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All That Was Not Her
Todd Meyers
Duke University Press, 2022
While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone—what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly’s life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist’s engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their ending.
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Arc of Interference
Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge
João Biehl and Vincanne Adams, editors
Duke University Press, 2023
The radically humanistic essays in Arc of Interference refigure our sense of the real, the ethical, and the political in the face of mounting social and planetary upheavals. Creatively assembled around Arthur Kleinman’s medical anthropological arc and eschewing hegemonic modes of intervention, the essays advance the notion of a care-ful ethnographic praxis of interference. To interfere is to dislodge ideals of naturalness, blast enduring binaries (human/nonhuman, self/other, us/them), and redirect technocratic agendas while summoning relational knowledge and the will to create community. The book’s multiple ethnographic arcs of interference provide a vital conceptual toolkit for today’s world and a badly needed moral perch from which to peer toward just horizons.

Contributors. Vincanne Adams, João Biehl, Davíd Carrasco, Lawrence Cohen, Jean Comaroff, Robert Desjarlais, Paul Farmer, Marcia Inhorn, Janis H. Jenkins, David S. Jones, Salmaan Keshavjee, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Adriana Petryna
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Becoming Gods
Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals
Vania Smith-Oka
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Through rich ethnographic narrative, Becoming Gods examines how a cohort of doctors-in-training in the Mexican city of Puebla learn to become doctors. Smith-Oka draws from compelling fieldwork, ethnography, and interviews with interns, residents, and doctors that tell the story of how medical trainees learn to wield new tools, language, and technology and how their white coat, stethoscope, and newfound technical, linguistic, and sensory skills lend them an authority that they cultivate with each practice, transforming their sense of self. Becoming Gods illustrates the messy, complex, and nuanced nature of medical training, where trainees not only have to acquire a monumental number of skills but do so against a backdrop of strict hospital hierarchy and a crumbling national medical system that deeply shape who they are.
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Beyond Surgery
Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital
Anita Hannig
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Over the past few decades, maternal childbirth injuries have become a potent symbol of Western biomedical intervention in Africa, affecting over one million women across the global south. Western-funded hospitals have sprung up, offering surgical sutures that ostensibly allow women who suffer from obstetric fistula to return to their communities in full health. Journalists, NGO staff, celebrities, and some physicians have crafted a stock narrative around this injury, depicting afflicted women as victims of a backward culture who have their fortunes dramatically reversed by Western aid. With Beyond Surgery, medical anthropologist Anita Hannig unsettles this picture for the first time and reveals the complicated truth behind the idea of biomedical intervention as quick-fix salvation.
 
Through her in-depth ethnography of two repair and rehabilitation centers operating in Ethiopia, Hannig takes the reader deep into a world inside hospital walls, where women recount stories of loss and belonging, shame and delight. As she chronicles the lived experiences of fistula patients in clinical treatment, Hannig explores the danger of labeling “culture” the culprit, showing how this common argument ignores the larger problem of insufficient medical access in rural Africa. Beyond Surgery portrays the complex social outcomes of surgery in an effort to deepen our understanding of medical missions in Africa, expose cultural biases, and clear the path toward more effective ways of delivering care to those who need it most.
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Beyond the Body Proper
Reading the Anthropology of Material Life
Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar, eds.
Duke University Press, 2007
Over the past several decades, scholars in both the social sciences and humanities have moved beyond the idea that there is a “body proper”: a singular, discrete biological organism with an individual psyche. They have begun to perceive embodiment as dynamic rather than static, as experiences that vary over time and across the world as they are shaped by discourses, institutions, practices, technologies, and ideologies. What has emerged is a multiplicity of bodies, inviting a great many disciplinary points of view and modes of interpretation. The forty-seven readings presented in this volume range from classic works of social theory, history, and ethnography to more recent investigations into historical and contemporary modes of embodiment.

Beyond the Body Proper includes nine sections conceptually organized around themes such as everyday life, sex and gender, and science. Each section is preceded by interpretive commentary by the volume’s editors. Within the collection are articles and book excerpts focused on bodies using tools and participating in rituals, on bodies walking and eating, and on the female circumcision controversy, as well as pieces on medical classifications, spirit possession, the commodification of body parts, in vitro fertilization, and an artist/anatomist’s “plastination” of cadavers for display. Materialist, phenomenological, and feminist perspectives on embodiment appear along with writings on interpretations of pain and the changing meanings of sexual intercourse. Essays on these topics and many others challenge Eurocentric assumptions about the body as they speak to each other and to the most influential contemporary trends in the human sciences.

