Scarlett Epstein thinks her controversial research on local mores can help ward off Papua New Guinea’s greatest threat. Anne Sebba meets her
In the hallway of Scarlett Epstein’s Brighton flat, there is a splayed panther skin rug complete with head and snarling jaw which dates from her time in the South Indian villages in 1954.
“I shot him,” she says proudly, aware that such an act attracts the wrath of conservationists. But, as she explains, the villagers wanted her to shoot because such animals were seen as dangerous predators killing their sheep and goats, their livelihood.
“You have to understand the local conditions,” she insists. It is the leitmotif that has guided her work.
The 83 year-old is currently Visiting Professor at the Catholic Divine Word University in Papua New Guinea (PNG) working to reduce the Aids infection rate. An HIV/Aids pandemic threatens the country and traditional NGOs seem powerless to ward it off. Professor Epstein has spent the last three months in PNG, training educators at the university, and is preparing to return there next month to set up a research project once she has raised the funds.
Epstein was born Gertrude Gruenwald in 1922 into a poor Viennese Jewish family. “I was thrown out of school aged 14 and a half for being Jewish. It felt as if I was being catapulted into adulthood. But from then on I recognised something about myself – I respond to challenges.”
The challenge she faced from 1938 was how to get herself and her family visas to leave Nazi-occupied Vienna. She did so by dressing up as an Aryan girl, bravely bluffing her way into the Yugoslav Embassy and persuading the suddenly demoted Ambassador to help her in her venture. Months later she got the necessary permissions and the long and tortuous journey to England was underway via Yugoslavia, Albania and Germany.
Epstein decided after helping her parents flee Nazi Austria for England that she needed a new name, one that reflected her determination to work her way up in the world.
“I had just been to see Gone with the Wind with a girlfriend and I identified with Scarlett O’Hara and the way she fought. I, too, wanted to get somewhere and Trude was not the right name for that. Calling myself Scarlett completed my new identity. It gave me strength.”
And Scarlett Epstein – the new surname came with marriage – has certainly had to fight her way through life. She resumed her studies only after the Second World War. By then she was too old to become a surgeon – her dream – but she worked by day at a sewing machine in a sweatshop making ladies’ underwear and attended night school to catch up with her education.
After winning a scholarship to Ruskin College, where she completed a two year diploma in one, she went aged 28 to Manchester to begin a 3 year BSc in Economics. Days before her final exams, however, she was severely burned in an accident when a fire tipped over and her nylon clothes went up in flames. Unable to write, bandaged like a mummy and in excruciating pain, she was given special permission to dictate her exam answers from a hospital bed.
“This was the turning point that decided me to become an academic,” she recalls. “Max Gluckman, the charismatic Professor of Anthropology, was my hospital invigilator and he offered me a postgraduate scholarship in anthropology there and then.”
She went on to have a brilliant academic career and, shortly after her marriage to Dr Bill Epstein, a social anthropologist, went out with him to work at the Australian National University in Canberra studying and living with the PNG local tribe, the Tolai, and learning to speak their language.
She returned to England as a senior lecturer at Salford College of Advanced Technology in 1962 and, in 1972, both she and her husband were offered Professorships at Sussex University. She spent twelve years as a Research Professor at the Institute of Development Studies and became a pioneer in her field, developing new and controversial research method based on a culturally adapted social market research system. She has used this approach to investigate the impact of different belief systems and cultural norms on present day sexual practices in PNG.
“As far as I have been able to establish, such a systematic approach to stemming the Aids tide has not yet been tried anywhere in the world,” she says.
But academics are often contemptuous of her methods. This is partly because she recognises that traditional academic research takes too long and is usually bound within one discipline. Over the years Professor Epstein has been employed as a consultant for myriad aid programmes, Government and Non-governmental organisations including the World Bank, FAO , ILO, Plan International and Care among others – and knows that planners need results in months not years. Another reason for criticism is the way she uses aspects of commercial market research, which can draw upon different disciplines such as economics, anthropology and psychology, to get accurate information from the local population. She believes this is vital in framing a policy that will really work in the fight against HIV/Aids in a community where people believe that someone died not from Aids but from sorcery or witchcraft.
“If they believe that the illness is a result of a spell, against which they cannot protect themselves, what is the point of suggesting they use a condom? You need to understand that before you can make a carefully constructed answer which will persuade them to act differently,” she explains. Another difficulty is that promiscuity is a cultural norm in PNG, a hangover from a time when it was a response to a time of high infant mortality. Today the solution lingers on even though the original problem has disappeared.
One of Epstein’s weapons in the battle against HIV/Aids is a monthly column called “Scarlett’s Letter” in The National, a PNG English-language newspaper. In a recent column she urged the introduction of a National Brown Ribbon Day to protest against violence against women. She pointed out how some men in Port Moresby regard HIV/Aids as a problem primarily for women because a recent awareness raising poster campaign pictured women and children only. “The men have got to be put in the picture and not just literally,” she says.
Epstein has been helped considerably by the attitudes of senior staff at the Divine Word University. While sensitive to orthodox Catholic teaching, which does not believe in the use of condoms, in a country that has a significant Catholic population, Professor Epstein is full of praise for a Franciscan Priest at the University who maintains “God wants you to survive and, if that means using condoms, people must learn how to survive.”
In her eighties, Epstein still burns with energy and ambition making daily visits to the gym when in England. She is involved in making a documentary called ‘Back to the Village’ whose message is that you cannot impose solutions on a community top down from the heights of the academic establishment. “You must try to see the world through the eyes of the people you are trying to help and appreciate their aspirations. Many academics have failed to do that.”
She says what motivates her is not religious faith – “I never believed in God – but a deep-seated desire to help the poor and disadvantaged because I can never forget that I too was poor and disadvantaged.”
Technically speaking, Scarlett Epstein herself is not a ‘survivor’ – a term applied to those refugees who survived the camps. However, since arriving in England she survived a broken wartime marriage, several miscarriages – she now has two daughters and four grandchildren – breast cancer and finally cervical cancer in 1991. It was after the latter, when the surgeon gave her only a one in three chance of survival, that she decided to write her autobiography, published last year, called “Swimming Upstream.”
“I wanted to write this book to give other women in my situation courage. I wanted to show girls like the ones I machined with that they did not have to spend the rest of their lives doing that. You can get out.”
Swimming Upstream by T Scarlett Epstein (Vallentine Mitchell isbn 08503 607 1)