anthropology – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise & the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

By Scott J. Pearson | February 10, 2026February 10, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Organizational silos occur when groups of people in the same organization do not rely on each others’ insights because of various cultural reasons. While the division of labor that silos create is essential for any business, silos can inhibit an organization’s creativity and innovation. They have been weak points in or even downfalls of many great business empires. Through case studies across many organizations and industries, anthropologist Gillian Tett describes negative results silos can create…

Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction

By Scott J. Pearson | February 1, 2026February 1, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Global health is a field known, in the past, as international health and colonial health. It has recently sought to center itself around health equity – that every person deserves decent healthcare to have a decent life. Thus, it has tried to remove any shackles of Western imperialism from its conceptualization. Also recently, Paul Farmer and Partners in Health have brought attention to the field, especially in Haiti and Rwanda. A large braintrust centered around…

Healthcare Society

The Spirit Catches You & You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors & the Collision of Two Cultures

By Scott J. Pearson | April 23, 2024April 23, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

In the 1980s, a young Hmong child – whose people fought for the Americans during the Vietnam War – had epilepsy after her parents were relocated to California as refugees. Tragically, her parents never adapted to the American medical system, and equally tragically, the American medical system never adapted to them either. The child Lia Lee’s case resulted in a negative outcome, and the Lee family’s difficulty appears utterly humane upon further investigation. In this…

Humanities Psychology

Recovery’s Edge: An Ethnography of Mental Health Care and Moral Agency

By Scott J. Pearson | June 29, 2020June 29, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

The American mental health system is one without much hope, without much money, and without much publicity. In this academic exploration, Myers seeks to bring a clear lens of careful observation to the situation. Often, exposure to the system makes observers disillusioned and hopeless. To that narrative, she provides a counter-narrative based on first-hand experience and research. All in all, she succeeds in her attempt. She spends an extended period of time investigating mental health…

Religion-Philosophy Society

Christianity and Culture by TS Eliot

By Scott J. Pearson | January 18, 2020January 18, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

I first read these essays while a senior at college. Now, about twenty years later, I reread them in a study on the English poet TS Eliot. Eliot uses language very carefully, as any poet should, but he is a poet approaching the world of an anthropologist. Further, he writes in an era (pre- and post-World-War-II) in which European culture was pulled apart at the seams and remade again. Eliot himself is an American transplant…