With selections by: Henry Abelove, Walter Benjamin, Janice Boddy, John Boswell, Judith Butler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Stuart Cosgrove, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze, Alice Domurat Dreger, Barbara Duden, Friedrich Engels, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Judith Farquhar, Marcel Granet, Felix Guattari, Ian Hacking, Robert Hertz, Patricia Leyland Kaufert, Arthur Kleinman, Shigehisa Kuriyama, Jean Langford, Bruno Latour, Margaret Lock, Emily Martin, Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nancy K. Miller, Lisa Jean Moore, John D. O’Neil, Aihwa Ong, Mariella Pandolfi, Susan Pedersen, Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Rayna Rapp, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Kristofer Schipper, Matthew Schmidt, Peter Stallybrass, Michael Taussig, Charis Thompson, E.P. Thompson, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Victor Turner, Terence Turner, Jose van Dijck, Keith Wailoo, Brad Weiss, Allon White

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Bioinsecurities
Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species
Neel Ahuja
Duke University Press, 2016
In Bioinsecurities Neel Ahuja argues that U.S. imperial expansion has been shaped by the attempts of health and military officials to control the interactions of humans, animals, viruses, and bacteria at the borders of U.S. influence, a phenomenon called the government of species. The book explores efforts to control the spread of Hansen's disease, venereal disease, polio, smallpox, and HIV through interventions linking the continental United States to Hawai'i, Panamá, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Congo, Iraq, and India in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ahuja argues that racial fears of contagion helped to produce public optimism concerning state uses of pharmaceuticals, medical experimentation, military intervention, and incarceration to regulate the immune capacities of the body. In the process, the security state made the biological structures of human and animal populations into sites of struggle in the politics of empire, unleashing new patient activisms and forms of resistance to medical and military authority across the increasingly global sphere of U.S. influence.
 

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Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America
Issues of Class, Race, and Gender
Hans A. Baer
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001

Examining medical pluralism in the United States from the Revolutionary War period through the end of the twentieth century, Hans Baer brings together in one convenient reference a vast array of information on healing systems as diverse as Christian Science, osteopathy, acupuncture, Santeria, southern Appalachian herbalism, evangelical faith healing, and Navajo healing.
    In a country where the dominant paradigm of biomedicine (medical schools, research hospitals, clinics staffed by M.D.s and R.N.s) has been long established and supported by laws and regulations, the continuing appeal of other medical systems and subsystems bears careful consideration. Distinctions of class, Baer emphasizes, as well as differences in race, ethnicity, and gender, are fundamental to the diversity of beliefs, techniques, and social organizations represented in the phenomenon of medical pluralism.
    Baer traces the simultaneous emergence in the nineteenth century of formalized biomedicine and of homeopathy, botanic medicine, hydropathy, Christian Science, osteopathy, and chiropractic. He examines present-day osteopathic medicine as a system parallel to biomedicine with an emphasis on primary care; chiropractic, naturopathy, and acupuncture as professionalized heterodox medical systems; homeopathy, herbalism, bodywork, and lay midwifery in the context of the holistic health movement; Anglo-American religious healing; and folk medical systems, particularly among racial and ethnic minorities. In closing he focuses on the persistence of folk medical systems among working-class Americans and considers the growing interest of biomedical physicians, pharmaceutical and healthcare corporations, and government in the holistic health movement

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The Body Multiple
Ontology in Medical Practice
Annemarie Mol
Duke University Press, 2002
The Body Multiple is an extraordinary ethnography of an ordinary disease. Drawing on fieldwork in a Dutch university hospital, Annemarie Mol looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. A patient information leaflet might describe atherosclerosis as the gradual obstruction of the arteries, but in hospital practice this one medical condition appears to be many other things. From one moment, place, apparatus, specialty, or treatment, to the next, a slightly different “atherosclerosis” is being discussed, measured, observed, or stripped away. This multiplicity does not imply fragmentation; instead, the disease is made to cohere through a range of tactics including transporting forms and files, making images, holding case conferences, and conducting doctor-patient conversations.

The Body Multiple juxtaposes two distinct texts. Alongside Mol’s analysis of her ethnographic material—interviews with doctors and patients and observations of medical examinations, consultations, and operations—runs a parallel text in which she reflects on the relevant literature. Mol draws on medical anthropology, sociology, feminist theory, philosophy, and science and technology studies to reframe such issues as the disease-illness distinction, subject-object relations, boundaries, difference, situatedness, and ontology. In dialogue with one another, Mol’s two texts meditate on the multiplicity of reality-in-practice.

Presenting philosophical reflections on the body and medical practice through vivid storytelling, The Body Multiple will be important to those in medical anthropology, philosophy, and the social study of science, technology, and medicine.

