Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Mapping Microbial Selves: Field Notes from a Dirty Parenting Project
No full textMicrobes exist everywhere on, in and around us. They are both ubiquitous and largely invisible, at least until they make their presence, or absence, felt. Recent years have seen a heightened sensitivity to microbial threats in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread concerns about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to antibiotics. At the same time, there is also a growing interest in the microbiome as a source of ‘wild immunology’. From this viewpoint, the human body is comprised of, embedded within, and dependent on its exposure to an ecosystem of microbes, and the absence of such exposure is linked to the development of auto-immune conditions such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Inspired by an emerging body of work in the humanities and social sciences which looks to engage with so-called lay knowledge and understandings of microbial forms (including bacteria, viruses, and fungi) and processes (such as contagion or digestion), this Field Note explores the piloting of ‘body mapping’ as a research method to engage with families to explore their collective understanding of their children’s microbiome
A Potent Chew?: Kenyan Khat and the Agency of Drugs
No full textFew other categories of things appear so bound up with questions of agency, power and responsibility as that of ‘drugs’. With over a century of global treaties and prohibition of such substances, we are accustomed to thinking of them as potent things that can hold us in their thrall. Social science approaches, in contrast, tend to downplay the agency and power of the drug itself, showing how such agency and power is distributed among wider contexts. This paper explores themes of drug power and agency through a case study of khat. While relatively weak in terms of pharmacology, khat brims with potency in how people talk about it and its effects. I argue that such talk is crucial for understanding the potency of the substance itself. This talk helps us understand how drug potency is not just a pharmacological property, but an historical, sociological and anthropological one too; such talk also acts to reinforce this potency through influencing expectations of what being ‘under the influence’ entails. Furthermore, while drug potency during moments of intoxication is fleeting, the stories of succumbing to a drug that arise from these moments have a longer-term potency as they are recounted over the years
The Glass Witness: Visual and Tactile Engagements with Online Medical Crowdfunding
No full textDonation-based crowdfunding platforms invite people to tell stories of unmet health needs in a hybrid form—using both words and images—but research to date has not addressed the role of visual practice in this setting, in any detail. In this Photo Essay I present an art installation responding to this gap and informed by empirical data from a three-year study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand. Through a feminist new materialist lens, and connecting to scholarship on visuality and the gaze, I used the medium of stained glass to evoke and connect the experiences of both campaigners and audiences. I briefly discuss the design process, alongside reflections on the role of graphic medical imagery in an assemblage of witnessing; on disability, shock, and the economic function of voyeurism; on non-normative bodies and subjectification through the gaze; on biases in audience recognition; and on paradoxes of intimacy and distance through digital technology. I highlight that both the content and the context of images have a role in shaping the ‘response-ability’ of networked publics to the suffering of distant others; in the case of medical crowdfunding, with significant consequences for healthcare access.
Pluralising Cancer
No full textThis Review essay seeks to interrogate the vast category of ‘cancer’. Taken together, the three books explored here pluralise cancer, locating it not just in organs and bodies but also in time and space—in the social, material, and historical specificities in which people become patients. These ethnographies break apart the notion of ‘the C word’, showing the diverse experiences and illnesses that are gathered under this banner. Cancers emerge as both unavoidably fatal and potentially controllable in different settings. At points, however, these anthropological texts may also reinforce the unity of a singular cancer. This essay suggests that clarity may be gained by more explicitly treating this notion as an object of their ethnography, historicising and theorising it. Wholeheartedly interrogating what is variously meant by the word cancer may have benefits, not only for improving the precision of anthropological work, but also for addressing the widespread fear that the term and its fairly uniform associations with suffering and death inspire. 
Seeking Knowledge in and for Troubled Times: The Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology, MAT, and a Shared Vision
No full textEditorial for the September Issue, 202
Diversity amongst Decision Makers?: Workplace Inequality, Black Underrepresentation, and the Afterlife of Colonialism in NHS Governance
No full textWhereas senior management within NHS England was once so monocultural that it was dubbed the ‘snowy white peaks of the NHS’, recent data suggests that things have begun to change. However, Black staff in particular are still underrepresented. Interviews with Black and White NHS managers from four London trusts found that though the acronyms ‘BME’/‘BAME’ lack subtlety, management considered quantitative data important. The #BlackLivesMatter movement impacted NHS staff as a potential catalyst for change, though momentum fizzled out. Barriers to diversity and promotion have been seen to include microaggressions and negative stereotyping of Black staff. This article interrogates such underrepresentation, and uses the concept of ‘the afterlife of colonialism’ to suggest that NHS management hierarchies follow colonially-introduced hierarchies of ethnicity and discrimination, creating structural issues that are difficult to address. Taking a feminist framework of analysis, I will argue that diversity race work, including that of #BlackLivesMatter, is anti-hierarchical at its core, suggesting that it is difficult to assimilate within the hierarchically minded world of management. I will conclude that for ethnic diversity amongst staff to be realised, all staff must be committed to supporting this agenda, regardless of their race. 
