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By Subject: Medical Anthropology

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• eBook available July 2010

  Abortion in Asia

  Local Dilemmas, Global Politics

  Whittaker, A. (ed)

  The issue of abortion forces a confrontation with the effects of poverty and economic inequalities, local moral worlds, and the cultural and social perceptions of the female body, gender, and reproduction. Based on extensive original field research, this provocative collection presents case studies from Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and India. It includes powerful insight into the conditions and hard choices faced by women and the circumstances surrounding unplanned pregnancies. It explores the connections among poverty, violence, barriers to access, and the politics and strategies involved in abortion law reform. The contributors analyze these issues within the broader conflicts surrounding women's status, gender roles, religion, nationalism and modernity, as well as the global politics of reproductive health.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available May 2020

  Abortion in Post-revolutionary Tunisia

  Politics, Medicine and Morality

  Maffi, I.

  After the revolution of 2011, the electoral victory of the Islamist party ‘Ennahdha’ allowed previously silenced religious and conservative ideas about women’s right to abortion to be expressed. This also allowed healthcare providers in the public sector to refuse abortion and contraceptive care. This book explores the changes and continuity in the local discourses and practices related to the body, sexuality, reproduction and gender relationships. It also investigates how the bureaucratic apparatus of government healthcare facilities affects the complex moral world of clinicians and patients.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available November 2019

  Access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies

  The Case of France and Belgium

  Merchant, J. (ed)

  Despite France and Belgium sharing and interacting constantly with similar culinary tastes, music and pop culture, access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies are strikingly different. Discrimination written into French law acutely contrasts with non-discriminatory access to ART in Belgium. The contributors of this volume are social scientists from France, Belgium, England and the United States, representing different disciplines: law, political science, philosophy, sociology and anthropology. Each author has attempted, through the prism of their specialties, to demonstrate and analyse how and why this striking difference in access to ART exists.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• June 2015

  Achieving Procreation

  Childlessness and IVF in Turkey

  Demircioğlu Göknar, M.

  Managing social relationships for childless couples in pro-natalist societies can be a difficult art to master, and may even become an issue of belonging for both men and women. With ethnographic research gathered from two IVF clinics and in two villages in northwestern Turkey, this book explores infertility and assisted reproductive technologies within a secular Muslim population. Göknar investigates the experience of infertility through various perspectives, such as the importance of having a child for women, the mediating role of religion, the power dynamics in same-gender relationships, and the impact of manhood ideologies on the decision for — or against — having IVF.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• March 2005

  Ageing Without Children

  European and Asian Perspectives on Elderly Access to Support Networks

  Kreager, P. & Schröder-Butterfill, E. (eds)

  Rapid fertility declines and improved longevity are now shifting the overall balance of population towards older ages in many parts of the world. Within this growing population of older people there are many groups with particular needs about which relatively little is known. This collection focuses on one such sub-population, the elderly without children. Few would deny that childlessness poses potential human and welfare problems for older people without them. What is less well known is that comparative anthropological and historical demographic research indicates that childlessness is a recurring social phenomenon that has affected 1 in 5 older women in many cultures and historical periods. High levels of childlessness arise not solely or primarily from biological factors like primary sterility, but from a combination of actors. Many, like non-marriage, delayed childbearing , and pathological sterility, reflect the interaction of social and biological influences.

  Also of major importance are factors that remove the support of children from elders' lives: migration, mortality, divorce, remarriage, family enmity, social mobility, and the pressing demands of family and career on younger generations. The papers collected in this volume employ a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to define and characterize the experience of ageing without children.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• June 2015

  Aging and the Digital Life Course

  Prendergast, D. & Garattini, C. (eds)

  Across the life course, new forms of community, ways of keeping in contact, and practices for engaging in work, healthcare, retail, learning and leisure are evolving rapidly. Breaking new ground in the study of technology and aging, this book examines how developments in smart phones, the internet, cloud computing, and online social networking are redefining experiences and expectations around growing older in the twenty-first century. Drawing on contributions from leading commentators and researchers across the world, this book explores key themes such as caregiving, the use of social media, robotics, chronic disease and dementia management, gaming, migration, and data inheritance, to name a few.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• May 2003

  Aging in Today's World

  Conversations between an Anthropologist and a Physician

  Shield, R. R. & Aronson, S. M.

  Never before in human existence have the aged been so numerous — and for the most part — healthy. In this important new book, two professionals, an anthropologist and a physician, wrestle with the complex subject of aging. Is it inevitable? Is it a burden or gift? What is successful aging? Why are some people better at aging than others? Where is aging located? How does it vary among individuals, within and between groups, cultures, societies, and indeed, over the centuries? Reflecting on these and other questions, the authors comment on the impact age has in their lives and work.

  Two unique viewpoints are presented. While medicine approaches aging with special attention given to the body, its organs, and its functions over time, anthropology focuses on how the aged live within their cultural settings. As this volume makes clear, the two disciplines have a great deal to teach each other, and in a spirited exchange, the authors show how professional barriers can be surmounted.

  In a novel approach, each author explores a different aspect of aging in alternating chapters. These chapters are in turn followed by a commentary by the other. Further, the authors interrupt each other within the chapters - to raise questions, contradict, ask for clarification, and explore related ideas - with these interjections emphasizing the dynamic nature of their ideas about age. Finally, a third "voice" - that of a random old man - periodically inserts itself into the text to remind the authors of their necessarily limited understanding of the subject.

  Subjects: Applied Anthropology Sociology Medical Anthropology

• eBook available October 2017

  The Anthropology of the Fetus

  Biology, Culture, and Society

  Han, S., Betsinger, T. K., & Scott, A. B. (eds)

  As a biological, cultural, and social entity, the human fetus is a multifaceted subject which calls for equally diverse perspectives to fully understand. Anthropology of the Fetus seeks to achieve this by bringing together specialists in biological anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. Contributors draw on research in prehistoric, historic, and contemporary sites in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and North America to explore the biological and cultural phenomenon of the fetus, raising methodological and theoretical concerns with the ultimate goal of developing a holistic anthropology of the fetus.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available December 2005

  Applications of Anthropology

  Professional Anthropology in the Twenty-first Century

  Pink, S. (ed)

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century the demand for anthropological approaches, understandings and methodologies outside academic departments is shifting and changing. Through a series of fascinating case studies of anthropologists’ experiences of working with very diverse organizations in the private and public sector this volume examines existing and historical debates about applied anthropology. It explores the relationship between the "pure and the impure" – academic and applied anthropology, the question of anthropological identities in new working environments, new methodologies appropriate to these contexts, the skills needed by anthropologists working in applied contexts where multidisciplinary work is often undertaken, issues of ethics and responsibility, and how anthropology is perceived from the ‘outside’. The volume signifies an encouraging future both for the application of anthropology outside academic departments and for the new generation of anthropologists who might be involved in these developments.

  Subjects: Applied Anthropology Medical Anthropology

• September 2015

  Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the Third Phase

  Global Encounters and Emerging Moral Worlds

  Hampshire, K. & Simpson, B. (eds)

  Following the birth of the first “test-tube baby” in 1978, Assisted Reproductive Technologies became available to a small number of people in high-income countries able to afford the cost of private treatment, a period seen as the “First Phase” of ARTs. In the “Second Phase,” these treatments became increasingly available to cosmopolitan global elites. Today, this picture is changing — albeit slowly and unevenly — as ARTs are becoming more widely available. While, for many, accessing infertility treatments remains a dream, these are beginning to be viewed as a standard part of reproductive healthcare and family planning. This volume highlights this “Third Phase” — the opening up of ARTs to new constituencies in terms of ethnicity, geography, education, and class.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• August 2009

  Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes

  Global Encounters with the New Biotechnologies

  Birenbaum-Carmeli, D. & Inhorn, M. C. (eds)

  Following the routinization of assisted reproduction in the industrialized world, technologies such as in vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and DNA-based paternity testing have traveled globally and are now being offered to couples in numerous non-Western countries. This volume explores the application and impact of these advanced reproductive and genetic technologies in societies across the globe. By highlighting both the cross-cultural similarities and diverse meanings that technologies may assume as they enter multiple contexts, the book aims to foster understanding of both the technologies and the settings. Enhanced by cross-cultural perspectives, the book addresses the challenges that globalization presents to local understandings of science, technology, and medicine.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• May 2014

  Asymmetrical Conversations

  Contestations, Circumventions, and the Blurring of Therapeutic Boundaries

  Naraindas, H., Quack, J., & Sax, W. S. (eds)

  Ideas about health are reinforced by institutions and their corresponding practices, such as donning a patient's gown in a hospital or prostrating before a healing shrine. Even though we are socialized into regarding such ideologies as "natural" and unproblematic, we sometimes seek to bypass, circumvent, or even transcend the dominant ideologies of our cultures as they are manifested in the institutions of health care. The contributors to this volume describe such contestations and circumventions of health ideologies, and the blurring of therapeutic boundaries, on the basis of case studies from India, the South Asian Diaspora, and Europe, focusing on relations between body, mind, and spirit in a variety of situations. The result is not always the "live and let live" medical pluralism that is described in the literature.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available August 2018

  Being a Sperm Donor

  Masculinity, Sexuality, and Biosociality in Denmark

  Mohr, S.

