Medicine Anthropology Theory
Not a member yet
559 research outputs found
Sort by
\u27You Become Pretty Much a Healthcare Worker\u27: The Parenting of a Child with Inherited Metabolic Disease and its Metaphors
No full textParents of a child diagnosed with a rare inherited metabolic disease (IMD) are required to actively participate in their child’s treatment, by managing the risk of metabolic crisis and ensuring that they adhere to a stringent diet. In this Research Article, I discuss the specific roles, tasks, and knowledge that Polish and Swedish parents of children with IMDs have developed. I also pay critical attention to the notions and metaphors that parents, clinicians, and social scientists use to describe these. The prevailing metaphors of professionalisation used to describe parental roles contribute to the acknowledgment of these caregivers’ unique expertise. However, I argue, they also overly stress an individualistic perspective and obscure the relationality of care, collaboratively achieved between parents, patients, relatives, and healthcare providers
The Long Shadow of Fake Drugs and the Social Lives of Fake-ness
No full textIntroduction to the Special Section \u27The Long Shadow of Fake Drugs and the Social Lives of Fake-ness\u27, guest edited by Sarah Hodges and Julia Hornberger
The Anthropologist as Audience: Engaged Listening among Khmer Rouge Survivors and Ukrainian War Refugees
No full textAlthough the Khmer Rouge regime was responsible for the deaths of roughly 2.2 million Cambodians—and the persecution and abuse of millions more—only a handful of survivors have been able to testify at the tribunal established to prosecute former leaders of the regime. Partly to address this gap, an NGO affiliated with the tribunal has been offering ‘Testimonial Therapy’ for the past decade as a form of reparation for survivors with symptoms of psychological distress. For 16 months, I followed survivors undergoing this therapy, during which they developed a testimonial narrative of their life story in collaboration with a local mental health worker. In this Position Piece, I consider Myers’ conception of ‘moral agency’ (2015) in relation to this process of personal narrative creation, and the critical importance of audience engagement. I then reflect on my own positionality as both ethnographer and active listener, tracing how this affective posture has been formed not only through fieldwork, but also through engagement with family narratives of loss in the context of war-torn Ukraine
Irritating Bowels: Attention and Everyday Management of Gut Trouble in Denmark
No full textIrritable bowel syndrome (IBS) constitutes an irritating and embarrassing problem for an estimated 11–16% of the Danish population. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how young and middle-aged people diagnosed with IBS attend to, experience, and manage gut trouble in a Danish welfare context. It asks how we may understand the relation between IBS, irritation, and attention. Drawing on conceptualisations of ‘dys-appearance’ (Leder 1990) and ‘attentional pulls’ (Throop and Duranti 2015), I explore how afflicted individuals’ attention is pulled towards unwanted and unexpected gut sensations in everyday life, and how a Danish welfare context, manifesting itself in notions of ‘faring well’ (Langer and Højlund 2011) and moral imaginings of ‘good lives’ (Mattingly 2014), may contribute to this. Furthermore, I show how people are impelled to experiment with consciously paying attention to the gut and deciphering its signals to try to alleviate gut trouble. I suggest that irritation may not only be an empirical focal point, but also a heuristic tool for troubling and refining concepts. 
Fleshy Entanglements in Development Aspirations: Birth Position as a Site of Contestation in Bangladesh
No full textEncouraging women to adopt a position of their choice during birth has long been among the calls of scholars and activists challenging medicalised models of childbirth rooted in patriarchy to allow women to own their birthing experiences rather than accept the passivity of a lithotomy position. The encouragement of women to adopt a position of their choosing is now integrated within global health policy. Based on fieldwork conducted in Dhaka and Kushtia district, Bangladesh, this article examines the promotion of non-supine birth positions promoted through international development entities in Bangladesh. It argues that despite its emancipatory appeal, when subsumed by international development logics, the birth position operates as a site of political contestation in which women are rendered peripheral within a broader constellation of development imaginaries and ends. Within this constellation, the birth position is circumscribed as a technical intervention amenable to metricisation. Rather than a ‘return’ to more ‘natural’ forms of birth, ‘non-supine’ birth positions when instrumentalised in this context, are broadly conceived of as ‘foreign’, and serve to expand the medicalisation of childbirth.  
