Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Collaboration and discord in international debates about coca chewing, 1949–1950
Get PDFThis essay complicates our thinking about unequal North-South ‘collaborations’ by considering how distinct scientific traditions, national politics, forms of racial thinking, and conditions of internal colonialism in the global South shape relations with individuals and entities based in the global North. It does this by examining conflicts between Peruvian scientists and the United Nations’ Commission for the Study of the Coca Leaf, which visited Peru and Bolivia in 1949 to investigate the health effects of coca consumption on highland Indigenous populations. Sent at the Peruvian government’s invitation, commission members saw themselves as conducting a field survey. However, they quickly found themselves embroiled in conflict with a Peruvian high-altitude physiologist, Carlos Monge, who sought long-term, laboratory-based collaboration. Monge’s scholarship and experiments proved controversial for UN authorities because they emphasized the racial alterity of highland Indigenous peoples even as he and his peers disagreed about the health effects of coca chewing
After the next: Notes on serial novelty
Get PDFThe mass media fascination with mass death and mass disease has a long history. But what makes a disease communicable in our culture of media? In this think piece, I argue that the mass media has found in the idea of the next pandemic an ideal opportunity to corroborate its own discursive problematic
Shadowlands and dark corners: An anthropology of light and zoonosis
Get PDFViral haemorrhagic fevers (VHFs) persist in darkness. The pathogenicity of viruses like Lassa, Marburg, and Ebola is partly explained by their ability to survive on surfaces outside their infected hosts, provided they are not exposed to heat, disinfecting chemicals, or ultraviolet light. Taking these basic virological insights as our starting point, we seek to elaborate ethnographically the links between disease transmission and gradations of luminosity. An interdisciplinary research project into the control of Lassa fever in West Africa provided the empirical prompt for this article, which we then extended through our experience working in the region during the 2014–2016 Ebola virus outbreak. The spectral dimensions of zoonotic exchange and the apprehensions they engender help us come to grips with the complex interface of viral biology and human-animal sociality, and, we suggest, add nuance to global health framings of disease transmission and control
Constructing landscapes: Health care contexts in rural South Africa
Get PDFThe concept of therapeutic landscapes has been adopted from geography by anthropologists with a similar commitment to addressing the intersections between the construction of place and the multifaceted and symbolic dimensions of health. Drawing from health geography and medical anthropology, we take up the challenge from these fields to approach health broadly in order to understand how health decision making is connected to intersecting political, economic, social, and cultural processes that shape what options are available to people. This article presents findings from an ongoing study of the political ecology of health in northeastern South Africa. We consider how therapeutic landscapes are produced by physical infrastructure, social dynamics, and the use of natural resources for livelihoods and health management. While each of these dimensions is critical in shaping human health, we argue that it is through their interaction that therapeutic landscapes are produced. Landscapes of care are thus complicated and shifting, with rural households making strategic decisions to leverage government support, social support, and resources for health management. We conclude by emphasizing the need for further integration of anthropological and geographic frameworks in studying human health