Medicine Anthropology Theory
Not a member yet
559 research outputs found
Sort by
Illness narratives of substance users from urban India: The untold stories of their ‘afflictions’
Get PDFReading Veena Das’s book \u27Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty\u27 was a journey of revelations for me as a health professional. The various dialects of illness that are spoken in the rapidly urbanizing Indian community become coherent, lending a voice to the distinctive sociocultural distress of the men and women who form a part of it. A discussion of the social aspects of illness brings certain questions to mind: Does the medical community fully understand those it tries to help? Is the therapeutic dialogue about the social dimensions of medical problems or vice versa? How do we bridge the mental health gender gap in our societies? To try and find some answers, I present the illness stories of two women who sought treatment at drug abuse treatment clinics in the urban slums of New Delhi. This think piece describes substance use disorder in the context of the cultural processes that have shaped these women, their families, and society
‘B!rth’: Seven countries. Seven female playwrights. One global controversy. A world of scientific debate.
No full textN/
Orchestrating home: Experiences with spousal stroke care
Get PDFThe private space of the home is an important site of health care in most industrialised countries, and rehabilitation following intensive in-hospital treatment largely takes place in domestic settings. Home in this context is implicitly understood by individuals affected by illness (people with illness, family members, friends, carers), health care providers, and policy makers as an a priori entity that naturally provides continuity and stability. This takes for granted that family carers will maintain both therapeutic activities and the sense of ‘being at home’ – and all of the accompanying emotional dimensions – within the home environment. Drawing on ethnographic research with relatively young spousal carers in Victoria, Australia, we explore how the reconstruction of home as a site for post-stroke recovery changed the experiences and meanings given to the idea of home. Home as a therapeutic place depended on constant orchestrating work that reconfigured the physical, symbolic, and practical elements of home. This was not a straightforward or singular process, as tensions arose in trying to integrate the new, post-stroke therapeutic landscape and pre-stroke conceptualisations and lived realities of home life
\u27When I was transgender\u27: Visibility, subjectivity, and queer aging in Indonesia
No full textThis think piece reflects on the ways in which the category ‘transgender’ is used by waria – Indonesia’s ‘national transvestite’ (Boellstorff 2007) – based on ethnographic data collected from informants aged forty years or older in Yogyakarta and Jakarta. I was struck by how this group used the category ‘transgender’ with reference to a particular time in life that stretched from mid-teens to late twenties, a period marked by national and transnational migration for intensive sex work and other labor. Their use of ‘transgender’ to describe certain times of their lives but not others validates scholarly calls to question the privileging of gender and sexuality in analyses of subjectivity. It also troubles the basis of Western assumptions about aging and its relationship to the self, which presumes an experience of time as an orderly chronological progression. Finally, their use of ‘transgender’ demands closer attention to why the use of categories of gender and sexuality might shift across the life course. My informants’ narratives invite us to consider how people in different locations draw upon globalized categories to make meaning. Greater ethnographic attention towards how categories are drawn upon to produce and reflect subjectivity in diverse ways may produce a reflexive understanding of the relationship between categories and the context of entrenched structural inequalities in which they are used
‘They overworked us’: Humiliation and claims to recognition of volunteer nurses in the aftermath of the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone
Get PDFIn this article, I describe the institutional humiliation experienced by volunteer nurses in Sierra Leone following the end of the Ebola epidemic. They had been promised formal employment with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation after working in the Ebola treatment units in the country, but were dismissed from the hospitals where they were volunteering and felt humiliated. I suggest that this maltreatment of volunteer nurses cannot be grasped through the existing categories and parameters used by global health policies nor through conventional moral theories that inform our understandings of global health. Instead, we need to attend to the harm inflicted upon the volunteer nurses’ sense of self-respect through institutionalized forms of subordination and misrecognition. Drawing on philosophical and anthropological works on recognition, I argue that we should pay attention to moral emotions as distinct objects of study to grasp how those who are humiliated register and validate the maltreatment they have undergone
Anthropology with algorithms? An exploration of online drug knowledge using digital methods
Get PDFBased on a study of more than twenty thousand reports on drug experiences from the online drug education portal Erowid, this article argues that the integration of ethnographic methods with computational methods and digital data analysis, including so-called big data, is not only possible but highly rewarding. The analysis of ‘natively’ digital data from sites like Facebook, message boards, and web archives can offer glimpses into worlds of practice and meaning, introduce anthropologists to user-based semantics, provide greater context, help to re-evaluate hypotheses, facilitate access to difficult fields, and point to new research questions. This case study generated important insights into the social and political entanglements of drug consumption, drug phenomenology, and harm reduction. We argue here that deep ethnographic knowledge, what we term ‘field groundedness’, is indispensable for thoroughly making sense of the resulting visualizations, and we advocate for seeing ethnography and digital data analysis in a symbiotic relationship
‘White man’s disease’: American Indian AIDS conspiracy theories and the refusal of synthesis
Get PDFThrough critical reflection on the conspiracy theories told about the origins of HIV by American Indians, we learned that many community members refused the universalized aspects of AIDS prevention, education, and intervention. We found that standard HIV/AIDS-related prevention and treatment programs tend to universalize experiences with and responses to the AIDS epidemic and ignore – or push to the margin – alternative framings and understandings of this disease. Inspired by American Indians’ refusal to synthesize (in the Hegelian dialectical sense) their own experience into national and international AIDS knowledges, in this article we seek to engage with such marginal understandings, as well as their interactions with universal, individual, and community notions of care, AIDS, and health causality. The use of non-standard theories of the origins of AIDS by American Indians, we argue, disrupts the logic that attempts to universalize AIDS and community experiences. By making AIDS a ‘White Man’s disease’, Natives bring the epidemic in line with a history of social and health neglect by the settler state, and refuse to collapse their own, marginalized experiences and understandings of HIV/AIDS into dominant knowledges of the disease
