2015/01/01 by Kate Nialla Fayers-Kerr, Fayers-Kerr, Kate Nialla
Arts and Humanities · #Fashion and Cultural Textiles #Visual Culture and Art Theory
paper · doi:10.5287/ora-jxqooqb5b
openalex publication_date 2015/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
During my undergraduate degree in Archaeology and Anthropology, I took an option paper in Medical Anthropology. Later, while I was excavating in Sudan and then working for an NGO in South Africa, I often recalled aspects of the medical anthropology course. I decided to return to Oxford in 2007 to begin the MSc in Medical Anthropology. My travels in Sudan inspired me to write my MSc dissertation on the healing qualities of Nuba body painting. Based on this project I received an AHRC grant, and I began my DPhil. My thesis, entitled ‘Beyond the Social Skin: Healing Arts and Sacred Clays among the Mun (Mursi) of Southwest Ethiopia', is a unique medical ethnography of body painting. Medical anthropology not only caused me to ask if body painting was medicinal, it also provided me with the theoretical background to explain how it has become the keystone of local Mun medical culture.