  What does it mean to be a man in our biomedical day and age? Through ethnographic explorations of the everyday lives of Danish sperm donors, Being a Sperm Donor explores how masculinity and sexuality are reconfigured in a time in which the norms and logics of (reproductive) biomedicine have become ordinary. It investigates men’s moral reasoning regarding donation, their handling of transgressive experiences at the sperm bank, and their negotiations of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and relatedness, showing how the socio-cultural and political dimensions of (reproductive) biomedicine become intertwined with men’s intimate sense of self.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• October 2016

  Biomedical Entanglements

  Conceptions of Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Society

  Herbst, F. A.

  Biomedical Entanglements is an ethnographic study of the Giri people of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the indigenous population’s interaction with modern medicine. In her fieldwork, Franziska A. Herbst follows the Giri people as they circulate within and around ethnographic sites that include a rural health center and an urban hospital. The study bridges medical anthropology and global health, exploring how the ‘biomedical’ is imbued with social meaning and how biomedicine affects Giri ways of life.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available August 2013

  The Body in Balance

  Humoral Medicines in Practice

  Horden, P. & Hsu, E. (eds)

  Focusing on practice more than theory, this collection offers new perspectives for studying the so-called “humoral medical traditions,” as they have flourished around the globe during the last 2,000 years. Exploring notions of “balance” in medical cultures across Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, from antiquity to the present, the volume revisits “harmony” and “holism” as main characteristics of those traditions. It foregrounds a dynamic notion of balance and asks how balance is defined or conceptualized, by whom, for whom and in what circumstances. Balance need not connoteegalitarianism or equilibrium. Rather, it alludes to morals of self care exercised in place of excessiveness and indulgences after long periods of a life in dearth. As the moral becomes visceral, the question arises: what constitutes the visceral in a body that is in constant flux and flow? How far, and in what ways, are there fundamental properties or constituents in those bodies?

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• June 2020

  Borders across Healthcare

  Moral Economies of Healthcare and Migration in Europe

  Sahraoui, N. (ed)

  Examining which actors determine undocumented migrants’ access to healthcare on the ground, this volume looks at what happens in the daily interactions between administrative personnel, healthcare professionals and migrant patients in healthcare institutions across Europe. Borders across Healthcare explores contemporary moral economies of the healthcare-migration nexus. The volume documents the many ways in which borders come to disrupt healthcare settings and illuminates how judgements of a health-related deservingness become increasingly important, producing hierarchies that undermine a universal right to healthcare.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Mobility Studies Sociology

• June 2005

  Breast Feeding and Sexuality

  Behaviour, Beliefs and Taboos among the Gogo Mothers in Tanzania

  Mabilia, M.

  Whereas in western countries breastfeeding is an uncontroversial, purely personal issue, in most parts of the world mother and baby form part of a network of interpersonal relations with its own rules and expectations. In this study, the author examines the cultural and social context of breastfeeding among the Gogo women of the Cigongwe's village in Tanzania, as part of the Paediatric Programme of Doctors with Africa, based in Padua. The focus is on mothers' behaviour and post partum taboos as key elements in Gogo understanding of the vicissitudes of the breast feeding process. This nutritional period is subject to many different events both physical and social that may upset the natural and intense link between mother and child. Any violation of cultural norms, particularly those dealing with sexual behaviour, marriage and reproduction, can, in the eyes of the Gogo, put at risk the correct development of an infant with serious consequences both for the baby's health as well as for the woman's image as mother and wife.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available May 2018

  Capturing Quicksilver

  The Position, Power, and Plasticity of Chinese Medicine in Singapore

  Smith, A. A.

  Since the turn of the century Singapore has sustained a reputation for both austere governance and cutting-edge biomedical facilities and research. Seeking to emphasize Singapore’s capacity for “modern medicine” and strengthen their burgeoning biopharmaceutical industry, this image has explicitly excluded Chinese medicine – despite its tremendous popularity amongst Singaporeans from all walks of life, and particularly amongst Singapore’s ethnic Chinese majority. This book examines the use and practice of Chinese medicine in Singapore, especially in everyday life, and contributes to anthropological debates regarding the post-colonial intersection of knowledge, identity, and governmentality, and to transnational studies of Chinese medicine as a permeable, plural, and fluid practice.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2018

  Care across Distance

  Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration

  Hromadžić, A. & Palmberger, M. (eds)

  World-wide migration has an unsettling effect on social structures, especially on aging populations and eldercare. This volume investigates how taken-for-granted roles are challenged, intergenerational relationships transformed, economic ties recalibrated, technological innovations utilized, and spiritual relations pursued and desired, and asks what it means to care at a distance and to age abroad. What it does show is that trans-nationalization of care produces unprecedented convergences of people, objects and spaces that challenge our assumptions about the who, how, and where of care.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available September 2009

  Childbirth, Midwifery and Concepts of Time

  McCourt, C. (ed)

  All cultures are concerned with the business of childbirth, so much so that it can never be described as a purely physiological or even psychological event. This volume draws together work from a range of anthropologists and midwives who have found anthropological approaches useful in their work. Using case studies from a variety of cultural settings, the writers explore the centrality of the way time is conceptualized, marked and measured to the ways of perceiving and managing childbirth: how women, midwives and other birth attendants are affected by issues of power and control, but also actively attempt to change established forms of thinking and practice. The stories are engaging as well as critical and invite the reader to think afresh about time, and about reproduction.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• July 2022

  Chinese Medicine in East Africa

  An Intimacy with Strangers

  Hsu, E.

  Based on fieldwork conducted between 2001-2008 in urban East Africa, this book explores who the patients, practitioners and paraprofessionals doing Chinese medicine were in this early period of renewed China-Africa relations. Rather than taking recourse to the ‘placebo effect’, the author explains through the spatialities and materialities of the medical procedures provided why -  apart from purchasing the Chinese antimalarial called Artemisinin -  locals would try out their ‘alternatively modern’ formulas for treating a wide range of post-colonial disorders and seek their sexual enhancement medicines.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available May 2012

  Collaborators Collaborating

  Counterparts in Anthropological Knowledge and International Research Relations

  Konrad, M. (ed)

  As bio-capital in the form of medical knowledge, skills and investments moves with greater frequency from its origin in First World industrialized settings to resource-poor communities with weak or little infrastructure, countries with emerging economies are starting to expand new indigenous science bases of their own. The case studies here, from the UK, West Africa, Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea, Latin America and elsewhere, explore the forms of collaborative knowledge relations in play and the effects of ethics review and legal systems on local communities, and also demonstrate how anthropologically-informed insights may hope to influence key policy debates. Questions of governance in science and technology, as well as ethical issues related to bio-innovation, are increasingly being featured as topics of complex resourcing and international debate, and this volume is a much-needed resource for interdisciplinary practitioners and specialists in medical anthropology, social theory, corporate ethics, science and technology studies.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Applied Anthropology

• October 2008

  Conceiving Kinship

  Assisted Conception, Procreation and Family in Southern Europe

  Bonaccorso, M. M. E.

  Conceiving Kinship is an in-depth journey, the first of its kind, into how heterosexual, lesbian and gay couples using programmes of gamete donation conceptualize and make Italian kinship. It explores the provision of treatment in clinical and non-clinical settings at a time when Italy was considered the 'Wild-West' of assisted conception. This compelling study provides a new perspective on hotly debated issues in kinship studies and the modern medical technologies; it offers fresh insights into longstanding questions of cultural continuities and discontinuities in European kinship.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available August 2016

  Conceptions

  Infertility and Procreative Technologies in India

  Bharadwaj, A.

  Infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in India lie at the confluence of multiple cultural conceptions. These ‘conceptions’ are key to understanding the burgeoning spread of assisted reproductive technologies and the social implications of infertility and childlessness in India. This longitudinal study is situated in a number of diverse locales which, when taken together, unravel the complex nature of infertility and assisted conception in contemporary India.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available February 2022

  Configuring Contagion

  Ethnographies of Biosocial Epidemics

  Meinert, L. & Seeberg, J. (eds)

  Expanding our understanding of contagion beyond the typical notions of infection and pandemics, this book widens the field to include the concept of biosocial epidemics. The chapters propose varied and detailed answers to questions about epidemics and their contagious potential for specific infections and non-infectious conditions. Together they explore how inseparable social and biological processes configure co-existing influences, which create epidemics, and in doing so stress the role of social inequality in these processes. The authors compellingly show that epidemics do not spread evenly in populations or through simple coincidental biological contagion: they are biosocially structured and selective, and happen under specific economic, political and environmental conditions. This volume illustrates that an understanding of biosocial factors is vital for ensuring effective strategies for the containment of epidemics.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available December 2005

  Conjuring Hope

  Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia

  Lindquist, G.

