Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Autism as heredity, autism as heritage: The movement of autism back and forth through time
Get PDFKinship relations constitute the grooves through which autism travels temporally. On the one hand, the biological components of the condition are understood to journey from one generation to the next through the passing down of genetic information. Yet on the other hand, autism is often employed retrospectively as an explanatory model and a marker for a unique personhood; this can occur in retelling to oneself and to others the story of one’s familial history, as well as, sometimes, the story of humanity as a whole. In this way, autistic people’s construction of autism as a cross-generational familial keystone offers them new opportunities for self-expression and self-creation. Through this temporal reframing of autism, the hereditability of the condition might instead be reconceptualised as heritage
Ongame molwashoka otse: Reflections on suicide from Swakopmund, Namibia
Get PDFA recent national survey by the Ministry for Health and Social Services revealed that Namibia’s suicide rate was vastly higher than previously thought. Mirroring global conceptions of mental health and depression, these numbers tend to be ‘explained away’ using pre-determined ‘risk factors’ – alcohol consumption, violence, and unemployment. Yet, current theories of suicide do not account for all of its intricacies; indeed, most are rooted in notions of individualism countered by many ethnographies situated in African contexts. This Think Piece problematises the study of suicide in southern African contexts, showing that notions of ‘unhappiness’, ‘depression’, and most importantly ‘self’ are locally specific and, in southern Africa, relational rather than individualistic
The stakes of (not) knowing: Motherhood, disability, and prenatal diagnostics in Jordan
Get PDFThis article draws on the concept of subjunctivity to explore how conditions of uncertainty, experimentation, and refusal shape the lives of women raising children with Down syndrome in Amman, Jordan. The connections that women forge – as mothers of children with Down syndrome – enable them to imagine new possibilities for their families and their futures across boundaries of class and circumstance. Prenatal diagnosis, however, invites possibilities of a different kind, challenging established models for divine creation, human agency, and moral accountability. As women reflect on what they would have done if they had known about their child’s Down syndrome in utero, they reason themselves to different conclusions. Yet their interest in the question itself reveals how, even in its absence, prenatal diagnosis circulates as a technology of subjunctivity, conjuring multiple possible pasts, presents, and futures
Beyond the military metaphor: Comparing antimicrobial resistance and the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom
Get PDFMilitary metaphors shape the limits and possibilities for conceptualising and responding to complex challenges of contagion. Although they are effective at communicating risk and urgency and at mobilising resources, military metaphors collapse diverse interests and communities into ‘fronts’, obscure alternative responses, and promote human exceptionalism. In this article, I draw from criticisms of the use of military metaphor in scientific and policy descriptions of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) over the past sixty years on order to compare with and explore the use of military metaphors in descriptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. As AMR research has recognised the importance of symbiotic human–microbe relationships and new areas of interdisciplinary collaboration in recent years, a corresponding decline in the use of military metaphor in scientific discourse has begun to emerge. I ask how the legacy of the military metaphor in AMR research can offer lessons regarding or alternatives to the martial language currently saturating responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK
The poet’s melancholy: Depression, structures of feeling, and creativity among Afghan refugees in Iran
No full textThis article considers the relationship between depressed affect, a long-term refugee situation, and poetry among Afghan refugees in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the changing subjectivities of Afghan refugee poets, it explores the relationship between a perception of collective suffering, individual mental distress, and creativity in this community. Rather than establishing diagnostic criteria for depression among Afghans, the article is mostly concerned with the social and cultural ripples of psychological distress resulting from decades of war, displacement, and marginalization in the host country. It seeks to complicate biomedical understandings of depression by drawing on anthropological studies of dysphoria in Iran and on the collective experience of social suffering and structural violence. Through a discussion of four poets and their work, it explores the productive aspects of depression and the therapeutic, political, and transcendental potential of writing poetry
Collaborative conundrums and respectful partnerships: Medical anthropology and disciplinary others
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Sticky models: History as friction in obstetric education
Get PDFThis paper explores the material histories which influence contemporary medical education. Using two obstetric simulators found in the distinct teaching environments of the University of Development Studies in the north of Ghana and Maastricht University in the south of the Netherlands, this paper deconstructs the material conditions which shape current practice in order to emphasise the past practices that remain relevant, yet often invisible, in modern medicine. Building on conceptual ideas drawn from STS and the productive tensions which emerge from close collaboration between historians and anthropologists, we argue that the pull of past practice can be understood as a form of friction, where historical practices ‘stick’ to modern materialities. We argue that the labour required for the translation of material conditions across both time and space is expressly relevant for the ongoing use and future development of medical technologies