Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Navigating multipositionality in ‘insider’ ethnography
Get PDFIn this article, I reflect on my experience of conducting ‘insider’ ethnography in a multidisciplinary collaborative project that evaluates HIV treatment as prevention in Swaziland. Having worked as the project’s social science coordinator for over five years, I discuss balancing my role as an insider on the study team with studying the project as the object of my doctoral research. Drawing on field notes taken during the design and implementation of the project, I discuss how my proximity to the study team created certain expectations in my interactions with team members and clinic staff. In some instances, I distanced myself from the study by not participating or not supporting a consensus option; my doing so engendered a sense that I was being disloyal and sometimes created frustration among my colleagues. The multipositionality that I navigated was a product of social interactions and therefore inherently relational and intersubjective. This article aims to stimulate self-reflective and methodological discussions of how anthropologists engage in global health research and what kind of knowledge and subject positions such collaborations produce
A research alliance: Tracking the politics of HIV-prevention trials in Africa
Get PDFThis article explores a research alliance across fields and continents in the wake of the early and controversial HIV-prevention clinical trials of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Our research set out to understand why three trial arms prematurely closed while another was refused approval from the relevant institutional review board. We conducted ethnographic research on ‘what happened’ at two of the sites. Over time our research strategy cohered around unearthing and exploring rapidly disappearing knowledge. We analyze insider/outsider politics, the power of global public-private partnerships, and the forms of scientific knowledge (located in African countries) that get left behind in the process
Cultivated cure, regenerated affliction: Encounters with ALS and stem cell regeneration in India
Get PDFIn this think piece, I interrogate the notion of cure in order to address the idea of disease. My intention is to show how emerging biotechnological modalities that cultivate an idea of ‘cure as regeneration’ dislocate expert knowledge, descriptions of disease, and its representation into contested new terrains. In approaching disease from the vantage point of the ‘cultivated cure’ I seek to trouble our commonsense view of afflictions. Drawing on ethnographic data from a longitudinal project engaged in mapping stem cell technologies in India, I conceptualize how ‘cure as regeneration’ reanimates the figures of disease and medical knowledge. I take up Veena Das’s challenging query: is it necessary to define terms – illness, disease, diagnosis, health – that defy neat characterization
Gender, violence, and sexuality: Collaborations for social justice at the intersection of academia, activism, and art
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Urban Mahabharata: Health care, ordinary, traditional, and contemporary ethics
Get PDFIn Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (Fordham, 2015), we listen with Das to ordinary ethics in challenged lives of poverty, illness, and family relations; and in three registers of (a) advocacy, (b) moral engagement, and (c) acknowledgement of the inherent uncertainties in the very fabric of living these lives, including hers and ours. In this article, I take up the text of Affliction, and comment on moral engagements and sparks of references to the Mahabharata and other traditional, especially Muslim, modes of ethical thought. This commentary can be read as what in Islamic scholarship often are called ‘hashiye’, marginal notes on the main text. I conclude by discussing a mosaic of coverage and gaps in the contemporary ethics of Indian health care and its anthropologies
