Gabriela Morales,

• Ph.D., Anthropology, Yale University (2017)
• M.Phil., Anthropology, Yale University (2013)
• B.A., Anthropology and English, University of Arizona (2010)

Research interests: care; the body; the state; medicine and colonialism; health policies and institutions; indigeneity and race; occupational and environmental health; Bolivia; Latin America

Working at the intersections of medical and political anthropology, I write about health institutions and projects to transform health care provision in highland Bolivia. A central concern in my work is how institutional projects to improve care unfold amid enduring dynamics of colonial and capitalist extraction. I analyze the contradictions of care provision in biomedicine and public health, particularly as harm and help, sickness and cure, become bound up with one another.

My scholarship traces these questions in different ways across two main projects. My first book, Decolonizing Medicine: Indigenous Politics and the Practice of Care in Bolivia (forthcoming in May 2025 with Stanford University Press), examines state-led efforts to decolonize the health care system during Evo Morales’s presidency in Bolivia. Through a fine-grained ethnography of health policymaking and implementation, I highlight how reforms focused on warm care and cultural inclusion as the basis for transformation ultimately extended longstanding colonial modes of intervention.

I have also begun research on a second book project, tentatively titled, Afterlives of Mining: Chronicity and Labor in the Bolivian Andes, that traces the historical relationship between mining and shifting approaches to environmental and occupational health in Bolivia. Focusing on the decay of hospitals and other social services once attached to mining centers, I consider how miners navigate care in a context where illnesses endure even when institutions do not.

• Core II: Good Intentions
• History of Anthropological Theory
• Introduction to Socio-Cultural Anthropology
• Medical Anthropology
• Science, Medicine, and Colonialism
• State and Society in Latin America

Books

n.d. Decolonizing Medicine: Indigenous Politics and the Practice of Care in Bolivia. Forthcoming in May 2025 with Stanford University Press.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

2018 “There is No Place Like Home: Imitation and the Politics of Recognition in Bolivian Obstetric Care.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 32: 404-424. DOI:10.1111/maq.12427

• Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund, The Reed Foundation (2020)
• Graves Award in the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies (2020)
• Mary W. Johnson Faculty Achievement Award in Teaching, Scripps College (2020)
• Sabbatical Research Fellowship, Scripps College (2020)
• Faculty Research Grant, Scripps College (2020)
• Oshita Fund for Emerging Needs, Scripps College (2019)
• Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, National Science Foundation (2014)