Carol Laderman

Carol Laderman (October 25, 1932 – July 6, 2010) was a groundbreaking medical anthropologist, specializing in the study of pregnancy and childbirth practices, shamanism, and Southeast Asian cultures, particularly Malays in rural Terengganu, Malaysia. She was also a critically acclaimed writer and a longtime professor and lecturer who had just been re-elevated to the Chairmanship of the Department of Anthropology at City College at the time of her death. and was thereby introduced to the humoral system as a fundamental aspect of a living belief system, rather than as just an ancient theory of Galen and others. This experience would prove to be important to her future research in Malaysia. She explained the practical applications of the humoral system as applied to foods in a New York Times article, for which she was interviewed:

"Scotch on the rocks[...]would be considered very hot, while squash, even taken boiling from the stove, would be cold."

Ms. Laderman graduated from Hunter College with honors in 1972 and was shortly thereafter awarded a Danforth Foundation fellowship, which enabled her to do graduate work at Columbia University. - which is still a much-cited article today.

Malaysia

In 1975, Ms. Laderman, her husband and her younger son, Michael (b. 1965), went to Malaysia, where she would do doctoral research for the following two years in the coastal village of Merchang, Terengganu, on the East Coast of the Malay Peninsula. She was apprenticed to a locally-famous bomoh and a traditional village midwife. The doctoral dissertation that resulted from her research, "Conceptions and Preconceptions: Childbirth and Nutrition in Rural Malaysia" - for which she received a Ph.D. with distinction helped correct many assumptions previously made by anthropologists and other writers about Malay culture. For example, through rigorous dietary analysis and blood testing, she was able to demonstrate that traditional dietary restrictions practiced by some Malay women during pregnancy and for 40 days after childbirth were not causing malnutrition, as had previously been claimed. as opposed to the specific local meaning of "vegetables [cooked] with coconut cream, chilis, and fish." Asking Malays from Terengganu and Kelantan how much "sayur" they eat would have produced misleading answers, if the questioner was trying to discover how often they ate vegetables in any form.

A subsequent book, "Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance," includes the first complete - and copiously annotated - translations of entire Main Peteri healing ceremonies, and constitutes the first instance of anthropological research which demonstrates the existence of a non-Western system of nonprojective psychotherapy. Within the book are explanations of the traditional Malay archetypes of personality called "angin" (="winds"), which Laderman analogizes to Jungian archetypes. In a monograph of the Federation Museums Journal of Malaysia, the original texts, in dialect/ritual Malay, were published.

Laderman returned to Malaysia to do further research in 1982 and 2003.

Academic career

Dr. Laderman had a long career as a professor, lecturer, editor, and reviewer, as well as a writer. Among the institutions she was associated with were Yale University, Hunter College, and Brooklyn College, but most of all, Fordham University and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her archive is preserved at the Smithsonian Institution.