Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Making Homes in a Nursing Facility in Athens
No full textThis Photo Essay seeks to visualise the room-homes of the residents in one of the largest semi-public nursing homes in Athens, Greece. Unlike in other facilities, residents are given the opportunity to intervene in their individual rooms, to change and fill the space with objects from their past lives and the houses they lived in, such as furniture, curtains, carpets, computers, crockery, or flowerpots. They also bring and live through photographs of their previous lives. I focus on the room-homes people create in this nursing home, the worlds they build. I conceive this visual ethnography as an account of the process of ‘house-ing’ (Biehl and Neiburg 2021, 540), ‘charting how forms and figures of dwelling constitute the house as a sensorial archiving machine of sorts, shaping affective pasts and the stories and trajectories of tomorrow’ (2021, 544).
Bio-imaginaries: ‘Biologics’, Bricolage, and the Making of Pharmaceutical Knowledge
No full textWhat does it mean when pharmaceuticals are called ‘biologics’? This article follows a pregnant person who has been hospitalised on a Norwegian rheumatology ward after being taken off her monoclonal antibody (mab) medication. She is painfully trapped in a crisis that is medical and existential, but also epistemological. Weighing the debilitating consequences of her disease against concerns about pharmaceutical risks for herself and her unborn child, she creates and adapts her own knowledge of mabs as ‘biologics’. Far from being passively receptive, she thus becomes part of a complex project of semantics where analogies and oppositions of biologic and chemical, natural and man-made, health and unhealth work to render some knowledge plausible and some implausible. Placing the individual and the pharmaceutical label at the centre of this semantic economy, the article suggests that pharmaceutical labels play an important albeit unacknowledged role in the making of pharmaceuticals as safe and efficacious
Anticipating Immunity: Vaccine-induced Immunity and Vaccine Safety in the Finnish News Coverage of COVID-19 Vaccines
No full textIn this article I draw on the concept of anticipation to examine Finnish news discourse on the development, licensing and administration of COVID-19 vaccines. I explore the interplay of anticipation of vaccine-induced immunity and vaccine safety concerns, and trace how ideas of protection and risk were invoked in relation to specific vaccine technologies as well as different accounts of biomedical pasts, including cases of narcolepsy associated with one of the 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccines. I demonstrate that anticipation around vaccine development during a public health emergency operates through a series of small shifts and twists that magnify affects around novel vaccines in news media discourse. I argue that even a slight shift in the biomedical knowledge about immunity or in the historical framing of specific vaccine technologies may significantly reshape vaccine-induced immunity as an object of anticipation
UK Khat Prohibition and the Making of a Harmful Drug
No full textThis article delves into the complex dynamics of khat (Catha edulis) prohibition in the UK, with a particular focus on a Somali community in north-west London. Despite the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs finding no substantial evidence of khat causing societal or medical harms and recommending public health interventions instead of prohibition, the UK Home Office classified khat as a Class C drug in June 2014. This decision raises critical questions about what constitutes a harmful drug. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the peak of prohibition discourse in 2013–14, the article explores how notions of harm operate across moral, political, and epistemological registers as people grapple with framing khat’s drug status and the effects of its use. It illustrates how prohibition discourse not only amplified perceptions of khat’s harmfulness but also sidelined the more nuanced concerns of Somali community members over persistent socioeconomic integration issues, mental health, and social marginalisation. Thus, the harm of khat may not lie in its potency as a psychoactive substance but as an object of prohibition that overshadows interventions to address the adverse conditions associated with its use among certain individuals
Grave Reverberations: Inherited Colonial Logics during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Philippines
No full textUsing the theory of reverberations, we track the dissonant transformation of sanitation regimes during the American colonial period in the Philippines, particularly during the cholera epidemic of 1902, to the mis/management of the COVID-19 pandemic in the present day. We argue that the formation, interpretation, and implementation of public health policies, especially with regards to the treatment of the dead, echo inherited colonial logics designed to exacerbate stigmas of virality and unruliness. In addition to past epidemics, responses to COVID-19 resonate with recurring episodes of terror formation, militarisation, and misinformation in the country. The enduring legacies of colonialism—rooted in themes of extraction, individualism, and hegemony, and masked under the guise of benevolence—live on in modern policies in ways that are not always readily apparent. Lastly, we see the notion of reverberations as one that allows analytical generosity in understanding the messiness of the postcolonial experience. 