  Notions of magic and healing have been changing over past years and are now understood as reflecting local ideas of power and agency, as well as structures of self, subjectivity and affect. This study focuses on contemporary urban Russia and, through exploring social conditions, conveys the experience of living that makes magic logical. By following people’s own interpretations of the work of magic, the author succeeds in unraveling the logic of local practice and local understanding of affliction, commonly used to diagnose the experiences of illness and misfortune.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available June 2016

  Cosmos, Gods and Madmen

  Frameworks in the Anthropologies of Medicine

  Littlewood, R. & Lynch, R. (eds)

  The social anthropology of sickness and health has always been concerned with religious cosmologies: how societies make sense of such issues as prediction and control of misfortune and fate; the malevolence of others; the benevolence (or otherwise) of the mystical world; local understanding and explanations of the natural and ultra-human worlds. This volume presents differing categorizations and conflicts that occur as people seek to make sense of suffering and their experiences. Cosmologies, whether incorporating the divine or as purely secular, lead us to interpret human action and the human constitution, its ills and its healing and, in particular, ways which determine and limit our very possibilities.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available January 2015

  Cousin Marriages

  Between Tradition, Genetic Risk and Cultural Change

  Shaw, A. & Raz, A. (eds)

  Juxtaposing contributions from geneticists and anthropologists, this volume provides a contemporary overview of cousin marriage and what is happening at the interface of public policy, the management of genetic risk and changing cultural practices in the Middle East and in multi-ethnic Europe. It offers a cross-cultural exploration of practices of cousin marriage in the light of new genetic understanding of consanguineous marriage and its possible health risks. Overall, the volume presents a reflective, interdisciplinary analysis of the social and ethical issues raised by both the discourse of risk in cousin marriage, as well as existing and potential interventions to promote “healthy consanguinity” via new genetic technologies.
   

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available February 2012

  The Cult and Science of Public Health

  A Sociological Investigation

  Dew, K.

  In contemporary manifestations of public health rituals and events, people are being increasingly united around what they hold in common—their material being and humanity. As a cult of humanity, public health provides a moral force in society that replaces ‘traditional’ religions in times of great diversity or heterogeneity of peoples, activities and desires. This is in contrast to public health’s foundation in science, particularly the science of epidemiology. The rigid rules of ‘scientific evidence’ used to determine the cause of illness and disease can work against the most vulnerable in society by putting sectors of the population, such as underrepresented workers, at a disadvantage. This study focuses on this tension between traditional science and the changing vision articulated within public health (and across many disciplines) that calls for a collective response to uncontrolled capitalism and unremitting globalization, and to the way in which health inequalities and their association with social inequalities provides a political rhetoric that calls for a new redistributive social programme. Drawing on decades of research, the author argues that public health is both a cult and a science of contemporary society.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Medical Anthropology

• November 2014

  The Cultural Politics of Reproduction

  Migration, Health and Family Making

  Unnithan-Kumar, M. & Khanna, S. K. (eds)

  Charting the experiences of internally or externally migrant communities, the volume examines social transformation through the dynamic relationship between movement, reproduction, and health. The chapters examine how healthcare experiences of migrants are not only embedded in their own unique health worldviews, but also influenced by the history, policy, and politics of the wider state systems. The research among migrant communities an understanding of how ideas of reproduction and “cultures of health” travel, how healing, birth and care practices become a result of movement, and how health-related perceptions and reproductive experiences can define migrant belonging and identity.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality

• December 2007

  Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany

  Usborne, C.

  Abortion in the Weimar Republic is a compelling subject since it provoked public debates and campaigns of an intensity rarely matched elsewhere. It proved so explosive because populationist, ecclesiastical and political concerns were heightened by cultural anxieties of a modernity in crisis. Based on an exceptionally rich source material (e.g., criminal court cases, doctors’ case books, personal diaries, feature films, plays and literary works), this study explores different attitudes and experiences of those women who sought to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and those who helped or hindered them. It analyzes the dichotomy between medical theory and practice, and questions common assumptions, i.e. that abortion was “a necessary evil,” which needed strict regulation and medical control; or that all back-street abortions were dangerous and bad. Above all, the book reveals women’s own voices, frequently contradictory and ambiguous: having internalized medical ideas they often also adhered to older notions of reproduction which opposed scientific approaches.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality Medical Anthropology

• eBook available April 2019

  Cyborg Mind

  What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

  MacKellar, C.

  With the development of new direct interfaces between the human brain and computer systems, the time has come for an in-depth ethical examination of the way these neuronal interfaces may support an interaction between the mind and cyberspace.

  In so doing, this book does not hesitate to blend disciplines including neurobiology, philosophy, anthropology and politics. It also invites society, as a whole, to seek a path in the use of these interfaces enabling humanity to prosper while avoiding the relevant risks. As such, the volume is the first extensive study in cyberneuroethics, a subject matter which is certain to have a significant impact in the 21st century and beyond.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available June 2017

  The Dance of Nurture

  Negotiating Infant Feeding

  Van Esterik, P. & O'Connor, R. A.

  Breastfeeding and child feeding at the center of nurturing practices, yet the work of nurture has escaped the scrutiny of medical and social scientists. Anthropology offers a powerful biocultural approach that examines how custom and culture interact to support nurturing practices. Our framework shows how the unique constitutions of mothers and infants regulate each other. The Dance of Nurture integrates ethnography, biology and the political economy of infant feeding into a holistic framework guided by the metaphor of dance. It includes a critique of efforts to improve infant feeding practices globally by UN agencies and advocacy groups concerned with solving global nutrition and health problems.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• December 2008

  Dances with Spiders

  Crisis, Celebrity and Celebration in Southern Italy

  Lüdtke, K.

  For centuries, the rite of the tarantula was the only cure for those ‘bitten’ or ‘possessed’ by the mythic Apulian spider. Its victims had to dance to the local tarantella or ‘pizzica’ for days on end. Today, the pizzica has returned to the limelight, bringing to the forefront issues of performance, gender, identity and well-being. This book explores how and why the pizzica has boomed in the Salento and elsewhere and asks whether this current popu- larity has anything to do with the historic ritual of tarantism or with the intention of recovering well-being. While personal stories and experiences may confirm the latter, a vital shift has appeared in the Salento: from the confrontation of life crises to the vibrant promotion and celebration of a local sense of identity and celebrity.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Performance Studies

• eBook available January 2020

  The Devil is Disorder

  Bodies, Spirits and Misfortune in a Trinidadian Village

  Lynch, R.

  What role might the Devil have in health and illness? The Devil is Disorder explores constructions of the body, health, illness and wider misfortune in a Trinidadian village where evangelical Christianity is growing in popularity. Based on long-term ethnography and locating the village in historical and global context, the book takes a nuanced cosmological approach to situate evangelical Christian understandings as shaping and being shaped by their context and, in the process, shaping individuals themselves. As people move from local to global subjects, health here stretches beyond being a matter of individual bodies and is connected to worldwide flows and networks, spirit entities, and expansive moral orders.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion Sociology

• eBook available November 2020

  Dust Inside

  Fighting and Living with Asbestos-Related Disasters in Brazil

  Mazzeo, A.

  Toxic production, disrupted lives and contaminated bodies. Care for unacknowledged suffering, incurable cancers, and immeasurable losses. This book bears witness to the invisible disasters provoked by the asbestos market worldwide and gives a voice to the communities of survivors who struggle daily in the name of social and environmental justice. Grounded in a profound, touching ethnography, this book offers an original contribution to understanding global health disasters and grassroots health-based activism.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available January 2021

  Embodying Borders

  A Migrant’s Right to Health, Universal Rights and Local Policies

  Ferrero, L., Quagliariello, C., & Vargas, A. C. (eds)

  Based on extensive field research, the essays in this volume illuminate the experiences of migrants from their own point of view, providing a critical understanding of the complex social reality in which each experience is grounded. Access to medical care for migrants is a fundamental right which is often ignored. The book provides a critical understanding of the social reality in which social inequalities are grounded and offers the opportunity to show that right to health does not correspond uniquely with access to healthcare.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Medical Anthropology

• March 2008

  Empathy and Healing

  Essays in Medical and Narrative Anthropology

  Skultans, V.

  For more than three decades the author has been concerned with issues to do with emotion, suffering and healing. This volume presents ethnographic studies of South Wales, Maharashtra and post-Soviet Latvia connected by a theoretical interest in healing, emotion and subjectivity. Exploring the uses of narrative in the shaping of memory, autobiography and illness and its connections with the master narratives of history and culture, it focuses on the post-Soviet clinic as an arena in which the contradictions of a liberal economy are translated into a medical language.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• May 2003

  Ethics and Genetics

  A Workbook for Practitioners and Students

  Wert, G. de, Meulen, R. ter, Mordacci, R. & Tallacchini, M.

  Genetic information plays an increasingly important role in ourlives. As a result of the Human Genome Project, knowledge ofthe genetic basis of various diseases is growing, withimportant consequences for the role of genetics in clinicalpractice, health care systems and for society at large. In theclinical setting genetic testing may result in a better insightinto susceptibility for inheritable diseases, not only before orafter birth, but also at later stages in life. Besides prenataltesting and pre-conceptional testing, predictive testing hasresulted in new possibilities for the early detection, treatmentand prevention of inheritable diseases.

