressed and some land is still held under this form of tenure. In the developing structure, the pressure on the land makes for heterogeneous arrangements, here considered under the rubric of the relatively new form of tenure.”

“She even helped capture and kill a leopard threatening a Haya settlement”. Although it was her work in the region around the 1980’s that really brought her recognition within the anthropology community. Another of Reining’s noteworthy achievements was her implication and pioneering of the Landsat imagery technology in the field of anthropology and other social sciences.

Fighting HIV/AIDS in Africa
During the 1980’s while on a visit to Tanzania, it became readily apparent to Reining that the people she had been studying, the Haya, were getting sick and the mortality rate within the region was becoming alarmingly high. This was the AIDS pandemic, she then devoted a great amount of time towards helping contain and working towards prevention and a cure for the epidemic that swept Africa during those years and still persists today.

She began to research into causes and prevention methods of the disease in order to help the people whom she had studied for so long. What she found was an interesting discovery. “At a conference in 1988, she learned of an apparent connection between circumcision and the transmission of the AIDS virus. For some reason, uncircumcised men in Kenya had a much higher risk of being infected”. With this new hypothesis Reining began to see cultural fluctuations in different groups, these were communal groups who did not practice circumcision, compared to the neighboring groups who ritually practiced the act of male circumcision. What she found was there was a “correlation between lack of circumcision among some ethnic groups in Africa and increased susceptibility to HIV/AIDS”. As a result of her extensive research into peoples of the region and Reining’s years of immersion in the cultures of surrounding groups she was able to make the connection that the rate of HIV/AIDS was higher in groups that had a cultural aversion to male circumcision. Her work was never officially validated until shortly before she passed away, although “more than 60 studies over the years supported her findings”.

Lack of Validation & International aid
The struggle to validate the theory of male circumcision and its connection to HIV/AIDS infection was a constant one, “In the middle 1990’s a husband and wife team, John and Pat Caldwell, mapped the progress of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. In elegant colour maps, published in the scientific American, they confirmed the work of Reining showing that regions of Africa with highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS coincided with areas where the greatest numbers of males were uncircumcised.”.

Individuals like the Caldwells and Reining were curious as to why after more than a decade of research that there was a lack of international support/action “after ten years of convincing evidence from multiple sources that circumcision protects against HIV infection”,ref name+"schoen"/>. International help was not provided even though there were other cases which yielded similar results. “And it is not Africa alone that the link between HIV and male circumcision has been shown. There is a growing epidemic in Asia as well. A United Nations study (UNAIDS) looked at the varying prevalence of HIV in different regions of South and Southeast Asia and found similar results as in Africa.”

Use of Landsat Technology
Reining’s work and breakthroughs in the field of HIV/AIDS research and prevention is not the only noteworthy act she conducted in her lifetime spent as an applied anthropologist. Reining is also responsible for pioneering the use of satellite imagery for social science research, demonstrating in 1973 that Landsat imagery could be combined with field data on villages to produce population and carrying capacity estimates for the Sahel (the arid belt between the Sahara and tropical Africa). “The technology was crude by today’s standards and Reining had to confirm the identifications by fieldwork”

The introduction of Landsat imagery to the field of social science was, at first, slow due to the fear of satellites replacing researchers in the field, this idea was short lived although and the technology grew and was incorporated into the fields of anthropology and archaeology among other social sciences This method is still used today, for studying village patterns as well as making the finding and mapping locations of archaeological sites easier. Reining used this technique to help map the HIV/AIDS occurrences in the region where she worked and it was one of the aspects that contributed to her findings involving male circumcision.

“In addition to her knowledge of African life, Reining was an expert on mapping and had used satellite imagery to study settlement patterns and environmental change. Putting her two specialties together, she drew up a map of Africa and identified 409 distinct ethnic groups according to their circumcision practices. She then compared it with map showing the rates of HIV infection and found a near-perfect match. In a 1989 study published in Current Science with three co-authors, Reining spelled out the unmistakable correlation: Uncircumcised African men were 86 percent more likely to get the AIDS virus than those who had been circumcised. Her findings held true across different regions, ethnic groups and religious faiths in Africa."

Other Achievements
“She authored or co-authored over fifty publications”. During a Sudanese uprising in 1955, Reining and her family fled the country having “led a whole convoy of people”.