Mark Dyreson, the 2022 recipient of the Pauline Schmitt Russell Distinguished Research Achievement Award, will present "The Curious Case of the Rarámuri Foot-Runners: Unlikely Avatars of Modern Health and Wellness."
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, a little-understood Indigenous culture from a remote area in northwestern Mexico has regularly appeared and reappeared in modern visions of health and wellness. Their exercise regimens and nutritional habits have been touted as remedies for inoculating modern populations against the scourges of urban-industrial civilizations, from heart disease and hypertension to cancer and diabetes to depression and anxiety. Curiously, these avatars of wellness are from other measures one of the least healthy populations in the Western Hemisphere, suffering from persistent malnutrition and endemic diseases and bearing one of the highest rates of childhood mortality in the world.