Relations as Immunity: Building Community Resilience
No full textResilience—a term that originated in mathematical ecology—now commonly refers to the ability to thrive in the face of trauma and adversity. This Position Piece reflects on both the charisma and political lability of resilience in the early 21st century. On the one hand, resilience is easily compatible with neoliberal discourses that demand that individuals protect themselves in the absence of state or community support. On the other hand, resilience can be an important corrective to narratives about the damage caused by trauma, focusing attention on our innate ability to heal. We argue that the ambivalence of resilience requires theoretical and empirical attention to both the wider appeal of the term and the situated definitions deployed by diverse actors. In particular, we look at the rise of the term ‘community resilience’ popularised by academics, community leaders, and activists, which seeks to avoid the pitfalls of the neoliberal definition of resilience and argues that strong interpersonal relationships can support health equity. Despite the ambivalence of resilience, we find “community resilience” to be promising in a time when collective visions of health and immunity are desperately needed
The Medical Tech Facilitator: An Emerging Position in Dutch Public Healthcare and Their Tinkering Practices
No full textThis article focuses on the emerging position of the ‘medical tech facilitator’ developed by practitioners in the Dutch public healthcare system. The analysis is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in Dutch hospitals. It highlights, firstly, the practices and ongoing negotiations that these facilitators engage in, to maintain a position between two parties—the medical sector and the technology industry. I argue that the practices of medical tech facilitators are not (only) a result of personal, lucrative interests, but should be seen as a pragmatic way of coping, or tinkering, with a healthcare system that is experienced by them as frustrating and inefficient. Secondly, the article reveals the outcomes of these practices for public healthcare. I will pose that this emerging and ambiguous position leads to a co-production of specific health policies—something which is concerning, considering the fact that medical tech facilitators typically lack technological expertise. As such, they both resist and reproduce the problems they experience in their daily work. 
The Political Life of Research Ethics Committees And What It Means for Ethnographic Research
No full textThis review discusses three pieces of work, that is, a conference panel and two books, that deal with the role of research ethics committees (RECs) in regulating biomedical research and medical anthropological research. We summarise the papers and conversations of a panel we convened on this topic during the 2020 European Association for Social Anthropologists (EASA) conference. We review two relatively recent books which discuss the role of RECs in biomedical research: Adam Hedgecoe’s (2020) Trust in the System: Research Ethics Committees and the Regulation of Biomedical Research, and Salla Sariola and Bob Simpson’s (2019) Research as Development: Biomedical Research, Ethics, and Collaboration in Sri Lanka. Finally, we consider how the review that RECs outside academic institutions perform is inadequate for ethnographic research, including that involving prospective participants who may lack capacity to consent. We conclude that undertaking the research ethics review internally (i.e., under university RECs) would be a first step forward in reclaiming ethnographic research ethical conversations. 
Synergies: The Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology, MAT, and a Shared Vision
No full textEditorial for the April issue, 2024
Sugar, A Morally Ambiguous Substance: Responsibility, Social Class and Pleasure in Scotland’s State Primary Schools
No full textChildren’s sugar consumption has been marked out as an important area of public health policymaking in the UK, due to connections between sugar consumption, obesity, type 2 diabetes and dental decay. Yet unlike other regulated substances (alcohol, tobacco, e-cigarettes), ‘moderate’ or ‘responsible’ sugar consumption, rather than abstinence, is the desired policy outcome. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Edinburgh in 2018–19 in two demographically mixed Scottish state primary schools, I examine how school staff navigate this space of lenience written into state health policy—whereby some sugar can be consumed, sometimes. The public health dangers of sugar consumption, coupled with its relational pleasures (through associations with kinship, nurture and celebration) help illuminate how schools—as responsible agents—attempt to care for and govern children. It is sugar’s ambiguity, I argue, that enables it to become a crucial tool for children’s socialisation. Where and how sugar can be consumed responsibly, and which pleasures are deemed permissible or excessive, vary contextually: they are shaped through social class, and depend on the school policy being enacted. Beyond being an object to regulate, children’s pleasures in sugar are central to affective, social and class-informed practices of creating morally responsible persons