Toward a Broader View of Health in the Anthropocene: The COVID-19 Syndemic and the Clash of Cosmographies in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil
No full textThe continual expansion of developmental frontiers has impacted dramatically upon Indigenous health in Brazil. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in Mato Grosso do Sul, its Indigenous populations were already living in circumstances of environmental degradation, food insecurity, racism, and structural violence. The synergistic interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 virus, other pathogens, and biosocial factors resulted in what Singer (2010) terms as ‘syndemics’. In the case of Mato Grosso do Sul, it brought about a substantial increase in the disease burden of Indigenous Peoples, where child malnutrition, obesity, hypertension, respiratory and parasitic diseases, and maternal mortality appear at higher rates than in the non-Indigenous population. This Research Article discusses the coping and participatory strategies that were employed by Indigenous Peoples early in the pandemic. Efforts by Indigenous Peoples to address the pandemic reveal ‘a clash’ between Indigenous and Colonial cosmographies with regard to notions of the body and health. Considering the Indigenous perspective on the relation between territoriality and health, the analysis highlights asymmetries of power and embodied vulnerabilities and the limits of the Anthropocene as a global perspective
Writing our Futures Possible: Inspirations from the Dementia Letter Project
No full textLife with dementia urgently needs to be reimagined. The dominant social imaginary of dementia perpetuates a story in which people with dementia cannot have a life that is ‘good’. In this Position Piece we draw from eight letters written for the Dementia Letter project, in which the letters’ authors address their potential future self with dementia. We found that using the creative method of letter writing opened up possibilities for writers to fill uncertain futures with dementia with new experiences and relations, as well as opportunities for exploring multiple temporalities and versions of themselves. We highlight five inspirations from the letters: living with what is, the future as a space of possibility, populating the everyday, folding time, and cultivating multiple selves. Through these, we argue, alternative futures, and a present, with dementia can be reimagined, and made differently
Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene
No full textIntroduction to the special issue \u27Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene\u27, guest edited by Jennie Gamlin, Laura Montesi, Sahra Gibbon, Paola Sesia, Jean Segata, and Ceres Victora
Antibiotic Arrivals in Africa: A Case Study of Yaws and Syphilis in Malawi, Zimbabwe and Uganda
No full textThe mass production of antibiotics in the 1940s enabled their travel beyond Europe and America, but to date the significance of the ways in which these medicines co-constituted colonial regimes at the time has not been systematically described. Through a case study of yaws and syphilis, this research article traces arrivals of antibiotics in three countries of Eastern Africa—Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Uganda. We draw attention to the emergent roles of antibiotics at the intersection of colonial governance and humanitarianism in these different settings. Through this analysis of archival and ethnographic materials, we explore how antibiotics became ‘infrastructural’ in material, affective, and political ways. Achieving a better understanding of the entanglement of antibiotics with human systems and lives is crucial to address the pressing issue of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). With this article we join in the global multidisciplinary efforts to tackle AMR, pointing out the often-overlooked role of colonial history in the circulation of antibiotic drugs, and opening a line of research that will provide valuable insights for the development of effective measures to prevent and reduce the spread of antibiotic resistance
Swan Song: An Account of Organ Donation after Circulatory Death
No full textThis is an account of a procedure of organ donation after circulatory death (DCD) that took place in July 2019 in a French hospital. Based on an ethnography in the neuro intensive care unit (neuro-ICU) of this hospital, I describe the impressions that DCD leaves on those taking part in it, the surprise effects it may produce, and the questions that it poses about what remains alive in a person on the brink of imminent death. This account is also that of a medical and technical complication, the advent of which makes it possible to document how organ donation protocols force doctors to clarify the dividing line between life and death.