Medicine Anthropology Theory
Not a member yet
559 research outputs found
Sort by
‘In the Meantime’: Ordinary Life in Continuous Medical Testing for Lung Cancer
No full textBased on ethnographic fieldwork among Danes undergoing CT scans as part of follow-up testing for potential lung cancer, we explore how access to technologies generates diagnostic uncertainty and trends of continuous testing. Our research is set in the context of a welfare state that has cultivated forms of government whose public health branches focus on early diagnosis and cancer control. Many studies on biotechnologies emphasise subject-making and power relations. Inspired by the work of Veena Das, we adopt an approach that focuses on the entanglement of diagnostic investigations with everyday life. We argue that being followed establishes a mode of being which we call ‘in the meantime’. Life in the meantime is equally characterised by a dramatic mode of being—that is, waiting for death—and an ambiguous mode of being: feeling quite well. As with any life crisis, it involves some sense of agency. We show in this paper how life in the meantime informs an ordinary ethics that encourages three ethical concerns in everyday life: firstly, how to inhabit life in the meantime? Secondly, what good is the testing for? And finally, what is a good death
The Grammar of Leprosy: Temporal Politics and the Impossible Subject
No full textThis research article critically interrogates the implications and unintended consequences of the World Health Organization’s purported elimination of leprosy as a public health problem. I explore how leprosy has been portrayed (for nearly a century) as something from the past, recalcitrantly lingering on into the present, but surely about to be gone—a temporal framing I call the ‘grammar of leprosy’. I recount the experiences of Daniel, my interlocutor in Tanzania, whose existence became a problem for his doctors. This problem they ultimately resolved by fabricating negative test results in order to record what they already knew: leprosy had been eliminated. I also analyse how researchers working for Novartis (the supplier of leprosy’s cure) continue to push for an always imminent ‘elimination’, while field researchers repeatedly caution about the potential problems of this approach. Finally, I reveal how the grammar of leprosy operates through a complex set of temporal politics, pulling into its orbit and being enabled by multiple interwoven temporalities. I conclude that—due to this grammar, the impossible subjects it produces, and the temporal politics through which it operates—leprosy elimination campaigns may have dire consequences for the lives of people with leprosy today, impeding rather than enabling treatment
Out of Compassion or Out of Rights? A Story about an Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Human Clinical Trial
No full textThis article examines the intersection of compassion and rights, and how the two concepts are constituted and wielded in the context of human clinical trials. Doron, an ALS patient who was recruited to a clinical trial, believed that he had the right to post-trial treatment according to the wording of an informed consent form he signed before joining the trial. However, the biotech company sponsoring the trial instead offered him ‘compassionate use’ access, i.e., access at its discretion rather than as a legal obligation on its part. I argue that under a ‘bioeconomy of value’, the human clinical trial regime has been subordinated to two competing discourses: that of compassion and that of patients’ rights. Both are interpreted and deployed differently by the different stakeholders, namely the patient, the biotech company, and the medical establishment. I argue that the adoption, by bioeconomy actors, of a social value discourse of compassion is designed to preserve a hierarchy that deprives the patient of their power and their rights. Simultaneously, this practice highlights the power of the biotech industry as a moral partner and ‘saviour’ in its relationship with patient organisations and its role as a medical–scientific actor in the Israeli healthcare system
Revealing Truth through Diagnostics: From Disclosure Laws to Clinical Research for Novel Drug Development
No full textThis article examines the changing role of ‘confessional technologies’ (Foucault 1990) over the history of the HIV pandemic, beginning when US public health departments first rolled out testing campaigns and continuing in the present day through the expansion of diagnostic practices to support the development and implementation of pharmaceutical technologies for HIV prevention. Across this decades-long history, diagnostic practices have been shaped by ethical principles, legal mandates, and research priorities, which have compelled the individual who is ‘at risk’ of acquiring HIV to speak about their sexual practices and thus reveal hidden truths about one’s self to an intimate Other (Whitacre 2018). Indeed, public health ethics have long focused on confession as a means for disciplining safe sex and managing pleasure (Race 2007) and relied on these techniques to secure resources for survival (Nguyen 2010). I argue that confessions have recently become a productive means by which to generate evidence about the efficacy of pharmaceuticals. Practices of revealing truth have contributed to clinical evidence for pharmaceutical interventions, including the use of antiretrovirals for oral HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Considering the contemporary use of confessions in enabling the development of drug products and facilitating market growth, I contend that confessing should be understood as a form of labour