  However, not all inheritable diseases that can be predicted onthe basis of genetic information can be treated or cured.Should we offer genetic tests to people for untreatablediseases? Should we test every individual who wants to knowhis or her genetic status? Should we inform family membersabout the results of genetic tests of individuals, even whenthere are no possibilities for treatment? What, in such cases,is the role of the "right-not-to-know"? Should we informfamily members when there is only an increased risk of adisease? This book deals with the ethical issues of clinicalgenetics, as well as ethical issues that arise in geneticscreening, the research of populations, and the use of geneticinformation for access to insurance and the workplace.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• May 2003

  The Ethics of New Reproductive Technologies

  Cases and Questions

  Dooley, D., Dalla-Vorgia, P., Garanis-Papdatos, T., & McCarthy, J.

  The new reproductive technologies (NRTs) have given rise to new ethical questions that are widely debated. This book, the outcome of a European Union-wide collaborative process, draws on the experience and expertise of ethicists, lawyers, and clinical practitioners and focuses on some of the "burning issues" in different European countries. These include: donor insemination; surrogacy; preimplantation genetic diagnosis; embryo research; access to IVF treatment; and parental, professional and social responsibility. Familiar notions such as quality of life, parenthood, mothering, responsibility and personal identity surface at many points throughout the book and are refashioned to accommodate new questions.

  This book introduces and probes ethical questions and challenges in a hands-on way by working through relevant case studies with key commentaries and activities. It engages the reader directly in ethical reasoning and decision-making and provides clear explanations, insightful commentaries and informed debate on NRTs.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available March 2014

  The Ethics of the New Eugenics

  MacKellar, C. & Bechtel, C. (eds)

  Strategies or decisions aimed at affecting, in a manner considered to be positive, the genetic heritage of a child in the context of human reproduction are increasingly being accepted in contemporary society. As a result, unnerving similarities between earlier selection ideology so central to the discredited eugenic regimes of the 20th century and those now on offer suggest that a new era of eugenics has dawned. The time is ripe, therefore, for considering and evaluating from an ethical perspective both current and future selection practices. This inter-disciplinary volume blends research from embryology, genetics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and history. In so doing, it constructs a thorough picture of the procedures emerging from today’s reproductive developments, including a rigorous ethical argumentation concerning the possible advantages and risks related to the new eugenics.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available June 2010

  Ethnobotany in the New Europe

  People, Health and Wild Plant Resources

  Pardo-de-Santayana, M., Pieroni, A. & Puri, R. (eds)

  The study of European wild food plants and herbal medicines is an old discipline that has been invigorated by a new generation of researchers pursuing ethnobotanical studies in fresh contexts. Modern botanical and medical science itself was built on studies of Medieval Europeans’ use of food plants and medicinal herbs. In spite of monumental changes introduced in the Age of Discovery and Mercantile Capitalism, some communities, often of immigrants in foreign lands, continue to hold on to old recipes and traditions, while others have adopted and enculturated exotic plants and remedies into their diets and pharmacopoeia in new and creative ways. Now in the 21st century, in the age of the European Union and Globalization, European folk botany is once again dynamically responding to changing cultural, economic, and political contexts. The authors and studies presented in this book reflect work being conducted across Europe’s many regions. They tell the story of the on-going evolution of human-plant relations in one of the most bioculturally dynamic places on the planet, and explore new approaches that link the re-evaluation of plant-based cultural heritage with the conservation and use of biocultural diversity.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available March 2009

  European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology

  Edwards, J. & Salazar, C. (eds)

  Interest in the study of kinship, a key area of anthropological enquiry, has recently reemerged. Dubbed ‘the new kinship’, this interest was stimulated by the ‘new genetics’ and revived interest in kinship and family patterns. This volume investigates the impact of biotechnology on contemporary understandings of kinship, of family and ‘belonging’ in a variety of European settings and reveals similarities and differences in how kinship is conceived. What constitutes kinship for different publics? How significant are biogenetic links? What does family resemblance tell us? Why is genetically modified food an issue? Are ‘genes’ and ‘blood’ interchangeable? It has been argued that the recent prominence of genetic science and genetic technologies has resulted in a ‘geneticization’ of social life; the ethnographic examples presented here do show shifts occurring in notions of ‘nature’ and of what is ‘natural’. But, they also illustrate the complexity of contemporary kinship thinking in Europe and the continued interconnectedness of biological and sociological understandings of relatedness and the relationship between nature and nurture.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• September 2011

  Evidence, Ethos and Experiment

  The Anthropology and History of Medical Research in Africa

  Geissler, P. W. & Molyneux, C. (eds)

  Medical research has been central to biomedicine in Africa for over a century, and Africa, along with other tropical areas, has been crucial to the development of medical science. At present, study populations in Africa participate in an increasing number of medical research projects and clinical trials, run by both public institutions and private companies. Global debates about the politics and ethics of this research are growing and local concerns are prompting calls for social studies of the “trial communities” produced by this scientific work. Drawing on rich, ethnographic and historiographic material, this volume represents the emergent field of anthropological inquiry that links Africanist ethnography to recent concerns with science, the state, and the culture of late capitalism in Africa.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Development Studies

• July 2011

  Fatness and the Maternal Body

  Women's Experiences of Corporeality and the Shaping of Social Policy

  Unnithan-Kumar, M. & Tremayne, S. (eds)

  Obesity is a rising global health problem. On the one hand a clearly defined medical condition, it is at the same time a corporeal state embedded in the social and cultural perception of fatness, body shape and size. Focusing specifically on the maternal body, contributors to the volume examine how the language and notions of obesity connect with, or stand apart from, wider societal values and moralities to do with the body, fatness, reproduction and what is considered ‘natural’. A focus on fatness in the context of human reproduction and motherhood offers instructive insights into the global circulation and authority of biomedical facts on fatness (as ‘risky’ anti-fit, for example). As with other social and cultural studies critical of health policy discourse, this volume challenges the spontaneous connection being made in scientific and popular understanding between fatness and ill health.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available September 2017

  Fertility, Conjuncture, Difference

  Anthropological Approaches to the Heterogeneity of Modern Fertility Declines

  Kreager, P. & Bochow, A. (eds)

  In the last forty years anthropologists have made major contributions to understanding the heterogeneity of reproductive trends and processes underlying them. Fertility transition, rather than the story of the triumphant spread of Western birth control rationality, reveals a diversity of reproductive means and ends continuing before, during, and after transition. This collection brings together anthropological case studies, placing them in a comparative framework of compositional demography and conjunctural action.  The volume addresses major issues of inequality and distribution which shape population and social structures, and in which fertility trends and the formation and size of families are not decided solely or primarily by reproduction.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available August 2019

  Fierce Medicines, Fragile Socialities

  Grounding Global HIV Treatment in Tanzania

  Mattes, D.

  Set in Tanga, a city on the Tanzanian Swahili coast, Dominik Mattes examines the implementation of antiretroviral HIV-treatment (ART) in the area, exploring the manifold infrastructural and social fragilities of treatment provision in public HIV clinics as well as patients’ multi-layered struggles of coming to terms with ART in their everyday lives. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book shows that, notwithstanding the massive rollout of ART, providing treatment and living a life with HIV in settings like Tanga continue to entail social, economic, and moral challenges and long-term uncertainties, which contradict the global rhetoric of the “normalization of HIV”.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Development Studies

• June 2010

  Folk Healing and Health Care Practices in Britain and Ireland

  Stethoscopes, Wands and Crystals

  Moore, R. & McClean, S. (eds)

  Folk, alternative and complementary health care practices in contemporary Western society are currently experiencing a renaissance, albeit with features that are unique to this historical moment. At the same time biomedicine is under scrutiny, experiencing a number of distinct and multifaceted crises. In this volume the authors draw together cutting edge cross-cultural, interdisciplinary research in Britain and Ireland, focusing on exploring the role and significance of healing practices in diverse local contexts, such as the use of crystals, herbs, cures and charms, potions and lotions.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available June 2012

  Fortune and the Cursed

  The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination

  Swancutt, K.

  Innovation-making is a classic theme in anthropology that reveals how people fine-tune their ontologies, live in the world and conceive of it as they do. This ethnographic study is an entrance into the world of Buryat Mongol divination, where a group of cursed shamans undertake the ‘race against time’ to produce innovative remedies that will improve their fallen fortunes at an unconventional pace. Drawing on parallels between social anthropology and chaos theory, the author gives an in-depth account of how Buryat shamans and their notion of fortune operate as ‘strange attractors’ who propagate the ongoing process of innovation-making. With its view into this long-term ‘cursing war’ between two shamanic factions in a rural Mongolian district, and the comparative findings on cursing in rural China, this book is a needed resource for anyone with an interest in the anthropology of religion, shamanism, witchcraft and genealogical change.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available December 2016

  A Fragmented Landscape

  Abortion Governance and Protest Logics in Europe

  De Zordo, S., Mishtal, J., & Anton. J. (eds)

  Since World War II, abortion policies have remained remarkably varied across European nations, with struggles over abortion rights at the forefront of national politics. This volume analyses European abortion governance and explores how social movements, political groups, and individuals use protests and resistance to influence abortion policy. Drawing on case studies from Italy, Spain, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the European Union, it analyses the strategies and discourses of groups seeking to liberalise or restrict reproductive rights. It also illuminates the ways that reproductive rights politics intersect with demographic anxieties, as well as the rising nationalisms and xenophobia related to austerity policies, mass migration and the recent terrorist attacks in Europe. 

