Jason Pribilsky ’93: Infinite Cultural Complexities of Community Engagement

Name: Jason Pribilsky

Class Year: 1993

Current Role: Professor of Anthropology, Whitman College

Jason and I spoke in his Maxey office late last week as students were turning in final assignments in the rooms all around us. We reflected on the year and gazed out his window at a perfect early-May Walla Walla afternoon.

How are you involved in the community?

It starts with being a product of what I call “Old Walla Walla”—I have family here for three generations. Of course, I moved away, from about when I left high school until 2003 when I came back here to start teaching at Whitman. Most of my community involvement has stemmed from my training as a medical anthropologist and a work background in public health. Over the years, I have worked a lot with the Cancer Center at St. Mary’s and then with Blue Mountain Heart to Heart, which I’ve been involved with since almost right after I returned, starting as a volunteer running groceries for clients and such, and now on the agency’s board on and off for almost a decade. A lot of my local connections have been through the courses I’ve taught that have a public health background to them—like with Medical Anthropology. I connected with lots of different practitioners in town, linking up what I teach in reproductive health, with the OBGYNs at St. Mary’s and also with midwives and doulas and other practitioners, and mapping that sector and making that legible to students.

A lot of my work was thinking about cancer in part because of my own bout and dealing with a rural cancer center and challenges that came from that, which led me to create a course on this—Anthropologies of Cancer. It had a big community-based component to it. What I didn’t realize in that class was that every student was somehow touched by cancer, and some students even enrolled specifically because of a personal connection. The class got students to think about their own family members’ care in the context of being here in Walla Walla. That class always had a research component—students developed surveys for early detection of cervical cancer within the Latinx population. One year, we did a caregiver survey for the Cancer Center. Then one year that course moved out of Walla Walla and worked more regionally with Downwinders both near Hanford and also nationally—people who traced their illnesses back to Hanford’s early history. That class brought me into so many different realms. That was powerful for students. They realized that they imagined oncology was all about being a high-tech medical practice but they didn’t understand how much cancer care is affected by how it’s provided to people. One of the class activities the students got to do was sit in on the chart reviews every week and be flies on the wall listening to the medical and care teams talk through some of their most difficult cases. The students realized that oncology has to think about a lot of important and relevant aspects, like how you bring someone from Umatilla County to Walla Walla for treatment and, “Where are they going to stay?” and “Who is going to take care of their animals?” The students really saw the challenges of this place.  

What is something you’ve learned about this area that surprised you or that you weren’t expecting?

When I started teaching at Whitman my whole focus was South America—Ecuador and Peru, specifically. Every time I had a break, I went there. But I knew I had to think of something closer to us. Soon after moving here around ’03, one of the industries that left this area was the extensive processing and canning of asparagus in the little communities surrounding Walla Walla. I realized that that was in part because of U.S. drug policy in Peru where the U.S. government paid farmers in Peru to stop growing coca and instead plant asparagus—a deal which brought Walla Walla and my research sites together in a surprising way!

How do skills you learned at Whitman help you today?

I did my undergraduate thesis here on a Pentecostal church that was in town at that time. (Pentecostals are a religious community that often practice tongue speaking). I was a Religion minor and was interested in the Second Great Awakening, which is what spurred the development of Pentecostalism. So, without really knowing anything about these churches, I decided to do fieldwork. And I was completely floored by the experiences I had in that congregation. I walked away thinking that I couldn’t really do anthropology. How could I come in with my outsider academic privilege and do a “case study” of people with such a seemingly unusual way of practicing their faith? It was hard for me to reconcile this. I almost jumped ship and left that path. I learned that going into a community requires a certain level of knowing your stuff—knowing the setting and context you’re going into. People may talk about “rural simplicity” but the reality is that we live in an incredibly complex place. Also, I learned—and I tell my students this now—once you start doing research in Walla Walla you’re going to run into those people again. You better be ready for that! That was exactly the case for me doing my project focusing on this church. I remember after going to a Pentecostal service the next day I was picking up a prescription at a local drugstore and the woman at the counter was one of the congregants I had just “studied” the day before! Yesterday, I saw her possessed by the Holy Spirit and today I’m seeing her in Tallman’s. As a student, I didn’t know how to talk with her. What kind of confidentiality is relevant to that situation? I share that to show these complex aspects of research. There are all these informal ethics that the IRB process doesn’t really help us with. I tell this to students to get them to: 1) develop a sense of humility; and 2) understand the surprises of doing field work once they leave campus—even if they are a few blocks away.

What is a way that Walla Walla is diverse?

There are many ways! Growing up here I always knew it as a pretty diverse place. My ears would always perk up when there was something in one of my school classes about diversity. In middle school, many of my friends were Mexican from a handful of families who always seemed related to each other. I gained a lot from that as a diverse experience. I also got to know a lot of kids whose parents were coming into town for itinerant work with the farms and they were here for a little while and then they’d move on. I think, from an early age, I sort of gravitated toward people who didn’t fit the white Walla Walla stereotype.

I sometimes describe Walla Walla as “a poor town with a patina of Syrah on top of it.” For instance, the Penitentiary is one of the five largest employers here, but the “face” of the town is the wine industry. I think that juxtaposition is super interesting and that also brings a lot of diversity into town. For me, I can think about how the town has become more diverse ethnically since I was a kid, but I find most fascinating the socioeconomic diversity here. If you take any of our census tracks and look at the range of incomes within them—just within a very short distance from campus—the most expensive houses are right next to some of the lowest income residents. I think we think about that with the contrast between town and the wine industry (which it used to be Whitman!). I think it’s amazingly diverse that way. Something I really came to understand after living in larger cities that are hyper-divided by class. Here it’s just a reality that you have folks together from a wide range of class statuses all in the same place.

What is your favorite thing about springtime in Walla Walla?

Definitely the length of spring. Having spent a decade in the East, I came to know spring as feeling like being about two weeks long, and then a jolt into a hot and sticky humid summer after that. Here, it’s the slow unfolding of the season that I really love. Sometimes I think that spring here is so long that it almost has distinct stages, like mini-springs. It’s fantastic.

Beyond the interview:

Jason Pribilsky ’93 will be available for questions and further conversation this Wednesday, May 14, at noon in Reid Campus Center, Room 207. The Career and Community Engagement Center will provide lunch for the first 10 students in attendance. Questions or ideas or accommodation requests? Email Noah Leavitt at leavitns@whitman.edu.