Psychopathological fringes: A historical and social science perspective on psychiatry at the fringes of psychopathology
No full textN/
The COVID Horizon: Introduction to the Special Section
No full textPrompted by long-standing realities that have recently erupted during the pandemic and ongoing protests against racial injustice in the US, this Special Section’s essays evolved out of conversations around the theme of the ‘COVID Horizon’. Authored by physician-anthropologists at various stages of their training, the Position Pieces describe vital searches for liveability in domains of emergency response. Moving beyond the walls of the clinical, they track medicine as an institution embedded in and shoring up other institutions linked to human rights, carceral detention, reproductive unfreedoms, and/or pandemic biocontainment—all of which define the scope of democratic freedoms and determine who exactly is afforded said freedoms. Within institutions of deferred or dislocated responsibility, the essays probe tensions between action and abstention, distance and proximity, futility and hope, and containment and freedom with the objective of dismantling forms of ‘démission’ (Fanon 1952) or abdication and locating an actionable ‘otherwise’ allowing for accountability and solidarity. The contributors’ ‘horizoning work’ (Petryna 2018) imagines a different ground from which to anticipate the role of medicine in the 21st century
Autism ‘Super Mums’: Affectivity as a Political Capital in Special Mothering and Autism Advocacy
No full textFrom the refrigerator mother theory to more recent comparisons to ‘warrior-heroes’, mothers of children with autism spectrum disorders have been historically categorised as emotionally remarkable. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in Portugal, I explore in this article how mothers politically mobilise emotions, characteristics, and acts usually associated with good mothering, such as maternal love, dedication, and sacrifice. While these socially expected phenomena have been addressed as instruments of the relegation of women to motherhood and care labour, I propose a novel look at the value of affectivity in discourses and practices of care and advocacy. I argue that mothers strategically embody and employ their affectivity as political capital to validate their role as expert caregivers and advocates, creating new opportunities to access leading positions within the autism advocacy movement
Introduction: Diagnostics, Medical Testing, and Value in Medical Anthropology
No full textIntroduction to the Special Issue on Diagnostics, Medical testing, and Valu
Thinking through the Photo Essay: Observations for Medical Anthropology
No full textAs photography becomes more prevalent in ethnographic research, scholars should more seriously consider the photo essay as a medium for sharing their work. In this Position Piece, we present guidelines for the creation of ethnographic photo essays for medical anthropology that do not simply combine image and text, but create a balance that allows words to provide context for the image(s) and images to reinforce or challenge the text. We feel there are three basic elements every photo essay must consider that are informed by the theory and practice of visual anthropology. While a solid background in visual anthropology is not necessary to produce a successful photo essay, being mindful of these three elements in relation to your work will help you develop a photo essay that combines the best of what both media offer your audience
Density and Danger: Social Distancing as Racialised Population Management
No full textA ubiquitous facet of collective social life in the age of COVID-19, social distancing(that is, the set of practices that aims to reduce the number of people in public spaces and maximise the distance between them) works to suppress viral spread by de-densifying public spaces; it redistributes people who are vectors for the virusby pushing them into their own domestic spaces. While the scale of these manoeuvres is in some ways unprecedented, the toll that the virus and its primary means of mitigation—social distancing—extracts along racial lines is at once unequal and deeply familiar. In this Position Piece, I examine social distancing as de-densification within a larger history of family planning and racialised population management in the context of ongoing fieldwork on the material and affective implications of contraceptive use in the American Midwest. In probing the grammar of social distancing—its distinctions between ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’ workers, services, and spaces and the ways in which such distinctions unequally distribute the labour of de-densification and its impacts on family planning—I elucidate how COVID-19 managements do not simply reveal existing racial disparities, but make them anew at a time when the fabrics of social reproduction are increasingly under strain. The dynamics of social distancing can thus be understood as continuous with ongoing attempts at racialised population management. Such an understanding opens a space for political action foreclosed by a narrow view of social distancing as crisis response