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology History: 20th Century to Present

• March 2015

  From Virtue to Vice

  Negotiating Anorexia

  O' Connor, R. A. & Esterik, P. van

  The recovered possess the key to overcoming anorexia. Although individual sufferers do not know how the affliction takes hold, piecing their stories together reveals two accidental afflictions. One is that activity disorders—dieting, exercising, healthy eating—start as virtuous practices, but become addictive obsessions. The other affliction is a developmental disorder, which also starts with the virtuous—those eager for challenge and change. But these overachievers who seek self-improvement get a distorted life instead. Knowing anorexia from inside, the recovered offer two watchwords on helping those who suffer. One is "negotiate," to encourage compromise, which can aid recovery where coercion fails. The other is "balance," for the ill to pursue mind-with-body activities to defuse mind-over-body battles.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Food & Nutrition

• eBook available October 2018

  The Global Age-Friendly Community Movement

  A Critical Appraisal

  Stafford, P. B. (ed)

  The age-friendly community movement is a global phenomenon, currently growing with the support of the WHO and multiple international and national organizations in the field of aging. Drawing on an extensive collection of international case studies, this volume provides an introduction to the movement. The contributors – both researchers and practitioners – touch on a number of current tensions and issues in the movement and offer a wide-ranging set of recommendations for advancing age-friendly community development. The book concludes with a call for a radical transformation of a medical and lifestyle model of aging into a relational model of health and social/individual wellbeing.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available July 2018

  Global Fluids

  The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Waste and Value

  Kroløkke, C.

  In the fertility and cosmetics industries, women’s body products – such as urine, eggs, and placentas – have moved from being seen as waste to becoming valuable ingredients. Taking a sociological and anthropological perspective, the author focuses in particular on the role that countries like Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, and Japan play in the reproductive products industry, and discusses the moral limits of the cultural and rhetorical trajectories that turn women’s body products into internationally mobile substances.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available October 2014

  Globalized Fatherhood

  Inhorn, M. C., Chavkin, W. & Navarro, J.-A. (eds)

  Using an entirely new conceptual vocabulary through which to understand men’s experiences and expectations at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this path-breaking volume focuses on fatherhood around the globe, including transformations in fathering, fatherhood, and family life. It includes new work by anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural geographers, working in settings from Peru to India to Vietnam. Each chapter suggests that men are responding to globalization as fathers in creative and unprecedented ways, not only in the West, but also in numerous global locations.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• February 2015

  Healing Roots

  Anthropology in Life and Medicine

  Laplante, J.

  Umhlonyane, also known as Artemisia afra, is one of the oldest and best-documented indigenous medicines in South Africa. This bush, which grows wild throughout the sub-Saharan region, smells and tastes like “medicine,” thus easily making its way into people’s lives and becoming the choice of everyday healing for Xhosa healer-diviners and Rastafarian herbalists. This “natural” remedy has recently sparked curiosity as scientists search for new molecules against a tuberculosis pandemic while hoping to recognize indigenous medicine. Laplante follows umhlonyane on its trails and trials of becoming a biopharmaceutical — from the “open air” to controlled environments — learning from the plant and from the people who use it with hopes in healing.
   

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• September 2016

  Health and Difference

  Rendering Human Variation in Colonial Engagements

  Widmer, A. & Lipphardt, V. (eds)

  Human variation represented a central research topic for life scientists and posed challenging administrative issues for colonial bureaucrats in the first half of the 20th century. By following scientists’ and administrators’ interests in innovating styles and tools for making and circulating documents, in reshaping landscapes and environments, and in fixing distances between humans, the book advances new understandings of the materiality of colonial institutional life and governance.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Colonial History

• eBook available November 2008

  Health, Risk, and Adversity

  Panter-Brick, C. & Fuentes, A. (eds)

  Research on health involves evaluating the disparities that are systematically associated with the experience of risk, including genetic and physiological variation, environmental exposure to poor nutrition and disease, and social marginalization. This volume provides a unique perspective - a comparative approach to the analysis of health disparities and human adaptability - and specifically focuses on the pathways that lead to unequal health outcomes. From an explicitly anthropological perspective situated in the practice and theory of biosocial studies, this book combines theoretical rigor with more applied and practice-oriented approaches and critically examines infectious and chronic diseases, reproduction, and nutrition.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available August 2018

  Healthcare in Motion

  Immobilities in Health Service Delivery and Access

  Vindrola-Padros, C., Johnson G. A., & Pfister, A. E. (eds)

  How does the need to obtain and deliver health services engender particular (im)mobility forms? And how is mobility experienced and imagined when it is required for healthcare access or delivery? Guided by these questions, Healthcare in Motion explores the dynamic interrelationship between mobility and healthcare, drawing on case studies from across the world and shedding light on the day-to-day practices of patients and professionals.

  Subjects: Mobility Studies Medical Anthropology

• eBook available January 2012

  Identity Politics and the New Genetics

  Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging

  Schramm, K., Skinner, D., & Rottenburg, R. (eds)

  Racial and ethnic categories have appeared in recent scientific work in novel ways and in relation to a variety of disciplines: medicine, forensics, population genetics and also developments in popular genealogy. Once again, biology is foregrounded in the discussion of human identity. Of particular importance is the preoccupation with origins and personal discovery and the increasing use of racial and ethnic categories in social policy. This new genetic knowledge, expressed in technology and practice, has the potential to disrupt how race and ethnicity are debated, managed and lived. As such, this volume investigates the ways in which existing social categories are both maintained and transformed at the intersection of the natural (sciences) and the cultural (politics). The contributors include medical researchers, anthropologists, historians of science and sociologists of race relations; together, they explore the new and challenging landscape where biology becomes the stuff of identity.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• December 2008

  Impotent Warriors

  Perspectives on Gulf War Syndrome, Vulnerability and Masculinity

  Kilshaw, S.

  From September 1990 to June 1991, the UK deployed 53,462 military personnel in the Gulf War. After the end of the conflict anecdotal reports of various disorders affecting troops who fought in the Gulf began to surface. This mysterious illness was given the name “Gulf War Syndrome” (GWS). This book is an investigation into this recently emergent illness, particularly relevant given ongoing UK deployments to Iraq, describing how the illness became a potent symbol for a plethora of issues, anxieties, and concerns. At present, the debate about GWS is polarized along two lines: there are those who think it is a unique, organic condition caused by Gulf War toxins and those who argue that it is probably a psychological condition that can be seen as part of a larger group of illnesses. Using the methods and perspective of anthropology, with its focus on nuances and subtleties, the author provides a new approach to understanding GWS, one that makes sense of the cultural circumstances, specific and general, which gave rise to the illness.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality

• October 2022

  Inconceivable Iran

  To Reproduce or Not to Reproduce?

  Tremayne, S.

  Celebrating the 50th volume of the landmark Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality series published by  Berghahn, this book offers a much-needed analysis of shifting reproductive policies and practices in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a society that is usually represented as either “revolutionary” or “oppressive.” Instead, Tremayne reflects on more than four decades of research  arguing that changing reproductive behaviors on the part of ordinary Iranians must always be viewed against the backdrop of core cultural values and traditions, which are often reinforced, instead of radically altered, by new reproductive technologies, juridical opinions, and state policies.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available October 2015

  Indigenous Medicine Among the Bedouin in the Middle East

  Abu-Rabia, A.

  Modern medicine has penetrated Bedouin tribes in the course of rapid urbanization and education, but when serious illnesses strike, particularly in the case of incurable diseases, even educated people turn to traditional medicine for a remedy. Over the course of 30 years, the author gathered data on traditional Bedouin medicine among pastoral-nomadic, semi-nomadic, and settled tribes. Based on interviews with healers, clients, and other active participants in treatments, this book will contribute to renewed thinking about a synthesis between traditional and modern medicine — to their reciprocal enrichment.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available November 2020

  Invisible Faces and Hidden Stories

  Narratives of Vulnerable Populations and Their Caregivers

  Obeng, C. S. & Obeng, S. G. (eds)

  Dealing with narratives of vulnerable populations, this book looks at how they deal with dimensions of their social life, especially in regard to health. It reflects the socio-political ecologies like public hostility and stereotyping, neglect of their unique health needs, their courage to overcome adversity, and the love of family and healthcare providers in mitigating their problems. The narratives inform us about the dissimilarity between the way we speak, what we hear and how we act. American society likes to give the impression that it is listening to the plight of vulnerable populations, but the stories in this volume prove otherwise.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Applied Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available July 2012

  Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies

  Sunni and Shia Perspectives

  Inhorn, M. C. & Tremayne, S. (eds)

  How and to what extent have Islamic legal scholars and Middle Eastern lawmakers, as well as Middle Eastern Muslim physicians and patients, grappled with the complex bioethical, legal, and social issues that are raised in the process of attempting to conceive life in the face of infertility? This path-breaking volume explores the influence of Islamic attitudes on Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) and reveals the variations in both the Islamic jurisprudence and the cultural responses to ARTs.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available June 2009

  Islam and New Kinship

  Reproductive Technology and the Shariah in Lebanon

  Clarke, M.

  Assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization have provoked global controversy and ethical debate. This book provides a groundbreaking investigation into those debates in the Islamic Middle East, simultaneously documenting changing ideas of kinship and the evolving role of religious authority in the region through a combination of in-depth field research in Lebanon and an exhaustive survey of the Islamic legal literature. Lebanon, home to both Sunni and Shiite Muslim communities, provides a valuable site through which to explore the overall dynamism and diversity of global Islamic debate. As this book shows, Muslim perspectives focus on the moral propriety of such controversial procedures as the use of donor sperm and eggs as well as surrogacy arrangements, which are allowed by some authorities using surprising and innovative legal arguments. These arguments challenge common stereotypes of the rigidity and conservatism of Islamic law and compel us to question conventional contrasts between ‘liberal’ and Islamic notions of moral freedom, as well as the epistemological assumptions of anthropology’s own ‘new kinship studies’. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Islam and the impact of reproductive technology on the global social imaginary.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality

• June 2003

  Issues in Medical Research Ethics

  Boomgaarden, J. & Louhiala, P & Wiesing, U.

  With the advances of medicine, questions of medical ethics have become more urgent and are now considered of great social and political significance. An innovatively designed, activity-based workbook, this text was prepared using papers and case studies collected from several countries in the European Union. It reflects the issues and concerns that confront clinical practitioners throughout Europe and elsewhere today and presents varying national responses in law and policy to these concerns, as identified by ethicists, lawyers, theologians and practitioners. The problems they examine include the relationship between medical research and medical practice, elementary regulations of medical research, the complexity of informed consent, and the role of the sponsor or scientific community.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available January 2020

  Jaguars of the Dawn

  Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer

  Pierini, E.

  The Brazilian Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) is the place where the worlds of the living and the spirits merge and the boundaries between lives are regularly crossed. Drawing upon over a decade of extensive fieldwork in temples of the Amanhecer in Brazil and Europe, the author explores how mediums understand their experiences and how they learn to establish relationships with their spirit guides. She sheds light on the ways in which mediumistic development in the Vale do Amanhecer is used for therapeutic purposes and informs notions of body and self, of illness and wellbeing.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology Sociology

• July 2010

  Kin, Gene, Community

  Reproductive Technologies among Jewish Israelis

  Birenbaum-Carmeli, D. & Carmeli, Y.S. (eds)

  Israel is the only country in the world that offers free fertility treatments to nearly any woman who requires medical assistance. It also has the world's highest per capita usage of in-vitro fertilization. Examining state policies and the application of reproductive technologies among Jewish Israelis, this volume explores the role of tradition and politics in the construction of families within local Jewish populations. The contributors—anthropologists, bioethicists, jurists, physicians and biologists—highlight the complexities surrounding these treatments and show how biological relatedness is being construed as a technology of power; how genetics is woven into the production of identities; how reproductive technologies enhance the policing of boundaries. Donor insemination, IVF and surrogacy, as well as abortion, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and human embryonic stem cell research, are explored within local and global contexts to convey an informed perspective on the wider Jewish Israeli environment.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available March 2009

  Kinship and Beyond

  The Genealogical Model Reconsidered

  Bamford, S. & Leach, J. (eds)

  The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model—in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission—structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making in domains well beyond what is normally labeled “kinship.” The detailed ethnographic work and analysis included in this text explores how these assumptions have been built into our understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and non-human species. The authors explore the influences of the genealogical model of kinship in wider social theory and examine anthropology’s ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the “social” and “natural” sciences. In doing so, this volume brings fresh new perspectives to bear on contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effect upon social life.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available June 2010

  The Land Is Dying

  Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya

  Geissler, P. W. & Prince, R. J.

  Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores life in and around a Luo-speaking village in western Kenya during a time of death. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS affects every aspect of sociality and pervades villagers' debates about the past, the future and the ethics of everyday life. Central to such debates is a discussion of touch in the broad sense of concrete, material contact between persons. In mundane practices and in ritual acts, touch is considered to be key to the creation of bodily life as well as social continuity. Underlying the significance of material contact is its connection with growth – of persons and groups, animals, plants and the land – and the forward movement of life more generally. Under the pressure of illness and death, economic hardship and land scarcity, as well as bitter struggles about the relevance and application of Christianity and ‘Luo tradition’ in daily life, people find it difficult to agree about the role of touch in engendering growth, or indeed about the aims of growth itself.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available August 2017

  Living Before Dying

  Imagining and Remembering Home

  Davies, J.

  This in-depth description of life in a nursing/care home for 70 residents and 40 staff highlights the daily care of frail or ill residents between 80 and 100 years of age, including people suffering with dementia. How residents interact with care assistants is emphasised, as are the different behaviours of men and women observed during a year of daily conversations between the author, patients and staff, who share their stories of the pressures of the work. Living Before Dying shows a world where, in extreme old age, people have to learn how to cope with living communally.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• June 2014

  Living Translation

  Language and the Search for Resonance in U.S. Chinese Medicine

  Pritzker, S. E.

  Integrating theoretical perspectives with carefully grounded ethnographic analyses of everyday interaction and experience, Living Translation examines the worlds of international translators as well as U.S. teachers and students of Chinese medicine, focusing on the transformations that occur as participants engage in a “search for resonance” with foreign terms and concepts. Based on a close examination of heated international debates as well as specific texts, classroom discussions, and interviews with publishers, authors, teachers, and students, Sonya Pritzker demonstrates the “living translation” of Chinese medicine as a process unfolding through interaction, inscription, embodied experience, and clinical practice. By documenting the stream of conversations that together constitute this process, the book thus traces the translation of Chinese medicine from text to practice with an eye towards the social, political, historical, moral, and even personal dimensions involved in the transnational production of knowledge about health, illness, and the body.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• June 2019

  Making Bodies Kosher

  The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England

  Kasstan, B.

  For Haredi Jews, reproduction is entangled with issues of health, bodily governance and identity. This is an analysis of the ways in which Haredi Jews negotiate healthcare services using theoretical perspectives in political philosophy. It is the first archival and ethnographic study of Haredi Jews in the UK and sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, social history and Jewish studies. It will allow readers to understand how reproductive care issues affect this growing minority population.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Jewish Studies Anthropology of Religion

• December 2001

  Managing Reproductive Life

  Cross-Cultural Themes in Fertility and Sexuality

  Tremayne, S. (ed)

  Throughout history human societies have sought to manage their reproductive lives to make them fit in with their social, economic and biological conditions. But the different ways communities regulate their fertility, penetrating every aspect of their social life, are so varied and specific that they are often incomprehensible to outsiders. In this book a group of anthropologists set out to throw new light on the dynamics of human reproduction in the world today, looking at the intricate ways that people manage their reproductive life across different cultures, and highlighting the wider meaning of human reproduction and its impact on social organization. The importance of human agency, ethnic boundaries, the regulation of gender relations, issues of fertility and infertility, the significance of children and motherhood and the problems of two large vulnerable social groups, youth and refugees, are all considered in their broader social contexts.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• April 2013

  Manufacturing Tibetan Medicine

  The Creation of an Industry and the Moral Economy of Tibetanness

  Saxer, M.

  Within a mere decade, hospital pharmacies throughout the Tibetan areas of the People’s Republic of China have been converted into pharmaceutical companies. Confronted with the logic of capital and profit, these companies now produce commodities for a nationwide market. While these developments are depicted as a big success in China, they have also been met with harsh criticism in Tibet. At stake is a fundamental (re-)manufacturing of Tibetan medicine as a system of knowledge and practice. Being important both to the agenda of the Party State’s policies on Tibet and to Tibetan self-understanding, the Tibetan medicine industry has become an arena in which different visions of Tibet’s future clash.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• May 2007

  Medical Identities

  Healing, Well Being and Personhood

  Maynard, K. (ed)

  Illness and misfortune more broadly are ubiquitous; thus, healing roles or professions are also universal. Ironically, however, little attention has been paid to those who heal or promote wellbeing. These come in many different guises: in some societies, healing is highly professional and specialized; in some cases, it is more preventative, in others more interventionist. Based on rich and wide-ranging ethnographic data and especially written for this volume, these essays look at how a great variety of health providers are perceived – from traditional healers to physicians, from diviners to nursing home providers. Conversely, the authors also ask how healers, or those concerned with wider matters of well being, view themselves and to what degree social attitudes differ in regard to who these people are, as well as their power, prestige and activities. As these essays demonstrate, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or state policy may all play formative roles in shaping the definition of health and wellbeing, how they are delivered, and the character and prestige of those who provide for our health and welfare in society.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available December 2010

  Medicine Between Science and Religion

  Explorations on Tibetan Grounds

  Adams, V., Schrempf, M. & Craig, S. R. (ed)

  There is a growing interest in studies that document the relationship between science and medicine - as ideas, practices, technologies and outcomes - across cultural, national, geographic terrain. Tibetan medicine is not only known as a scholarly medical tradition among other Asian medical systems, with many centuries of technological, clinical, and pharmacological innovation; it also survives today as a complex medical resource across many Asian nations - from India and Bhutan to Mongolia, Tibet (TAR) and China, Buryatia - as well as in Western Europe and the Americas. The contributions to this volume explore, in equal measure, the impacts of western science and biomedicine on Tibetan grounds - i.e., among Tibetans across China, the Himalaya and exile communities as well as in relation to globalized Tibetan medicine - and the ways that local practices change how such “science” gets done, and how this continually hybridized medical knowledge is transmitted and put into practice. As such, this volume contributes to explorations into the bi-directional flows of medical knowledge and practice.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available June 2022

  Migration and Health

  Challenging the Borders of Belonging, Care, and Policy

  El-Shaarawi, N. & Larchanché, S. (eds)

  Despite the centrality of migration in our contemporary world, scholarship on mobility and health frequently separates migrants according to legal status, country of origin, destination, or health concern. Yet people on the move and health systems face challenges and opportunities that transcend these boundaries, including border fortification, neoliberal agendas, and climate change. This volume explores these epistemic borders, recognizing the necessity of a new conversation about migration and health. Each of the empirically grounded chapters introduces readers to pressing questions of migration and health in diverse social, political, and geographical settings.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology

• eBook available March 2013

  Militant Lactivism?

