Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Elephant tuberculosis as a reverse zoonosis: Postcolonial scenes of compassion, conservation, and public health in Laos and France
Get PDFIn the last twenty years, a growing number of captive elephants have tested positive for tuberculosis (TB) in various institutions worldwide, causing public health concerns. This article discusses two localities where this concern has produced significant mobilizations to ask about the postcolonial resonances of this global response. The first case focuses on epidemiological studies of elephant TB in Laos launched by international organizations involved in conservation, and on the role of traditional elephant workers (mahouts) in the daily care for elephants. The second describes the finding by veterinarians of two elephants suspected of TB infection in a French zoo and the mobilization of animal rights activists against the euthanasia of the pachyderms. The article shows that while, in the recent past, in France elephants were considered markers of exoticism and in Laos as coworkers in the timber industry, they are now considered to be endangered subjects in need of care, compassion, and conservation. This analysis contributes to the anthropology of relations between humans and elephants through the study of a rare but fascinating zoonosis
Asking questions: Interviews and expertise in global health research
Get PDFHousehold surveys are one of the primary methodological tools employed in global health research. In this paper, I try to gain insight into the production of global health knowledge by elaborating upon the process of data collection for such surveys. I do so by narrating a story of an impact evaluation in northern India, drawing attention to how data collectors, called ‘enumerators’, follow or disregard different aspects of the research protocol while conducting survey interviews. I pay close attention to how enumerators translate and ask questions, and how the ethical challenges they face affect their interactions with respondents. I use this analysis to draw parallels between the work of enumerators and global health researchers. I argue that researchers also acknowledge or ‘unknow’ different aspects of research practice in order to produce scientific evidence and claim expertise
Diabetes, alcohol abuse, and inequality in southern Mexico: A synergistic interaction
Get PDFDespite the serious persistence of infectious diseases, low-income, indigenous people in southern Mexico are increasingly burdened by noncommunicable diseases, type 2 diabetes in particular. Most studies on diabetes and indigenous peoples focus on the dietary transition they are experiencing, with an emphasis on the biological role of processed foods and soft drinks on the onset of this disease. Little, however, is known about the synergistic interaction of alcohol abuse, diabetes, and inequality. This article adopts a syndemic approach to investigate how alcohol abuse among women and men in a rural, indigenous community in southern Mexico contributes to exacerbating health outcomes. Based on a one-year qualitative ethnographic study, this article advocates the use of a syndemic approach into the study of noncommunicable diseases because it offers critical insights into political economy, individual and social suffering, and the biosocial nature of health and illness
Blaming the rat? Accounting for plague in colonial Indian medicine
Get PDFThe medical-humanities literature on zoonosis has overwhelmingly stressed the manner in which cross-species diseases challenge anthropocentric accounts of society. This article explores the colonial discovery, between 1896 and 1910, that bubonic plague (the disease responsible for the medieval Black Death) was zoonotic. This scientific work involved a massive, almost industrialised, examination of rat corpses so as to produce an animal linkage in plague. I show that this production of animal agency paradoxically served to hasten an ongoing process whereby human behaviour was identified as the moral locus of disease. The scientific production of zoonosis thus enabled another form of reasoning and judging to come to the fore, which ultimately had the effect of strengthening and heightening existing racial stereotypes and hierarchies. Far from challenging an anthropocentric worldview, this zoonosis helped to re-establish one
Pregnant with puppies: The fear of rabies in the slums of New Delhi, India
Get PDFIn New Delhi, some migrants from central-eastern India espouse a belief in ‘puppy pregnancy’, or the notion that after being bitten by a dog its puppies are conceived within the abdomen and their growth leads to an awful death. This article suggests that this belief is related to the widespread fear of rabies. This lethal infectious disease causes one-half of deaths in India, leaving behind grief-stricken families and shocked communities. This rabies-related shock results not only from the disease per se but also from the long, painful, and disturbing post-bite vaccination prophylaxis, using a nervous tissue vaccine, in which bite victims receive fourteen distressing injections in the abdomen in the hope of saving them from death. I propose here that dread of this vaccination may have stimulated, within an already fertile cultural milieu, the belief in this unnatural, animal pregnancy
What the word ‘partnership’ conjoins, and what it does
Get PDFThis essay proposes that ‘global health partnership’ might usefully be conceived as a boundary object, in that the term’s capacity to encompass widely divergent and incompatible understandings, and to facilitate mutual misunderstandings, is a crucial part of how it ‘works’ in the world to help bring together assemblages of people and organizations across great distances and steep gradients of inequality