Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Living a full life: Embodiment, disability, and ‘anthropology at home’
Get PDFWhat might anthropology and fieldwork look like if the anthropologist’s body, considered to be one of their ‘tools’, is not able-bodied? This piece of writing explores the intersection of disability and anthropological fieldwork, within the specific experience of doing anthropology at home. By interrogating the tension between academic advancement and disability, I challenge the expectation that traditional anthropologists must be able-bodied. In turn, this highlights the potential of being a vulnerable researcher
Looking at and seeing beyond young people’s photographs of ‘child protection’ in Zanzibar: On children as diagnosticians of their own well-being
Get PDFIn this think piece, I argue that making children diagnosticians of their own well-being can contribute to a broader understanding of child protection that goes beyond singular issues like corporal punishment. Children themselves are well placed to help define what their protection needs to entail and what is essential to their own well-being. What child protection means to children themselves is best understood by granting young people authority to explain their own lives, while also relating their concerns to the broader contexts in which they live. By means of some Zanzibari young people’s visual representations of protection and safety, I emphasise the need to ‘see beyond’ their photographs and ‘read’ them alongside their own explanations. Their accounts ultimately build a case for the need to broaden understandings of ‘protection’ to include ideas of promoting well-being
The syndemogenesis of depression: Concepts and examples
Get PDFSyndemics, or the deleterious interaction of diseases and structural factors, is an essential and increasingly utilized theory with which to address health inequities and how they interact with disease. However, less research has been conducted on syndemogenesis, a process by which a specific disease or structural factor is more likely to exacerbate syndemic interactions. With the increasing incidence and prevalence of depressive symptomology in Westernized nations, and with depression coexisting syndemically with other illnesses, I use depression as a case study to highlight syndemogenic processes in action. Doing so will hopefully aid preventive efforts in these areas
‘It gives you nothing but it takes away everything’: Photo ethnography as a lens onto the experiences of people who inject drugs in Puerto Rico
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Cancer-before-cancer: Mythologies of cancer in everyday life
Get PDFApproaching the presence of cancer in everyday life in terms of mythologies, the article examines what cancer is and how cancer-related potentialities are enacted and embodied in the context of contemporary regimes of anticipation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a suburban Danish middle-class community among people who were not immediately afflicted by cancer, we describe different and paradoxical cancer mythologies and show how they provide multiple ways of understanding, anticipating, and dealing with cancer in everyday life. Special attention is paid to the relation between biomedically informed notions of symptoms and bodily processes, and a ghostly and muted presence of cancer, particularly when people are faced with more tangible cancer worries. We explore how contemporary cancer disease-control strategies emphasising ‘symptom awareness’ interweave with and add to cancer mythologies. We suggest that these strategies also carry moral significance as directives (be aware of early signs of cancer and seek care in time), and create an unintended illusion of certainty that does not correspond with everyday embodied forms of uncertainty and ambiguity. We argue that paying attention to the continuous cultural configurations of cancer that exist ‘before cancer’ will increase understanding of how the public health construction of ‘cancer awareness’ relates to everyday health practices such as symptom experience and health care seeking
