Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Proyecto Fotovoz: The everyday lives of young people attending Instituto Pedagógico para Problemas de Lenguaje in Mexico City
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Global eHealth: Designing spaces of care in the era of global connectivity
Get PDFUsing the case of the Pan-African e-Network, this Think Piece describes some of the practical and theoretical challenges presented by eHealth. At the junction of ‘networked thinking’ and clinical work, human lives come to matter in new ways, taking shape as objects of knowledge and intervention. The terrain on which this is happening is discursive, and deeply enmeshed with living and technical systems. Studying eHealth reveals how contemporary arrangements create new spaces in which lives are cared for. As such, it is inseparable from wider questions being raised by global eHealth practices: How are spaces of care to be designed in the era of global connectivity? What are the emergent relations between space, information technology, and the government of care on a global scale
‘The opposite of a history’: What substance use in pregnancy can lend to an ethics of accompaniment
Get PDFTheoretical work in critical medical anthropology and biomedicine on substance use in pregnancy has yet to develop a cohesive framework of the maternal-fetal unit (MFU) as a dynamic object. As a result, patient history, risk, and agency continue to be driven by an Enlightenment-era, monolithic conception of individual will. I use the example of Carla, a young woman actively using heroin in her pregnancy, to illustrate the limits of the MFU as it is currently conceived. By using critiques of subjective utilitiarianism, as discussed by Byron Good, and the concept of becoming, as elucidated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this article seeks to articulate an ethics of accompaniment, focused on both individual patient care and wider sociopolitical advocacy. These ethics help to redefine the MFU, and support new and unique ways of providing services to this often marginalized and vulnerable population
When wounds travel
Get PDFThis article explores trauma as a form of ‘social wound’, entrenched in the intersections of local histories and social experiences of violence and displacement. Building on ethnographic accounts of displacement of Iraqis in Lebanon in the wake of the US occupation of Iraq (2003–2011), I ask: what happens when wounds travel across different social worlds and local histories of violence? The account presented tells the story of Hussein, an Iraqi refugee who escaped Iraq during the height of sectarian violence (2006–2007) and claimed asylum status as a torture victim in Lebanon. For displaced people like Hussein, the experiences of violence and uprooting were amplified by the uncertainties of everyday life in Beirut. His case shows that the selective sorting of refugees around questions of vulnerability and victimhood weaves further tensions into the social fabric of displaced peoples and their host communities. In contexts of layered histories of war, violence, displacement, and humanitarian interventions, which characterize much of the Middle East, wounds constitute the interstitial tissue of the social; they are what brings people together and what sets them apart. An ethnography of such ‘travelling wounds’ might account for the complex ways that discourses of trauma and histories of violence unravel in everyday encounters