Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Living with transplant: Never quite beyond illness
Get PDFOrgan transplantation is often held to epitomize the power and promise of biomedicine. Yet life after transplant does not so clearly mark an ‘after’ to illness, and instead requires close monitoring and treating for organ rejection, graft failure, or the side effects of medication regimens. Such medical domains are counterbalanced, in turn, by relations of kinship, friendship, home and work life. In this Position Piece, I call for attention to the interconnected tensions among these domains, focusing on one illustrative case example: that of Janet, a three-time kidney recipient. By detailing Janet’s lifelong imbrication of daily life with vulnerability and biomedical intervention, I delineate the mismatch between popular imaginings of transplant as ‘cure’ and the realities of living a life that is never quite beyond illness
Medicalization as a way of life: The Iran-Iraq War and considerations for psychiatry and anthropology
No full textMost debates on postwar mental health focus on clinical evaluations of veterans’ and civilians’ individual experiences of wartime ‘trauma’. But the psychological afterlife and the social discord that wars create cannot be reduced to a clinical artifact of individual trauma or be divorced from the historical and cultural meanings that it carries. Generations of war children will continue to remember, process, and work through cultural changes that quietly inscribe past war experiences in their daily lives. This article examines one such cultural shift, namely the medicalization of the memories of the Iran-Iraq War. It illustrates how individuals’ PTSD-like symptoms or alleged depreshen turn the seemingly desocializing act of medicalization on its head, and how diagnosis can become a cultural resource to resocialize the war in the sanitized language of biomedicine. It further suggests that moving beyond an individual and clinical rendition of trauma requires the integration of an anthropological understanding of illness and its cultural situatedness into medical pedagogies
Solidarity beyond the grave: Yielding organs in a Nordic welfare state
No full textAccording to a survey carried out in 2009, Finnish citizens are exceptionally willing to donate their organs after death, an attitude that paved the way for a 2010 amendment to the Tissue Law that introduced an ‘opt-out’ consent policy. Reactions to the
When the dead teach: Exploring the postvital life of cadavers in Danish dissection labs
No full textThis article follows the postvital lives of bodies donated to science, exploring their continuing material and social lives after the donor has died. I explore how the postmortem wishes of those who decide to donate their bodies to science intersect wit
Can epidemics be noncommunicable? Reflections on the spread of \u27noncommunicable\u27 diseases
No full textThis article argues that the concept of communicability that is central to the distinction between communicable diseases (CDs) and noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) is poorly conceptualized. The epidemic spread of NCDs such as diabetes, depression, and eating disorders demonstrates that they are communicable, even if they are not infectious. We need to more critically explore how they might be communicable in specific environments. All diseases with epidemic potential, we argue, should be assumed to be communicable in a broader sense, and that the underlying medical distinction between infectious and noninfectious diseases confuses our understanding of NCD epidemics when these categories are treated as synonymous with ‘communicable’ and ‘noncommunicable’ diseases, respectively. The dominant role accorded to the concept of ‘lifestyle’, with its focus on individual responsibility, is part of the problem, rather than the solution, and the labelling of some NCDs as ‘lifestyle diseases’ is misleading. Founded on a critical understanding of global health and globalized medicine, we propose to explore the dynamics of the phenomena of contamination and biosocial contagion in networks. An analytics of biosocial epidemics needs to be developed by a medical anthropology that is engaged in a critical dialogue with both medicine and biology
Taking sides: A reflection on ‘partisan anthropology’
No full textThis think piece argues for a ‘partisan anthropology’. Building on lessons learned through my research about the practices of postmastectomy breast reconstruction in France and Italy, I reflect on the role of the researcher in fieldwork. In my own research, I acted as neither a militant nor an activist in the field, that is, I did not actively participate in the initiatives I observed. However, in the analysis stage, I decided to side with the patients I had met: my aim was to understand their experience of the illness and the therapies available, as well as their sometimes difficult relationship with the medical system. Having decided to take the patients’ side, I conducted a ‘partisan anthropology’. These reflections are intended as an effort to fully recognize the legitimacy and the scientific character of a partisan anthropology, building on previous arguments for militant and activist anthropology