  Attachment Parenting and Intensive Motherhood in the UK and France

  Faircloth, C.

  Following networks of mothers in London and Paris, the author profiles the narratives of women who breastfeed their children to full term, typically a period of several years, as part of an 'attachment parenting' philosophy. These mothers talk about their decision to continue breastfeeding as 'the natural thing to do': 'evolutionarily appropriate', 'scientifically best' and 'what feels right in their hearts'. Through a theoretical focus on knowledge claims and accountability, the author frames these accounts within a wider context of 'intensive parenting', arguing that parenting practices – infant feeding in particular – have become a highly moralized affair for mothers, practices which they feel are a critical aspect of their 'identity work'. The book investigates why, how and with what implications some of these mothers describe themselves as 'militant lactivists' and reflects on wider parenting culture in the UK and France. Discussing gender, feminism and activism, this study contributes to kinship and family studies by exploring how relatedness is enacted in conjunction to constructions of the self.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available December 2001

  Modern Babylon?

  Prostituting Children in Thailand

  Montgomery, H.

  Child prostitution became one of the key concerns of the international community in the 1990s. World congresses were held, international and national laws were changed and concern over "cemmercially sexually exploited children" rose dramatically. Rarely, however, were the children who worked as prostitutes consulted of questioned in this process, and the voices of these children brought into focus. This book is the first to address the children directly, to examine their daily lives, their motivations and their perceptions of what they do. Based on 15 months of fieldwork in a Thai tourist community that survived through child prostitution, this book draws on anthropological theories on childhood and kinship to contextualize the experiences of this group of Thai child prostitutes and to contrast these with the stereotypes held of them by those outside their community.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available July 2010

  Moral Power

  The Magic of Witchcraft

  Stroeken, K.

  Neither power nor morality but both. Moral power is what Sukuma farmers in Tanzania in times of crisis attribute to an unknown figure they call their witch. A universal process is involved, as much bodily as social, which obstructs the patient’s recovery. Healers turn the table on the witch through rituals showing that the community and the ancestral spirits side with the victim. In contrast to biomedicine, their magic and divination introduce moral values that assess the state of the system and that remove the obstacles to what is taken as key: self-healing. The implied ‘sensory shifts’ and therapeutic effectiveness have largely eluded the literature on witchcraft. This book shows how to comprehend culture other than through the prism of identity politics. It offers a framework to comprehend the rise of witch killings and human sacrifice, just as ritual initiation disappears.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available May 2010

  Morality, Hope and Grief

  Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa

  Dilger, H. & Luig, L. (eds)

  The HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa has been addressed and perceived predominantly through the broad perspectives of social and economic theories as well as public health and development discourses. This volume however, focuses on the micro-politics of illness, treatment and death in order to offer innovative insights into the complex processes that shape individual and community responses to AIDS. The contributions describe the dilemmas that families, communities and health professionals face and shed new light on the transformation of social and moral orders in African societies, which have been increasingly marginalised in the context of global modernity.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• December 2005

  Multiple Medical Realities

  Patients and Healers in Biomedical, Alternative and Traditional Medicine

  Johannessen, H. & Lázár, I. (eds)

  Nowadays a plethora of treatment technologies is available to the consumer, each employing a variety of concepts of the body, self, sickness and healing. This volume explores the options, strategies and consequences that are both relevant and necessary for patients and practitioners who are manoeuvring this medical plurality. Although wideranging in scope and covering areas as diverse as India, Ecuador, Ghana and Norway, central to all contributions is the observation that technologies of healing are founded on socially learned and to some extent fluid experiences of body and self.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• May 2005

  Nameless Relations

  Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients

  Konrad, M.

  Based on the author's fieldwork at assisted conception clinics in England in the mid-1990s, this is the first ethnographic study of the new procreative practices of anonymous ova and embryo donation. Giving voice to both groups of women participating in the demanding donation experience – the donors on the one side and the ever-hopeful IVF recipients on the other – Konrad shows how one dimension of the new reproductive technologies involves an unfamiliar relatedness between nameless and untraceable procreative strangers. Offsetting informants’ local narratives against traditional Western folk models of the ‘sexed’ reproductive body, the book challenges some of the basic assumptions underlying conventional biomedical discourse of altruistic donation that clinicians and others promote as “gifts of life.” It brings together a wide variety of literatures from social anthropology, social theory, cultural studies of science and technology, and feminist bioethics to discuss the relationship between recent developments in biotechnology and changing conceptions of personal origins, genealogy, kinship, biological ownership and notions of bodily integrity.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available March 2020

  Navigating Miscarriage

  Social, Medical and Conceptual Perspectives

  Kilshaw, S. & Borg, K. (eds)

  Miscarriage is a significant women's health issue. Research has consistently shown that one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. This collected volume explores miscarriage in diverse historical and cultural settings with contributions from anthropologists, historians and medical professionals. Contributors use rich ethnographic and historical material to discuss how pregnancy loss is managed and negotiated in a range of societies. The book considers meanings attached to miscarriage and how religious, cultural, medical and legal forces impact the way miscarriage is experienced and perceived.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• January 2009

  Negotiating Risk

  British Pakistani Experiences of Genetics

  Shaw, A.

  Drawing on fieldwork with British Pakistani clients of a UK genetics service, this book explores the personal and social implications of a ‘genetic diagnosis’. Through case material and comparative discussion, the book identifies practical ethical dilemmas raised by new genetic knowledge and shows how, while being shaped by culture, these issues also cross-cut differences of culture, religion and ethnicity. The book also demonstrates how identifying a population-level elevated ‘risk’ of genetic disorders in an ethnic minority population can reinforce existing social divisions and cultural stereotypes. The book addresses questions about the relationship between genetic risk and clinical practice that will be relevant to health workers and policy makers.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• December 2004

  A New Look At Thai Aids

  Perspectives from the Margin

  Fordham, G.

  Following the detection of the first HIV infections in the early 1980s, by the 1990s Thailand was routinely depicted as having the world’s fastest moving HIV/AIDS epidemic. However, by the early 2000’s the bulk of scholarly and medical AIDS literature portrayed the epidemic as being largely under control, and claimed that Thai AIDS prevention efforts during the 1990s had been successful. Based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in Northern Thailand this book makes an in-depth study of the social construction of Thailand’s HIV/AIDS epidemic over this period. In addition to his own field research the author draws on an extensive corpus of English and Thai language social science and medical HIV/AIDS literature to examine the modeling of Thailand’s AIDS epidemic, and addresses concepts and issues such as risk groups, risk behaviour, alcohol use, gender and class, masculinity, the scapegoating of female prostitutes and men in the underclass, the reporting of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Thailand’s indigenous Thai language media, and sexual activity amongst Thai youth. The analysis demonstrates the contribution of anthropology as an interpretative social science, and the use of anthropological theory and research methods, to finding alternative ways of framing the problems of Thai AIDS and of posing new questions that will lead to more effective points of intervention. It emphasises the necessity for critically reflexive approaches that question the ‘taken for granted’ and demonstrates how qualitative research techniques guided by social theory have the potential to take account of local meanings in complex social contexts where traditional values and cultural practices are rapidly transforming due to economic and social change. The book offers a sustained and powerful criticism of the limitations of the normative model of the Thai AIDS epidemic and, in its aim of promoting critically reflexive AIDS research techniques in order to produce a better understanding of issues ‘on the ground’ and hence better health policy and more effective AIDS interventions, speaks not only to the Thai AIDS epidemic but to AIDS epidemics throughout Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

  This is the only English language study of Thailand’s HIV/AIDS epidemic to draw on long-term qualitative research in Northern Thailand as well as on a broad range of Thai (and some Khmer language) materials. Its contextualised and subtly nuanced analysis of the AIDS epidemic and of the impact of AIDS control initiatives, in concert with the theoretical and methodological contributions it makes to AIDS research and policy and behavioural interventions, makes it a timely publication of vital interest to scholars in the social sciences, as well as to the members of non-governmental organisations and international organisations working in the HIV/AIDS, health and development fields.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Development Studies

• eBook available October 2014

  Nighttime Breastfeeding

  An American Cultural Dilemma

  Tomori, C.

