Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Health as growth: Bananas, humanitarian biotech, and human-plant histories in Uganda
Get PDFWhat notions of health and proper nutrition are articulated in the use and promotion of agricultural biotechnology in the global South? What future trajectories for health do they envision? Experiments with genetically modified bananas in Uganda use the fruit as a vehicle to achieve public health goals. This work in plant science understands itself as humanitarian, drawing on specific notions of health and its opposite: the deficient health of humans and plants. Instead of thinking about improved health through bananas, which implies an instrumental relationship to plants, I connect this high-tech effort to a way of thinking with the banana plant in central Uganda that highlights the entanglement of human and plant growth. Expanding our thinking about health with plants and the gardens where they grow relocates the production of health to sites that still seldom figure in medical anthropology and helps reconceptualize what one takes growth to be and what relations can sustain cross-species thriving
Health beyond the carbon barrier: Convergence, immortality, and transhuman health
Get PDFSilicon Valley donors have been investing heavily in a range of transhumanist longevity and immortality ventures. Theirs is a particular, culturally embedded endeavor, shaped by specific histories, ideologies, and futures that present new posthuman views of life, death, and survival. These projects aim for a future world in which the fundamental ontological categories of mind, life, and nonlife will have finally collapsed into one another thanks to the intercession of silicon-based digital or informatic technologies. The key term that denotes such a project is ‘convergence’ – used as much by transhumanists as by mainstream scientists and policymakers. Here I critically explore the ‘project of convergence’, tracing its history in the United States, and examining some of the projects and activities that have coalesced around it. These specifically include artificial intelligence, in which human persons are to be transferred from carbon-based to silicon-based substrates, and nanotechnology, in which work at the nano resolution aims at the reconstitution of the carbon-based or biochemical body. Although the concept of convergence emerges out of a transhumanist imaginary, the ideas and plans behind it have gained increasing traction in mainstream technoscientific projects. In contrast to some other health concepts that have been recently expanded to incorporate the organic nonhuman environment, these projects expand notions of health via robotic and computational formations in ways that, I argue, are moving health beyond the carbon barrier, pushing us toward an era in which intelligent existence deserving of care will not be understood as exclusive to carbon-based life forms
Winter anthropology in Finland: Exploring ‘green care’ in low light
Get PDFThis photo essay discusses some of the methodological issues for medical anthropology in the environmental human health sector, particularly, how season and latitude shape the types of anthropology that can be employed, the activities that can be undertaken, and their aesthetic effect on visual ethnography. The essay recounts the author’s experiences conducting ethnographic studies in the winter months in Finland and discusses the various challenges that environmental conditions produce for researchers
Worlds in a bottle: An object-centered ethnography for global health
Get PDFIn this article, I call for an object-centered ethnography to illuminate the ontological multiplicity that marks the worlds of health and healing that people inhabit. Focusing on a sports-drink bottle filled with a remedy from a faith healer in rural South Africa, I explore the ‘partial connections’ that link the world of global health and the world of traditional healing through objects and bodies. Drawing on medical anthropology focused on global health and medical pluralism as well as scholarship from the ontological turn, I argue that global health programs are limited by their failure to recognize the ontological multiplicity their target populations inhabit
Critical convergences: Social science research as global health technology?
Get PDFThinking through two objects – a focus group and a photograph – this essay suggests that ethnographic critique is not separate from but constitutive of global health. Social science representations, from data and focus groups to ethnographic descriptions and clinical snapshots, not only analyze, unpack, or depict global health; they also constitute it as a field of intervention and to define certain spaces, particularly clinical ones, as exemplary global health sites. This co-constitutive role complicates ethnographic critiques that see their role as primarily destabilizing global health facts. Rather, by drawing on feminist approaches to ethnography and critique, I suggest that convergences between ethnographic and global health knowledge stem from historical alignments through which anthropology and global health alike emerged and have come to circulate. These convergences point to the need for a ‘non-innocent’ critique of global health that centers the disciplinary complicity between, and methodological adjacency of, social science and global health
On the coloniality of global public health
Get PDFThe continued inordinate demise from communicable pathogens in the global South is not the result of an intractable problem thwarting our best efforts to prevent and cure disease; we have the means. Rather, as an accomplice to contemporary imperialism, public health manages (as a profession) and maintains (as an academic discipline) global health inequity. It does this through ‘bourgeois empiricist’ models of disease causation, which serve protected affluence by uncritically reifying inequitable social relations in the modern/colonial matrix of power and making them appear commonsensical
Epistemic prejudice and geographies of innovation: Health disparities and unrecognized interventions in Mississippi
Get PDFThis article seeks to understand how and why certain locations are excluded from or seen as foreclosed as places of innovation and knowledge production in health research and practice. Rooted in several years of collaborative ethnographic research in Mississippi, we develop this conceptual framework to understand the persistence of – and often ineffective response to – racialized and classed health disparities. We define our concept of epistemic prejudice as a structural inability or resistance to seeing certain places, bodies, and locations as capable of knowledge production and innovation. The history of the community health center movement, paired with the portrayal of Mississippi in contemporary media representations, helps us develop our concept. We use an interface ethnography method as Mississippi scholars to demonstrate the importance of this model of research in understanding persistent inequality in places of ‘lack’, noting that the challenges of addressing health problems in Mississippi stem in part from epistemic prejudice of scholars, health care practitioners, and policy-makers. Epistemic prejudice has broader implications for how global health initiatives are implemented, how postcolonial frameworks still shape knowledge production, and how knowledge is generated and taken as authoritative
Everyday adaptability in Ghanaian hospital laboratories
No full textDeveloped countries that enact laboratory standards and universal health policies have the luxury of numerous resources and technological advances to ensure an efficient diagnosis. In rural and urban Ghana, resource availability fluctuates depending on allocated funds, location, and tools; yet, technicians in these hospital laboratories successfully treat their patients by modifying their care and protocols to fit the environment in which they work. This essay offers a porthole into the day-to-day lives of lab staff in urban and rural hospitals in the Ashanti region of Ghana. It describes the tools and procedures used by technicians to work effectively with limited resources. By identifying these daily operations, we can better appreciate the work of clinicians and technicians in developing countries and the diligence that is required to provide adequate care to their patients
‘MSM-ing’ as a networking concept: Becoming a global health category
Get PDFThis article explores the creation of ‘MSM’ as global health category over the course of the HIV and AIDS epidemic, and across country contexts from India to southern and eastern Africa. We conceive of ‘MSM’ as a mode of ‘doing’ and ‘becoming’: ‘MSM-ing’, so to speak. Actor-network perspectives and ethnographic reflections are engaged to elucidate ‘MSM’ as a term that both enables and inhibits communications about sexualities and risks. We consider the term as a plural form of evidencing that offers wider perspectives on flows and boundaries in global health–knowledge making and HIV prevention