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Building a New Biocultural Synthesis
Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology
Alan H. Goodman and Thomas L. Leatherman, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Anthropology, with its dual emphasis on biology and culture, is--or should be--the discipline most suited to the study of the complex interactions between these aspects of our lives. Unfortunately, since the early decades of this century, biological and cultural anthropology have grown distinct, and a holistic vision of anthropology has suffered.
This book brings culture and biology back together in new and refreshing ways. Directly addressing earlier criticisms of biological anthropology, Building a New Biocultural Synthesis concerns how culture and political economy affect human biology--e.g., people's nutritional status, the spread of disease, exposure to pollution--and how biological consequences might then have further effects on cultural, social, and economic systems.
Contributors to the volume offer case studies on health, nutrition, and violence among prehistoric and historical peoples in the Americas; theoretical chapters on nonracial approaches to human variation and the development of critical, humanistic and political ecological approaches in biocultural anthropology; and explorations of biological conditions in contemporary societies in relationship to global changes.
Building a New Biocultural Synthesis will sharpen and enrich the relevance of anthropology for understanding a wide variety of struggles to cope with and combat persistent human suffering. It should appeal to all anthropologists and be of interest to sister disciplines such as nutrition and sociology.
Alan H. Goodman is Professor of Anthropology, Hampshire College. Thomas L. Leatherman is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of South Carolina.
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Chronic Conditions, Fluid States
Chronicity and the Anthropology of Illness
Manderson, Lenore
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Chronic Conditions, Fluid States explores the uneven impact of chronic illness and disability on individuals, families, and communities in diverse local and global settings. To date, much of the social as well as biomedical research has treated the experience of illness and the challenges of disease control and management as segmented and episodic. Breaking new ground in medical anthropology by challenging the chronic/acute divide in illness and disease, the editors, along with a group of rising scholars and some of the most influential minds in the field, address the concept of chronicity, an idea used to explain individual and local life-worlds, question public health discourse, and consider the relationship between health and the globalizing forces that shape it.
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Cooking Data
Culture and Politics in an African Research World
Cal (Crystal) Biruk
Duke University Press, 2018
In Cooking Data Crystal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi to rethink the production of quantitative health data. While research practices are often understood within a clean/dirty binary, Biruk shows that data are never clean; rather, they are always “cooked” during their production and inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce them. Examining how the relationships among fieldworkers, supervisors, respondents, and foreign demographers shape data, Biruk examines the ways in which units of information—such as survey questions and numbers written onto questionnaires by fieldworkers—acquire value as statistics that go on to shape national AIDS policy. Her approach illustrates how on-the-ground dynamics and research cultures mediate the production of global health statistics in ways that impact local economies and formulations of power and expertise.
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Crafting Science
A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer
Joan H. Fujimura
Harvard University Press, 1996

During the late 1970s and 1980s, "cancer" underwent a remarkable transformation. In one short decade, what had long been a set of heterogeneous diseases marked by uncontrolled cell growth became a disease of our genes. How this happened and what it means is the story Joan Fujimura tells in a rare inside look at the way science works and knowledge is created. A dramatic study of a new species of scientific revolution, this book combines a detailed ethnography of scientific thought, an in-depth account of science practiced and produced, a history of one branch of science as it entered the limelight, and a view of the impact of new genetic technologies on science and society.

The scientific enterprise that Fujimura unfolds for us is proto-oncogene cancer research--the study of those segments of DNA now thought to make normal cells cancerous. Within this framework, she describes the processes of knowledge construction as a social enterprise, an endless series of negotiations in which theories, material technologies, and practices are co-constructed, incorporated, and refashioned. Along the way, Fujimura addresses long-standing questions in the history and philosophy of science, culture theory, and sociology of science: How do scientists create "good" problems, experiments, and solutions? What are the cultural, institutional, and material technologies that have to be in place for new truths and new practices to succeed?

Portraying the development of knowledge as a multidimensional process conducted through multiple cultures, institutions, actors, objects, and practices, this book disrupts divisions among sociology, history, anthropology, and the philosophy of science, technology, and medicine.

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The Cultural Geography of Health Care
Wilbert M. Gesler
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992

In health care delivery and health care research, basic concepts of cultural behavior are ignored—at a high personal and financial cost—because both fields are dominated by technical solutions and quantitative analysis. They have little use for what is often regarded as irrelevant information.
In this wide-ranging book, written for students and non-specialists, Gesler applies cultural geography to health care and shows that throughout the world, in western and developing countries alike, the social sciences can inform the medical sciences nd make them more effective and less expensive.

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Divination and Healing
Potent Vision
Edited by Michael Winkelman and Philip M. Peek
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Divination is an important feature of cultures all over the world. While some may still question the efficacy of divination systems, they continue to serve their communities by diagnosing ailments, prescribing healing treatments, and solving problems. Yet despite their universality, there are relatively few comprehensive studies of divination systems. This volume seeks to fill this gap regarding the use of divination in healing. Here some of the world’s leading authorities draw on their own fieldwork and participation in ritual to present detailed case studies, demonstrating that divination rituals can have therapeutic effects. As the contributors examine the systems of knowledge that divination articulates and survey the varieties of divinatory experience, they seek to analyze divination as an epistemological system, as a social process, and as a therapeutic endeavor. While some of their findings reinforce traditional assumptions about the importance of social control, spirit relations, and community support in the divination process, the authors place these considerations within new epistemological frameworks that emphasize the use of alternative modes of knowing. In this wide-ranging volume, readers will find coverage of classic Ifa systems; Buddhist-influenced shamanic practices in the former Soviet Union; the reconciliation of Muslim beliefs and divinatory practices in Thailand; Native American divination used in diagnosis; Maya calendrical divination in Guatemala; mediumistic and chicken oracle divination among the Sukuma of Tanzania; Ndembu divination, focusing on the process of collective healing; and divination among the Samburu (Maasai) of Kenya, featuring dialogues from actual healing sessions. Together, these contributions argue for new perspectives on the study of divination that emphasize not only the epistemological roots of these systems but also their multifaceted therapeutic functions. Divination and Healing is a rich source of both data and insight for scholars of ritual, religion, medical anthropology, and the psychology of altered states of consciousness.
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Eliciting Care
Health and Power in Northern Thailand
Bo Kyeong Seo
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
In 2001, Thailand introduced universal health care reforms that have become some of the most celebrated in the world, providing almost its entire population with health protection coverage. However, this remarkable implementation of health policy is not without its weaknesses. Drawing on two years of fieldwork at a district hospital in northern Thailand, Bo Kyeong Seo examines how people in marginal and dependent social positions negotiate the process of obtaining care.
Using the broader concept of elicitation, Seo analyzes the social encounters and forces that shape caregivers. These dynamics challenge dichotomies of subjugation and resistance, consent and coercion, and dependence and autonomy. The intimate and moving stories at the core of Eliciting Care from patients and providers draw attention to a broader, critically important phenomenon at the hospital level. Seo's poignant ethnography engages with feminist theory on the ethics of care, and in so doing, makes a significant contribution to emerging work in the field of health policy and politics.
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Embodying Culture
Pregnancy in Japan and Israel
Ivry, Tsipy
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Embodying Culture is an ethnographically grounded exploration of pregnancy in two different cultures—Japan and Israel—both of which medicalize pregnancy. Tsipy Ivry focuses on "low-risk" or "normal" pregnancies, using cultural comparison to explore the complex relations among ethnic ideas about procreation, local reproductive politics, medical models of pregnancy care, and local modes of maternal agency.

