Medicine Anthropology Theory
Not a member yet
559 research outputs found
Sort by
Harm Reduction— And What Keeps Us From Embracing It Fully
No full textIn this Review essay, we examine some of the latest and needed scholarship on harm reduction: Travis Lupick’s Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction (2018); Jarrett Zigon’s A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community (2019); Kimberly Sue’s Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis (2019); and Nancy Campbell’s OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (2020). Our authors present us with intimate windows into a diverse array of geographies, peoples, and technologies—from women’s jails, prisons, and community treatment programmes in Massachusetts to Vancouver’s downtown; from Copenhagen’s safe injection sites to prisons in Scotland. While varied in methods and approaches, these works unequivocally push for alternative imaginings to what one of Campbell’s protagonists dubs the ‘North American disaster’. Harm reduction is front and centre to these authors’ envisioning of a kinder, more loving, and more accepting future. Embracing harm reduction both requires and initiates a radical rethinking of how drug use is viewed, and our authors have given us crucial insight and analyses into how such reorientations are possible. We encourage continued scholarship on this topic, especially on non-Western options. 
Paper Patients: When Documents Stand in for Patients
No full textThis article analyses a seemingly mundane feature of a mental health centre for immigrants and refugees in Paris: the documents used by budding therapists undertaking their apprenticeships. Supervisors developed these documents in order to train therapist apprentices to learn the explanatory models of patients, identify the voice of patients, and incorporate medical anthropology into their therapeutic practice. The documents were central to the experiences of therapist apprentices because they occupied most of their time and were a substitute for supervision and patient contact. Documents disciplined the speech of therapist apprentices and focused their attention on specific aspects of patients’ histories. Therapist apprentices found these documents and documentary practices to be problematic because they reduced patients’ complex migration and medical histories to a series of tick boxes and short answers. These documents generated new forms of uncertainty among therapist apprentices about how to present clinical information about patients to their supervisors. This article is part of a larger study that considers mental health services for immigrants and refugees as communities of practice in which therapist apprentices learned to develop clinical and caring skills for vulnerable patient populations. By drawing on and contributing to scholarship on apprenticeship, uncertainty, documents, and bureaucracy, this article demonstrates how bureaucratic processes and documentary artefacts may generate unnecessary forms of uncertainty and hinder participation in communities of practice
Anthropological Engagements with Global Health
No full textEpidemic infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, Ebola, and more recently COVID-19, have persistent and devastating impacts in human populations across the globe. In this Review essay, we consider together the monographs Epidemic Illusions (Richardson 2021) and Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds (Farmer 2020), as well as the documentary film Bending the Arc (Davidson and Kos 2017), Together, they demonstrate the history of transnational colonialism, the significance of structural violence as a contributor to global health inequity, and the increasing presence of co-occurring epidemics worldwide, topics which are often absent from discussions of global health systems. These three works discuss epidemics as pathologies of history and sociocultural patterns of colonial dispossession in global health systems; the inclusion of patient narratives in two of them, the film Bending the Arc and the book Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds, is pivotal in describing the intricacies of HIV infection and other infectious diseases, as well as the complexity of gaining control of syndemic diseases. Further, these three materials point to the importance of health education in communities and of access to healthcare by community members, and to the roles that health education and access play in health policy implementation
‘Something is Not Okay’: Bodily Expressions of Grief for Street-Involved Youth
No full textThe experiences of grieving among street-involved youth are both highly visible and invisible. Their actions of living outside, engaging in money-making by approaching passersby, trading in and using drugs and alcohol, or simply hanging around in public spaces make them exposed and visible to the public. Yet, the stories that brought youth to the street and the scope of the losses they have sustained are hidden. Henry Giroux (2006, 175) describes the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as the new ‘biopolitics of disposability’ in that poor and racialised groups ‘not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life’s tragedies but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society’. This Photo Essay makes visible the bodily expressions of grief from participants in my doctoral research, Grieving Online, to create understanding into the profound losses and ways in which they cope
