Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Biomedicine in an unstable place: Infrastructure and personhood in a Papua New Guinean hospital
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Double trouble? Towards an epistemology of co-infection
Get PDFTuberculosis and HIV co-infection came to figure as one of the major global health problems at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with multiple attempts to tackle this intricate issue on epidemiological, clinical, and public health levels. In this article, we propose thinking beyond the practical problems caused by co-infections in order to explore medicine’s epistemological attachment to the idea of single diseases, using TB/HIV as an analytical lever. We retrace how TB/HIV co-infection has been problematised in public health discourses since the 1990s, particularly in WHO reports and international public health journals, and show that it has been mainly discussed as a complex biosocial phenomenon in need of more resources. The epistemological interrogation of the concept of co-infection itself – as an entangled object of two or more diseases with different histories and social, political, and scientific identities – is largely missing. To elaborate on this gap, we look at the translational processes between the two diseases and their communities, and suggest concrete historical and ethnographic entry points for future research on this global health phenomenon
Recoiling from war again
Get PDFWhat have we learned in the aftermaths of wars across the Middle East as a prolegomena for a new generation of research frameworks on mental health burdens in the region? Four questions are addressed: what are the moral implications of different forms of intervention? Are there transformations in the discursive structures over the past three decades in response to experiences of war? What are the implications for mental health and social resilience in neighboring countries to those in war? What mix of methods to research these are most helpful? The 2014 ‘Beyond Trauma’ workshop held at Kings College, London, organized by Orkideh Behrouzan, provides a beginning benchmark for new comparative work across the region from the Levant to Afghanistan and Acheh. I discuss the workshop’s case studies, together with other research, to highlight the range of methods utilized and objects examined, and to draw attention to the resonances this research has with the work of many other scholars. A new network and new conversation should grow and connect with other networks of researchers, bringing together patient life histories, genres of expression, and new discursive formations to address transformations in the lives of everyone touched by these wars
A mediating capacity: Towards an anthropology of the gut
Get PDFIn this article I seek to develop a conceptual framework for anthropological work on ‘the gut’ by bringing together reflections on ethnographic fieldwork on nutrition and well-being in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, with recent advances in the sciences of the gastroenterological and enteric nervous systems. While new evidence suggests that diet, immune system functioning, memory, and behaviour are shaped by the characteristics and processes of the enteric nervous system, it has also come into the public sphere as an object of intense disputation. Despite an ethnographic archive elaborating the diverse ways in which the gut contributes to well-being, it is still seen as a collection of folk systems incommensurable with scientific knowledge. I suggest that the mutual absorption of the natural and the social in the mediating membrane of the gut requires a more robust concept than either illness narrative or biosociality, and I ask: what would an anthropology of the gut look like
The open question: Medical anthropology and open access
Get PDFThe open question: Medical anthropology and open acces