The ethnography pieces together the voices of pregnant Japanese and Israeli women, their doctors, their partners, the literature they read, and depicts various clinical encounters such as ultrasound scans, explanatory classes for amniocentesis, birthing classes, and special pregnancy events.

The emergent pictures suggest that although experiences of pregnancy in Japan and Israel differ, pregnancy in both cultures is an energy-consuming project of meaning-making— suggesting that the sense of biomedical technologies are not only in the technologies themselves but are assigned by those who practice and experience them.

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Ethnicity and Medical Care
Alan Harwood
Harvard University Press, 1981

Ethnicity and Medical Care equips health professionals with the ethnographic data they need to deliver better health care within American communities of urban blacks, Chinese, Haitians, Italians, Mexicans, Navajos, and Puerto Ricans. Each chapter, dealing in turn with one of these seven American subcultures, reviews the available demographic and epidemiological data and examines sociocultural influences on each major phase of illness.

Topics range from culture-specific syndromes such as susto or “evil eye,” to concepts of disease based on blood perturbations or God's punishment, to lay-referral networks, consultation of mainstream and non-mainstream sources of medical care, and adherence to treatment regimens. But ethnic behavior often entails general styles of interaction—attitudes toward authority figures, sex-role allocations, and ways of expressing emotion and asking for help—that are carried over into the healthcare setting. Accordingly, Ethnicity and Medical Care also offers general guidelines for providing more personalized, culturally relevant care for any ethnically affiliated patient.

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Forgotten Bodies
Imperialism, Chuukese Migration, and Stratified Reproduction in Guam
Sarah A. Smith
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Women from Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia, who migrate to Guam, a U.S. territory, suffer disproportionately poor reproductive health outcomes. Though their access to the United States is unusually easy, through a unique migration agreement, it keeps them in a perpetual liminal state as nonimmigrants, who never fully belong as part of the United States Chuukese women move to Guam, sometimes with their families but sometimes alone, in search of a better life: for jobs, for the education system, or to access safe health care. Yet, the imperial system they encounter creates underlying conditions that greatly and disproportionately impact their ability to succeed and thrive, negatively impacting their reproductive health. Through clinical and community ethnography, Sarah A. Smith illuminates the way this system stratifies women’s reproduction at structural, social, and individual levels. Readers can visualize how U.S. imperialist policies of benign neglect control the body politic, change the social body, and render individual bodies vulnerable in the twenty-first century but also how people resist.
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Glyphosate and the Swirl
An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move
Vincanne Adams
Duke University Press, 2022
In Glyphosate and the Swirl Vincanne Adams explores the chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—as a predicament of contested science and chemically saturated life. Adams traces the history of glyphosate’s invention and its multiple uses as activists, regulators, scientists, clinicians, consumers, and sick people try to determine its safety and harm. Scientific and political debates over glyphosate’s toxicity are agitated into a swirl—a condition in which certainty is continually contested, divided, and multiplied. This movement replicates the chemical’s movement in soils, foods, bodies, archives, labs, and legislative bodies, settling in some places here and in other places there, its potencies changing and altering what it touches with different scales and kinds of impact. The swirl is both an artifact of academic capitalism, activist tactics, and contested scientific facts and a way to capture the complexity of contemporary life with chemicals.
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Gut Anthro
An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes
Amber Benezra
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A fascinating ethnography of microbes that opens up new spaces for anthropological inquiry

 

The trillions of microbes in and on our bodies are determined by not only biology but also our social connections. Gut Anthro tells the fascinating story of how a sociocultural anthropologist developed a collaborative “anthropology of microbes” with a human microbial ecologist to address global health crises across disciplines. It asks: what would it mean for anthropology to act with science? Based partly at a preeminent U.S. lab studying the human microbiome, the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University, and partly at a field site in Bangladesh studying infant malnutrition, it examines how microbes travel between human guts in the “field” and in microbiome laboratories, influencing definitions of health and disease, and how the microbiome can change our views on evolution, agency, and life.

