Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Milk, meaning, and morality: Following the trajectory of donated breast milk from donor to baby
Get PDFDonated human milk’s status comes into question as it leaves the mother-child relationship and is reconfigured through practices and discursive structures that seek to stabilise it as a specific kind of object. Based on research conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, we examine the crucial role of technologies in aiding the milk’s transformation as milk moves from donors’ homes into the clinical setting where it is received by preterm, low-birth weight newborns. We show that the milk shifts back and forth between being a bodily fluid, food, and medicine in the course of this trajectory. Different techniques foreground milk’s diverse properties as a set of moral decisions converges around saving, securing, and sustaining life, and materialising relationships
Occupational citizenship: Practice, routine, and bureaucracy among nurses and midwives in rural Burkina Faso
Get PDFHealth workers are an overlooked category in the growing literature on health and citizenship. In this article I describe a 2012–2013 nationwide conflict in the public health care sector in Burkina Faso to explore how ideas about citizenship were mobilized in a situation of political agitation. I examine how public health care is done in a context of material deprivation, technological shortage, and great demand from the population. Three distinct repertoires of practice, routine, and bureaucracy are identified, through which health workers strive to make meaning of their work and engage in the practice of public health care. Drawing on these findings, I argue that adopting a citizenship framework offers an opportunity to improve our understanding of the multiple ways in which health workers manage the difficulties related to being (health professionals) and doing (professional health care) in rural Burkina Faso
‘Have we become too ethical’? Discussing research ethics and human vulnerability in an international context
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Beyond trauma, beyond humanitarianism, beyond empathy: A commentary
Get PDFThe authors of this Special Section invite us to consider what it means to go beyond the common trope of ‘trauma’ in conceptualizing events in the Middle East. Considering the question in relation to these contributions, I ask: is trauma a concept with sharp edges or a word at hand saturated with context that grows out of the experience of life and its many dissolutions? Together, this collection challenges the reader to think further about a family of concepts that might be honed out of the experience of survivors. It also calls for rethinking the idea of the Middle East itself as a region from which we could get an opening into different ways of showing what it is to be a chronicler of how life is being remade