Making Apprenticeship Training Visible
No full textCommentary to the special issue \u27Therapeutic Apprenticeship: Uncovering Truth and Performing Responsibility\u27 by Rachel Prentice
The Politics of Breathing Troubles in COVID-19: Pandemic Inequalities and the Right to Breathe across India and Germany
No full text‘Breathing trouble’ refers both to a biopolitical process and a metaphor for the current global condition. This Position Piece draws inspiration from the ‘universal right to breathe’ frame suggested by Joseph-Achille Mbembe (2021a) to discuss pandemic inequalities in Kolkata (India) from a location in the global north, Berlin (Germany), where the author currently lives and works. Drawing from the circumstances surrounding the interruption of my fieldwork in urban India, I argue how the border-crossing pandemic and the choking politics of the ruling governments in India and Germany are entangled in the production of pandemic inequalities. The coeval discussions of lived experiences and political grievances ‘there’ (India/Kolkata) and the critical questioning of the image of India from ‘here’ (Germany/Berlin) invite an understanding of breathing beyond its purely biological function to what we have in common, as the universal right to breathe. Such framing may help anthropologists to reattune to spatial, temporal, and ethical dimensions of excess empirical events in the constantly changing yet simultaneous pandemic realities
Accounting for Complexity: Thinking With Idealisations, Models, and Data
No full textWhat does it mean to call something complex? This Review essay describes three recent books which take up complex problems and the problem of complexity: philosopher Angela Potochnik’s Idealization and the Aims of Science (2017); science and technology studies (STS) scholar Nicole Nelson’s Model Behavior: Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders (2018); and historian of science Bruno Strasser’s Collecting Experiments: Making Big Data Biology (2019). Taken together, these works lay out a refreshed analytic vocabulary and set of guiding concerns for thinking about what complexity is and does in medical research, and how complexity mediates public participation in science and medicine
Social Distancing, Interaction, and (Un)crowded Public Space in Mass Transit in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
No full textVietnam’s national response to the COVID-19 pandemic is informed by its past experiences of fighting endemic disease. This response involves an emerging biosocial paradigm of long-term adaptation to living with the co-presence of viral infections. Moving beyond traditional anthropological work, this article issues an invitation to (re)think crowds and COVID-19. I offer a path forward by engaging in an interdisciplinary dialogue, drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources to understand this unfolding problematic. Through the lens of its public transport service Saigon Bus and environmental protests, I examine how the 2020–21 ‘pandemic season’ (mùa dịch) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest city, has transformed consciousness about crowds, ways of being in (un)crowded public spaces, and the regulation of networked public space. In doing so, this article explores existing and emerging shifts in policymaking and transformations of urban Vietnamese social relations, in the context of the emerging biosocial paradigm. The article contributes to medical anthropology by analysing the impact of pandemic prevention policies on the transformation of crowds—from being viewed as anti-state assemblies requiring social control into a form of pro-state participatory citizenship, exemplified by public engagement with networked activist communities in a ‘more-than-human’ world
Therapeutic Apprenticeship: Uncovering Truth and Performing Responsibility
No full textIntroduction to the special issue \u27Therapeutic Apprenticeship: Uncovering Truth and Performing Responsibility\u27, guest edited by David Ansari and Amy Cooper
Escaping the Clinic: Exposure as Care among Military Medical Professionals at War
No full textThis article examines exposure in the mobile reach of care in war in order to theorise exposure as care. It does so from the margins, focusing on US military medical professionals of the officer class in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who feel distanced from the ‘real’ war experience represented by the infantry soldier, and thus engage in practices of exposure to gain the ‘trust’ and ‘respect’ of their soldier-patients. To grasp something of the promise and perils of exposure and its everyday enactments, I analyse one army physician assistant’s accounts of secretly stealing away on combat missions and the use of an ambulation tool called ‘the walkabout’ by the military mental healthcare community. The material, operational, and tactical settings of counterinsurgency and the professional cultures of military care occupations dynamically intersect to engender specific contexts for, opportunities within, and risks associated with exposure among military elite. An examination of exposure reveals that military medical professionals recast the hegemonic authority of proximity to soldiering in terms of the ethical norms and professional values of medicine: in a word, as care