As lab scientists studied the interrelationships between gut microbes and malnutrition in resource-poor countries, Amber Benezra explored ways to reconcile the scale and speed differences between the lab, the intimate biosocial practices of Bangladeshi mothers and their children, and the looming structural violence of poverty. In vital ways, Gut Anthro is about what it means to collaborate—with mothers, local field researchers in Bangladesh, massive philanthropic global health organizations, with the microbiome scientists, and, of course, with microbes. It follows microbes through various enactments in scientific research—microbes as kin, as data, and as race. Revealing how racial categories are used in microbiome research, Benezra argues that microbial differences need transdisciplinary collaboration to address racial health disparities without reifying race as a straightforward biological or social designation.

Gut Anthro is a tour de force of science studies and medical anthropology as well as an intensely personal and deeply theoretical accounting of what it means to do anthropology today.

 

Cover alt text:

Black background overlaid with a pink organic path suggestive of a human digestive system. Title appears within the guts as if being processed.

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Healing at the Periphery
Ethnographies of Tibetan Medicine in India
Laurent Pordié and Stephan Kloos, editors
Duke University Press, 2022
India has long occupied an important place in Tibetan medicine's history and development. However, Indian Himalayan practitioners of Tibetan medicine, or amchi, have largely remained overlooked at the Tibetan medical periphery, despite playing a central social and medical role in their communities. Power and legitimacy, religion and economic development, biomedical encounters and Indian geopolitics all intersect in the work and identities of contemporary Himalayan amchi. This volume examines the crucial moment of crisis and transformation that occurred in the early 2000s to offer insights into the beginnings of Tibetan medicine's professionalization, industrialization, and official recognition in India and elsewhere. Based on fine-grained ethnographic studies in Ladakh, Zangskar, Sikkim, and the Darjeeling Hills, Healing at the Periphery asks how the dynamics of capitalism, social change, and the encounter with biomedicine affect small communities on the fringes of modern India, and, conversely, what local transformations of Tibetan medicine tell us about contemporary society and health care in the Himalayas and the Tibetan world.

Contributors. Florian Besch, Calum Blaikie, Sienna R. Craig, Barbara Gerke, Isabelle Guérin, Kim Gutschow, Pascale Hancart Petitet, Stephan Kloos, Fernanda Pirie, Laurent Pordié
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Healing Logics
Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems
Erika Brady
Utah State University Press, 2001

Scholars in folklore and anthropology are more directly involved in various aspects of medicine—such as medical education, clinical pastoral care, and negotiation of transcultural issues—than ever before. Old models of investigation that artificially isolated "folk medicine," "complementary and alternative medicine," and "biomedicine" as mutually exclusive have proven too limited in exploring the real-life complexities of health belief systems as they observably exist and are applied by contemporary Americans. Recent research strongly suggests that individuals construct their health belief systmes from diverse sources of authority, including community and ethnic tradition, education, spiritual beliefs, personal experience, the influence of popular media, and perception of the goals and means of formal medicine. Healing Logics explores the diversity of these belief systems and how they interact—in competing, conflicting, and sometimes remarkably congruent ways. This book contains essays by leading scholars in the field and a comprehensive bibliography of folklore and medicine.

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Health in a Fragile State
Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo
John M. Janzen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Based on extensive field research in the Manianga region of the Lower Congo, Health in a Fragile State is an anthropological account of public health and health care after the collapse of the Congolese state in the 1980s and 1990s. This work brings into focus John M. Janzen's earlier books on African health and healing, revealing the collaborative effort by local, national, and international agencies to create viable alternative institutions to those that represented the centralized state. This book documents and analyzes the realignment of existing institutions and the creation of new ones that shape health and healing.
Janzen explores the manner in which power and information, including science, are legitimized in the preservation and improvement of health. Institutional validity and knowledge empower citizens and health practitioners to gain the upper hand over the region's principal diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, and HIV/AIDS.
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Incommunicable
Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine
Charles L. Briggs
Duke University Press, 2024
In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which negatively affects all patients, doctors, and healthcare providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians—John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and Georges Canguilhem—to show how cultural models of communication and health have historically racialized people of color as being incapable of communicating rationally and understanding biomedical concepts. He outlines incommunicability through a study of COVID-19 discourse, in which health professionals defined the disease based on scientific medical knowledge in ways that reduced varieties of nonprofessional knowledge about COVID-19 to “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories.” This dismissal of nonprofessional knowledge led to a failure of communication that eroded trust in medical expertise. Building on efforts by social movements and coalitions of health professionals and patients to craft more just and equitable futures, Briggs helps imagine health systems and healthcare discourses beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.
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Infertile Environments
Epigenetic Toxicology and the Reproductive Health of Chinese Men
Janelle Lamoreaux
Duke University Press, 2023
In Infertile Environments, Janelle Lamoreaux investigates how epigenetic research into the effects of toxic exposure conceptualizes and configures environments. Drawing on fieldwork in a Nanjing, China, toxicology lab that studies the influence of pesticides and other pollutants on male reproductive and developmental health, Lamoreaux shows how the lab’s everyday research practices bring national, hormonal, dietary, maternal, and laboratory environments into being. She situates the lab’s work within broader Chinese history as well as the contemporary cultural and political moment, in which declining fertility rates and reproductive governance and technology are growing concerns. She also points to how toxicology in China is a transnational endeavor tied to both local conditions and international research agendas and infrastructures, which highlights the myriad scales and scope of epigenetic environments. At a moment of growing concerns about toxins, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and climate change, Lamoreaux demonstrates that epigenetic research’s proliferation of environments produces new kinds of toxic relations that impact multiple generations of humans.
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Life on Ice
A History of New Uses for Cold Blood
Joanna Radin
University of Chicago Press, 2017
After the atomic bombing at the end of World War II, anxieties about survival in the nuclear age led scientists to begin stockpiling and freezing hundreds of thousands of blood samples from indigenous communities around the world. These samples were believed to embody potentially invaluable biological information about genetic ancestry, evolution, microbes, and much more. Today, they persist in freezers as part of a global tissue-based infrastructure. In Life on Ice, Joanna Radin examines how and why these frozen blood samples shaped the practice known as biobanking.
 
