Medicine Anthropology Theory
Not a member yet
559 research outputs found
Sort by
Protecting life, facilitating death: The bureaucratic experience of organized assisted suicide
Get PDFThe process of organized assisted suicide (OAS), permitted in Switzerland under specific circumstances, requires applicants to produce and circulate an array of medico-legal documents. Obtaining these documents involves stressful interactions with family doctors, turning the bureaucratic experience into a very personal, and rather intimate, form of sociality. In this Think Piece, I suggest that by following how such documents are produced and circulated, we can better understand how OAS reveals an underlying tension between two figurations of life. Normatively, life is seen as a source of value that needs to be protected and preserved, but OAS statutes acknowledge that some individual lives require professional assistance to die. While legal protections are set up in order to protect life from OAS, these same protections are responded to via the establishment of a bureaucratic infrastructure that facilitates death. In this sense, medico-legal documents not only expose a tension between life and lives, but also enable the navigation of a bureaucracy that facilitates death within a legal framework designed to protect life
Thinking through complex webs of potency: Early Tibetan medical responses to the emerging coronavirus epidemic: Notes from a field visit to Dharamsala, India
Get PDFThe epidemic of COVID-19 caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been in the headlines since December 2019. This Think Piece presents ethnographic vignettes from a recent (February 2020) field visit to Dharamsala, where the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and a Tibetan exile community reside in the northwestern Indian Himalayas. At that time there were no COVID-19 cases in India except in Kerala, South India, which had three confirmed cases. There were no cases in Tibetan communities in India, but they were considered vulnerable because of the influx of Buddhist pilgrims from China. My ethnographic focus is on traditional Tibetan medical responses of prevention and conceptions of contagion prior to any outbreak. I explore what counts as prevention, protection, and contagion in a Tibetan medical public outreach context during pre-epidemic days, and how politics and fear of ‘the other’ merge with the preventive aspects of traditional medicinal products and public health announcements in Dharamsala. Taken together, these ethnographic vignettes illustrate how local epidemic imaginaries draw on complex webs of potency. These combine, for example, substances and their smells with mantras, protective oils, and facemasks in varied ways, all in an effort to reduce anxiety and prevent contagion
Post-cure
Get PDFThe curative imaginary is a powerful driver of hope and investment in medicine, often displacing attention and resources given to other illness-related fields of practice. Whereas cure implies an end to the sick role and the possibility of an absolute state of health, in practice those fields that are touted as having high curative potential grapple with the ongoing nature and incompleteness of post-cure care. By capturing the public imagination and channelling research and funding in particular directions, the motif of cure risks drawing resources away from other, less seductive forms of treatment, and towards the technological at the expense of the social. Drawing on our research into precision medicine and deep brain stimulation, we track how cure operates as a concept in these fields, and compare this to how medical practitioners actually care for patients. We argue that a critical engagement with post-cure possibilities offers an opportunity to challenge and rethink what constitutes good medical care, as well as the social, political, and economic underpinnings of medical innovation
Eating my words: Linguistic politics in India
Get PDFLanguage learning is common preparation for much anthropological fieldwork, but the choices researchers make in this area are distinctly political. Prompted by a chance encounter while studying Hindi, the author reflects on this realisation in view of the numerous languages spoken in India, the interactions involved in hospital-based research, and the place of language in Indian politics more broadly
Structural vulnerabilities and healthcare services integration: HIV-positive Mozambican migrants in Johannesburg
Get PDFHome to one fifth of all people living with HIV, South Africa carries the world’s heaviest burden of this disease. While a significant proportion of those infected are immigrants from other African high-prevalence countries, little is known about how these migrants engage with healthcare systems in shifting cultural and clinical settings. This article draws on fieldwork from migrant communities and twenty-one ethnographic life histories told by HIV-positive Mozambicans in a major South African HIV clinic. From their collective narratives, a range of structural vulnerabilities are found that limit immigrants’ access to, and proper integration within, healthcare services. These include perilous migration, xenophobia and deportation, exclusion and exploitation, language barriers, medical pluralism, cultural estrangement, social isolation, and the stigmas of being HIV-positive. In conjunction, these structural factors may delay treatment-seeking and inhibit drug adherence, which could increase rates of morbidity and mortality as well as contribute to viral mutation and antiretroviral drug resistance