Maria Tapias earned her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and has been teaching at Grinnell since 2001. Her research interests include women's and infants' health, the anthropology of emotions, the impacts of neoliberalism on health, international migration, transnationalism and Latin American Studies. She has been conducting fieldwork in Bolivia since 1996 and among Bolivians in Spain since 2006. Her research has been published in journals such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Body and Society, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Her book, "Embodied Protests: Emotions, Sociality and the Search for Tranquility in Bolivia," is under contract with the University of Illinois Press.
Selected Publications:
Maria Tapias and Xavier Escandell ‘Not in the Eyes of the Beholder: Envy Among Bolivian Migrants in Spain’, International Migration. International Migration 49(6):74-94 2011.
Xavier Escandell and Maria Tapias ‘Transnational Lives and Idioms of Distress among Bolivian Migrants in Spain.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 407-423. 2010.
Maria Tapias ‘Always ready and always clean’?: Competing discourses of breast-feeding, infant illness and the politics of mother-blame in Bolivia’, Body and Society,12: 83-108.2006.
Maria Tapias ‘Emotions and the intergenerational embodiment of social suffering in rural Bolivia’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 20(3): 399-415. 2006