The Cold War projects Radin tracks were meant to form an enduring total archive of indigenous blood before it was altered by the polluting forces of modernity. Freezing allowed that blood to act as a time-traveling resource. Radin explores the unique cultural and technical circumstances that created and gave momentum to the phenomenon of life on ice and shows how these preserved blood samples served as the building blocks for biomedicine at the dawn of the genomic age. In an era of vigorous ethical, legal, and cultural debates about genetic privacy and identity, Life on Ice reveals the larger picture—how we got here and the promises and problems involved with finding new uses for cold human blood samples.
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Medical Anthropology at the Intersections
Histories, Activisms, and Futures
Marcia C. Inhorn and Emily A. Wentzell, eds.
Duke University Press, 2012
In this important collection, prominent scholars who helped to establish medical anthropology as an area of study reflect on the field's past, present, and future. In doing so, they demonstrate that medical anthropology has developed dynamically, through its intersections with activism, with other subfields in anthropology, and with disciplines as varied as public health, the biosciences, and studies of race and ethnicity. Each of the contributors addresses one or more of these intersections. Some trace the evolution of medical anthropology in relation to fields including feminist technoscience, medical history, and international and area studies. Other contributors question the assumptions underlying mental health, global public health, and genetics and genomics, areas of inquiry now central to contemporary medical anthropology. Essays on the field's engagements with disability studies, public policy, and gender and sexuality studies illuminate the commitments of many medical anthropologists to public-health and human-rights activism. Essential reading for all those interested in medical anthropology, this collection offers productive insight into the field and its future, as viewed by some of the world's leading medical anthropologists.

Contributors
. Lawrence Cohen, Didier Fassin, Faye Ginsburg, Marcia C. Inhorn, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Emily Martin, Lynn M. Morgan, Richard Parker, Rayna Rapp, Merrill Singer, Emily A. Wentzell
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Near Human
Border Zones of Species, Life, and Belonging
Mette N. Svendsen
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Near Human takes us into the borders of human and animal life. In the animal facility, fragile piglets substitute for humans who cannot be experimented on. In the neonatal intensive care unit, extremely premature infants prompt questions about whether they are too fragile to save or, if they survive, whether they will face a life of severe disability. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out on farms, in animal-based experimental science labs, and in hospitals, Mette N. Svendsen shows that practices of substitution redirect the question of "what it means" to be human to "what it takes" to be human. The near humanness of preterm infants and research piglets becomes an avenue to unravel how neonatal life is imagined, how societal belonging is evaluated, and how the Danish welfare state is forged. This courageous multi-sited and multi-species approach cracks open the complex ethical field of valuating life and making different kinds of pigs and different kinds of humans belong in Denmark.
 
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Nested Ecologies
A Multilayered Ethnography of Functional Medicine
Rosalynn A. Vega
University of Texas Press, 2023

How functional medicine leverages systems biology and epigenetic science to treat the microbiome and reverse chronic disease.

Each body is a system within a system—an ecology within the larger context of social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental factors. This is one of the lessons of epigenetics, whereby structural inequalities are literally encoded in our genes. But our ecological embeddedness extends beyond DNA, for each body also teems with trillions of bacteria, yeast, and fungi, all of them imprints of our individual milieus. Nested Ecologies asks what it would mean to take seriously our microbial being, given that our internal ecologies are shaped by inequalities embedded in our physical and social environments.

Further, Rosalynn Vega argues that health practices focused on patients’ unique biology inadvertently reiterate systemic inequities. In particular, functional medicine—which attempts to heal chronic disease by leveraging epigenetic science and treating individual microbiomes—reduces illness to problems of “lifestyle,” principally diet, while neglecting the inability of poor people to access nutrition. Functional medicine thus undermines its own critique of the economics of health care. Drawing on novel digital ethnographies and reflecting on her own experience of chronic illness, Vega challenges us to rethink not only the determinants of well-being but also what it is to be human.

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Obesity
Cultural and Biocultural Perspectives
Brewis, Alexandra A
Rutgers University Press, 2010
In a world now filled with more people who are overweight than underweight, public health and medical perspectives paint obesity as a catastrophic epidemic that threatens to overwhelm health systems and undermine life expectancies globally. In many societies, being obese also creates profound personal suffering because it is so culturally stigmatized. Yet despite loud messages about the health and social costs of being obese, weight gain is a seemingly universal aspect of the modern human condition.