Hope and Haunting Images: The Imaginary in Danish Parkinson’s Disease Rehabilitation
No full textMuch in life is imagined: hoped for, dreamed about, or dreaded, as we engage with potential futures. Parkinson’s disease is a progressive and neuro-degenerative disease, currently incurable. During long-term fieldwork among Danish rehabilitees with Parkinson’s disease, rehabilitees’ mentioning of hope and images of the future gradually inspired attention to an imaginary dimension in rehabilitation. We explore haunting images and hope among rehabilitees as examples of the imaginary in rehabilitation, but also as windows into how rehabilitees orientate themselves towards an uncertain future. We show how rehabilitees’ imaginations of the future resemble hauntings instigating an urge to ‘do something’ to avoid their actualisation; to insist on living in the now, keeping up training, and partaking in clinical trials. This urge translates into rehabilitation practices, where rehabilitees and professionals work with both hope and rehabilitation goals to maximise the present and postpone the future. We emphasise that hope is a complex phenomenon; it is multiple and has a certain elasticity. A person can carry multiple hopes at once; hope can be agentic, co-created and worked with, located, or be an existential stance
Of Truths and Snakes: The Percussive Effects of Asylum Seeking in Australia
No full textAustralia’s border hardened stance has created a culture of asylum prevention, providing a rationale for the use of defence and security as the core argument to prevent asylum seeker protection. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken with Tamil asylum seekers and refugees from Sri Lanka in Australia, this Field Note showcases the percussive impacts of border policy on lived experiences. I do this by elevating the subjective lens, narrating an encounter with one of my interlocutors to provide insights into the process of meaning-making and explore how everyday life is negotiated amid ongoing upheaval and protracted insecurity. This piece illuminates some of the structural and symbolic barriers preventing safety, stability and a sense of belonging for asylum seekers in Australia along with highlighting the intimate, mundane and practical ways that daily life is performed, despite these restrictions.
Structural Vulnerability and Toxicity Experiences in the Uruguayan Soybeanisation Process
No full textFuelled by agribusiness, transgenic soybean crops, genetically modified to withstand pesticide use, have increased in use during the last 20 years in the Southern Cone of Latin America. Plantations are understood as examples of ‘modular simplifications’ in ‘patchy Anthropocene’ landscapes (Tsing et al. 2019), where the attempt to reduce diversity may have social and ecological feral effects as diseases and toxins spread. In Uruguay, as an agro-exporter country, soybean expansionist processes correlate with an increased use of pesticides. Based on an ethnographic study (2016–2018) carried out in the main Uruguayan agricultural region, this Research Article seeks to analyse the experiences of toxicity among agricultural workers and rural inhabitants in the soybeanisation context. I propose that pesticide effects transcend biomedical diagnoses of ‘intoxication’. I also contend that the experience of toxicity can be understood as occurring along a continuum in the daily life of sufferers, which encompasses chemical and biological processes, their affects, intersectional conflicts, lay concepts of illnesses, informal self-care networks, and unequal access to health services. This ethnography demonstrates that the experience of toxic suffering embodies inequalities in environmental health in the time of the Anthropocene and is shaped by structural vulnerabilities and politics of exposure
"Just Graphite": Corporate Representations of Particular Matter in Santa Cruz, Rio de Janeiro
No full textThe unevenly distributed environmental burdens of the Anthropocene become evident in conflicts surrounding the extractive industries. ThyssenKrupp’s steel mill (TKCSA) in Rio de Janeiro is an illustrative example. The factory transformed its surrounding landscape and emitted a fine metallic dust over its human and non-human neighbours. This article focuses on some of the less tangible elements of Anthropocene transformations around the mill. I examine ThyssenKrupp’s communication strategies to reveal the underlying meanings of corporate rhetorical devices, uncover the violence of public relations language and understand the intensity of feeling that surrounded it. I trace the affective registers that emerged around the steel mill as a result of its polluting activities, its approach to corporate communications, and its ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) activities. Everyday life involved minimal corporeal expressions of emotion that encapsulated feeling and allowed for perseverance in the face of toxic suffering. The ‘Stop TKCSA’ campaign involved affective labour; emotions were the agentic contribution campaigners were able to make in the context of unequal power structures. I centre these less visible dynamics of power to examine how emotions can shape experiences of environmental conflict, form coalitional politics, and contribute to the very landscapes of the Anthropocene