Grounded in a holistic anthropological approach and using a range of ethnographic and ecological case studies, Obesity shows that the human tendency to become and stay fat makes perfect sense in terms of evolved human inclinations and the physical and social realities of modern life. Drawing on her own fieldwork in the rural United States, Mexico, and the Pacific Islands over the last two decades, Alexandra A. Brewis addresses such critical questions as why obesity is defined as a problem and why some groups are so much more at risk than others. She suggests innovative ways that anthropology and other social sciences can use community-based research to address the serious public health and social justice concerns provoked by the global spread of obesity.
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The Origin of the World
Science and Fiction of the Vagina
Jelto Drenth
Reaktion Books, 2004
The Origin of the World is a revealing, intimate, and ultimately liberating study of female sexuality at its heart: the vagina. Working from the assumption that sex is pleasurable and fulfilling insofar as its participants fully understand how it works, sexologist Jelto Drenth gives readers a guided tour of the complex, challenging, and often misunderstood "origin of the world."

Drenth describes the workings of the vagina in simple language, enriching his description throughout the book with the imagery, mythology, lore, and history that has surrounded the vagina since the Middle Ages. The Origin of the World moves from basic physiognomic facts to the realms of anthropology, art history, science fiction, and feminist literature-all in the service of mapping the dark continent. Drenth's journey takes him from Renaissance woodcuts to vibrators, clitoridectomies to "virginity checks," fears of the vagina (the vagina dentata) to its celebration. Part medical exposition covering the function of female genitalia from orgasm to pregnancy and part cultural history discussing contemporary and historical views of such aspects of the feminine as pubic hair, Freud's theories of coitus, and slang terms for the vagina, The Origin of the World is encyclopedic in its breadth, fascinating in its content, and familiar in its subject.

This lightly written exploration can be seen as both an owner's manual and a guide for the perplexed. Women and men alike will benefit from its entertaining erudition and from its fundamental mission of demystifying sex and sexuality in the service of greater understanding and, from that understanding, greater pleasure.
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Pandora's Box
Ethnography and the Comparison of Medical Beliefs: The 1979 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures
Gilbert Lewis
HAU, 2020
In this book, written between 1979 and 2020, Gilbert Lewis distills a lifetime of insights he garnered as a medical anthropologist. He asks: How do different cultures' beliefs about illness influence patients' abilities to heal? Despite the advances of Western medicine, what can it learn from non-Western societies that consider sickness and curing to be as much a matter of social relationships as biological states? What problems arise when one set of therapeutic practices displaces another?

Lewis compares Indigenous medical beliefs in New Guinea in 1968, when villagers were largely self-reliant, and in 1983, after they became dependent on Western medicine. He then widens his comparative scope by turning to West Africa and discussing a therapeutic community run by a prophet who heals the ill through confession and long-term residential care.

Pandora's Box began life with the prestigious Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures that Gilbert Lewis delivered in 1979 at the University of Rochester. He expanded them with materials gathered over the next forty years, completing the manuscript a few weeks before his death. Engagingly written, this book will inspire anthropologists, medical professionals, students, and curious readers to look with new eyes at current crises in world health.
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Rebirth of the Clinic
Places and Agents in Contemporary Health Care
Cindy Patton
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
From physical location to payment processes to expectations of both patients and caregivers, nearly everything surrounding the contemporary medical clinic's central activity has changed since Michel Foucualt's Birth of the Clinic. Indebted to that work, but recognizing the gap between what the modern clinic hoped to be and what it has become, Rebirth of the Clinic explores medical practices that shed light on the fraught relationship between medical systems, practitioners, and patients.

Combining theory, history, and ethnography, the contributors to this volume ground today's clinic in a larger scheme of power relations, identifying the cultural, political, and economic pressures that frame clinical relationships, including the instrumentalist definition of health, actuarial-based medical practices, and patient self-help movements, which simultaneously hem in and create the conditions under which agents creatively change ideas of illness and treatment.

From threatened community health centers in poor African American locales to innovative nursing practices among the marginally housed citizens of Canada's poorest urban neighborhood, this volume addresses not just the who, what, where, and how of place-specific clinical practices, but also sets these local experiences against a theoretical backdrop that links them to the power of modern medicine in shaping fundamental life experiences.
 
Contributors: Christine Ceci, U of Alberta; Lisa Diedrich, Stony Brook U; Suzanne Fraser, Monash U; John Liesch, Simon Fraser U; Jenna Loyd, CUNY; Annemarie Mol, U of Amsterdam; Mary Ellen Purkis, U of Victoria.
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The Republic of Therapy
Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS
Vinh-Kim Nguyen
Duke University Press, 2010
The Republic of Therapy tells the story of the global response to the HIV epidemic from the perspective of community organizers, activists, and people living with HIV in West Africa. Drawing on his experiences as a physician and anthropologist in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, Vinh-Kim Nguyen focuses on the period between 1994, when effective antiretroviral treatments for HIV were discovered, and 2000, when the global health community acknowledged a right to treatment, making the drugs more available. During the intervening years, when antiretrovirals were scarce in Africa, triage decisions were made determining who would receive lifesaving treatment. Nguyen explains how those decisions altered social relations in West Africa. In 1994, anxious to “break the silence” and “put a face to the epidemic,” international agencies unwittingly created a market in which stories about being HIV positive could be bartered for access to limited medical resources. Being able to talk about oneself became a matter of life or death. Tracing the cultural and political logic of triage back to colonial classification systems, Nguyen shows how it persists in contemporary attempts to design, fund, and implement mass treatment programs in the developing world. He argues that as an enactment of decisions about who may live, triage constitutes a partial, mobile form of sovereignty: what might be called therapeutic sovereignty.
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Sweetness in the Blood
Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes
James Doucet-Battle
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A bold new indictment of the racialization of science

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.

James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes.

Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.

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Theories of Illness
A World Survey
George Peter Murdock
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980

An important contribution to medical anthropology, this work defines the principal causes if illness that are reported throughout the world, distinguishing those involving natural causation from the more widely prevalent hypotheses advancing supernatural explanations.

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Thinking About Dementia
Culture, Loss, and the Anthropology of Senility
Leibing, Annette
Rutgers University Press, 2006

Bringing together essays by nineteen respected scholars, this volume approaches dementia from a variety of angles, exploring its historical, psychological, and philosophical implications. The authors employ a cross-cultural perspective that is based on ethnographic fieldwork and focuses on questions of age, mind, voice, self, loss, temporality, memory, and affect.

Taken together, the essays make four important and interrelated contributions to our understanding of the mental status of the elderly. First, cross-cultural data show that the aging process, while biologically influenced, is also culturally constructed. Second, ethnographic reports raise questions about the diagnostic criteria used for defining the elderly as demented. Third, case studies show how a diagnosis affects a patient's treatment in both clinical and familial settings. Finally, the collection highlights the gap that separates current biological understandings of aging from its cultural meanings.

As Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia continue to command an ever-increasing amount of attention in medicine and psychology, this book will be essential reading for anthropologists, social scientists, and health care professionals.

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An Uncertain Cure
Living with Leprosy in Brazil
White, Cassandra
Rutgers University Press, 2008
In many cultures, leprosy elicits fear, stigma, and misunderstanding. Historically, people affected by leprosy were banished or isolated from the rest of society. Although the worldwide incidence of leprosy has declined markedly over the past quarter century with the advent of new multidrug therapies, developing nations are still encountering a high number of cases.

In An Uncertain Cure, Cassandra White goes deep into the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro to give a riveting account of the contemporary leprosy experience among poor and working class Brazilians. In this ethnographic treatment of leprosy sufferers, White exposes the web of historical, socioeconomic, religious, and political forces that complicate the path to wellness and perpetuate high rates of infection. Drawing on nearly ten years of research, White shows how anthropological research can contribute to more effective treatment of chronic infectious diseases around the world.

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With Shaking Hands
Aging with Parkinson's Disease in America's Heartland
Solimeo, Samantha
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Far from celebrity media spotlight, ordinary individuals, many older and less advantaged, suffer the disabling pain of Parkinson's disease (PD), an illness whose progressive symptoms often mimic old age and cause mobility impairment, communication barriers, and social isolation.

At the heart of With Shaking Hands is the account of elder Americans in rural Iowa who have been diagnosed with PD. With a focus on the impact of chronic illness on an aging population, Samantha Solimeo combines clear and accessible prose with qualitative and quantitative research to demonstrate how PD accelerates, mediates, and obscures patterns of aging. She explores how ideas of what to expect in older age influence and direct interpretations of one's body.

This sensitive and groundbreaking work unites theories of disease with modern conceptions of the body in biological and social terms. PD, like other chronic disorders, presents a special case of embodiment which challenge our thinking about how such diseases should be researched and how they are experienced.

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Women as Healers
Cross-Cultural Perspectives
McClain, Carol Shepherd
Rutgers University Press, 1989

In Women as Healers, thirteen contributors explore the intersection of feminist anthropology and medical anthropology in eleven case studies of women in traditional and emergent healing roles in diverse parts of the world. In a spectrum of healing roles ranging from family healers to shamans, diviner-mediums, and midwives, women throughout the world pursue strategic ends through healing, manipulate cultural images to effect cures and explain misfortune, and shape and are shaped by the social and political contexts in which they work. In an introductory chapter, Carol Shepherd McClain traces the evolution of ideas in medical anthropology and in the anthropology of women that have both constrained and expanded our understanding of the significance of gender to healing-one of the most fundamental and universal of human activities.

The contributors include Carol Shepherd McClain, Ruthbeth Finerman, Carolyn Nordstrom, Carole H. Browner, William Wedenoja, Marjery Foz, Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern, Laurel Kendall, Merrill  Signer, Roberto Garcia, Edward C. Green, Carolyn Sargent, and Margaret Reid.

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Your Pocket Is What Cures You
The Politics of Health in Senegal
Foley, Ellen E
Rutgers University Press, 2009
In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, and many Africans have limited access to basic medical care. Using a community-level approach, anthropologist Ellen E. Foley analyzes the implementation of global health policies and how they become intertwined with existing social and political inequalities in Senegal. Your Pocket Is What Cures You examines qualitative shifts in health and healing spurred by these reforms, and analyzes the dilemmas they create for health professionals and patients alike. It also explores how cultural frameworks, particularly those stemming from Islam and Wolof ethnomedicine, are central to understanding how people manage vulnerability to ill health.

While offering a critique of neoliberal health policies, Your Pocket Is What Cures You remains grounded in ethnography to highlight the struggles of men and women who are precariously balanced on twin precipices of crumbling health systems and economic decline. Their stories demonstrate what happens when market-based health reforms collide with material, political, and social realities in African societies.

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