  Nighttime for many new parents in the United States is fraught with the intense challenges of learning to breastfeed and helping their babies sleep so they can get rest themselves. Through careful ethnographic study of the dilemmas raised by nighttime breastfeeding, and their examination in the context of anthropological, historical, and feminist studies, this volume unravels the cultural tensions that underlie these difficulties. As parents negotiate these dilemmas, they not only confront conflicting medical guidelines about breastfeeding and solitary infant sleep, but also larger questions about cultural and moral expectations for children and parents, and their relationship with one another.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• December 2006

  Nursing Stories

  Life and Death in a German Hospice

  Eschenbruch, N.

  At a time, when the section of the older population is increasing in all western societies, more and more attention needs to be paid to the growing number of people who live with and die of drawn-out terminal illnesses, cancer being one of the most common ones. This study focuses on terminally ill people in a German hospice and addresses the question how meaningful experience is constructed for these patients in an attempt to preserve their dignity as persons. It is based on detailed and sometimes moving material from diary texts and active participation of the author in the role of a nurse, which allowed him to watch closely the behaviour of patients and nurses in routine situations and to look at the underlying emotions, values, and assumptions within such interaction. This book goes well beyond this particular case and reaches conclusions about death narratives that are significant for the social sciences more generally.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available December 2018

  Of Life and Health

  The Language of Art and Religion in an African Medical System

  Tengan, A. B.

  An anthropological study of the health system of the Dagara people of northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, Of Life and Health develops a cultural and epistemological lexicon of Dagara life by examining its religious, ritual, and artistic expressions. Consisting of ethnographic descriptions and analyses of six Dagara cultic institutions, each of which deals with different aspects of sustaining and transmitting life, the volume gives a holistic account of the Dagara knowledge system.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology

• eBook available September 2016

  The Online World of Surrogacy

  Berend, Z.

  Zsuzsa Berend presents a methodologically innovative ethnography of SurroMomsOnline.com, the largest surrogacy support website in the United States. Surrogates’ views emerge from the stories, debates, and discussions that unfold online. The Online World of Surrogacy documents these collective meaning-making practices and explores their practical, emotional, and moral implications. In doing so, the book works through themes of interest across the social sciences, including definitions of parenthood, the symbolic role of money, reproductive loss, altruism, and the moral valuation of relationships.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• April 2011

  Out of Place

  Madness in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

  Goddard, M.

  The Kakoli of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), the focus of this study, did not traditionally have a concept of mental illness. They classified madness according to social behaviour, not mental pathology. Moreover, their conception of the person did not recognise the same physical and mental categories that inform Western medical science, and psychiatry in particular was not officially introduced to PNG until the late 1950s. Its practitioners claimed that it could adequately accommodate the cultural variation among Melanesian societies. This book compares the intent and practice of transcultural psychiatry with Kakoli interpretations of, and responses to, madness, showing the reasons for their occasional recourse to psychiatric services. Episodes involving madness, as defined by the Kakoli themselves, are described in order to offer a context for the historical lifeworld and praxis of the community and raise fundamental questions about whether a culturally sensitive psychiatry is possible in the Melanesian context.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available April 2016

  Parenthood between Generations

  Transforming Reproductive Cultures

  Pooley, S. & Qureshi, K. (eds)

  Recent literature has identified modern “parenting” as an expert-led practice—one which begins with pre-pregnancy decisions, entails distinct types of intimate relationships, places intense burdens on mothers and increasingly on fathers too. Exploring within diverse historical and global contexts how men and women make—and break—relations between generations when becoming parents, this volume brings together innovative qualitative research by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists. The chapters focus tightly on inter-generational transmission and demonstrate its importance for understanding how people become parents and rear children.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available January 2017

  The Patient Multiple

  An Ethnography of Healthcare and Decision-Making in Bhutan

  Taee, J.

  In the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, medical patients engage a variety of healing practices to seek cures for their ailments. Patients use the expanding biomedical network and a growing number of traditional healthcare units, while also seeking alternative practices, such as shamanism and other religious healing, or even more provocative practices. The Patient Multiple delves into this healthcare complexity in the context of patients’ daily lives and decision-making processes, showing how these unique mountain cultures are finding new paths to good health among a changing and multifaceted medical topography.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available August 2016

  Patient-Centred IVF

  Bioethics and Care in a Dutch Clinic

  Gerrits, T.

  Contemporary Dutch policy and legislation facilitate the use of high quality, accessible and affordable assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) to all citizens in need of them, while at the same time setting some strict boundaries on their use in daily clinical practices. Through the ethnographic study of a single clinic in this national context, Patient-Centred IVF examines how this particular form of medicine, aiming to empower its patients, co-shapes the experiences, views and decisions of those using these technologies. Gerrits contends that to understand the use of reproductive technologies in practice and the complexity of processes of medicalization, we need to go beyond ‘easy assumptions’ about the hegemony of biomedicine and the expected impact of patient-centredness.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• August 2012

  Patients and Agents

  Mental Illness, Modernity and Islam in Sylhet, Bangladesh

  Callan, A.

  Sylhet, the area of Bangladesh most closely associated with overseas migration, has seen an increase in remittances sent home from abroad, introducing new inequalities.  Social change has also been mediated by the global forces of Western biomedicine and orthodox Islam.  This book examines the effects of these modernizing trends on mental health and on local, traditional healing as the new inequalities have exacerbated existing social tensions and led to increased vulnerability to mental illness.  It is the young women of Sylhet who are most affected.  The global economy has increased competition for resources and led to marriage being seen as a route to economic advancement.  Parents prefer to give their daughters in marriage to families that will widen their social contacts and enhance their economic and social standing.  Accordingly, the young wife’s outsider status (and hence vulnerability to mental illness) has increased as it is no longer customary to give daughters in marriage to local kin.  Yet, patients and their families do not work out tensions passively.  They are active agents in the construction of their own diagnosis.  The extent to which patients act or are acted upon is an investigation that runs throughout the book.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality Medical Anthropology

• eBook available September 2010

  Plants, Health and Healing

  On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology

  Hsu, E. & Harris, S. (eds)

  Plants have cultural histories, as their applications change over time and with place. Some plant species have affected human cultures in profound ways, such as the stimulants tea and coffee from the Old World, or coca and quinine from South America. Even though medicinal plants have always attracted considerable attention, there is surprisingly little research on the interface of ethnobotany and medical anthropology. This volume, which brings together (ethno-)botanists, medical anthropologists and a clinician, makes an important contribution towards filling this gap. It emphasises that plant knowledge arises situationally as an intrinsic part of social relationships, that herbs need to be enticed if not seduced by the healers who work with them, that herbal remedies are cultural artefacts, and that bioprospecting and medicinal plant discovery can be viewed as the epitome of a long history of borrowing, stealing and exchanging plants.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Environmental Studies (General)

• March 2006

  The Politics of Egalitarianism

  Theory and Practice

  Solway, J. (ed)

  The essays assembled in this book exemplify the way political anthropologists address a range of problems that deeply affect people throughout the world. The authors draw their inspiration from the work of Canadian anthropologist Richard B. Lee, and, like him, they are concerned with understanding and acting upon issues of “indigenous rights”; the impact of colonialism, postcolonial state formation, and neoliberalism on local communities and cultures; the process of culture change; what the history and politics of egalitarian societies reveal about issues of “human nature” or “social evolution”; and how peoples in southern Africa are affected by and responding to the most recent crisis in their midst, the spread of AIDS. The authors in this volume discuss the state of a range of contemporary debates in the field that in various ways extend the political, theoretical, and empirical issues that have animated Lee's work. In addition, the book provides readers with important contemporary Kalahari studies, as well as “classic” works on foraging societies.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Medical Anthropology

• December 2005

  Population, Reproduction and Fertility in Melanesia

  Ulijaszek, S.J. (ed)

  Human biological fertility was considered a important issue to anthropologists and colonial administrators in the first part of the 20th century, as a dramatic decline in population was observed in many regions. However, the total demise of Melanesian populations predicted by some never happened; on the contrary, a rapid population increase took place for the second part of the 20th century. This volume explores relationships between human fertility and reproduction, subsistence systems, the symbolic use of ideas of fertility and reproduction in linking landscape to individuals and populations, in Melanesian societies, past and present. It thus offers an important contribution to our understanding of the implications of social and economic change for reproduction and fertility in the broadest sense.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available January 2014

  Powerless Science?

  Science and Politics in a Toxic World

  Boudia, S. & Jas, N. (eds)

  In spite of decades of research on toxicants, along with the growing role of scientific expertise in public policy and the unprecedented rise in the number of national and international institutions dealing with environmental health issues, problems surrounding contaminants and their effects on health have never appeared so important, sometimes to the point of appearing insurmountable. This calls for a reconsideration of the roles of scientific knowledge and expertise in the definition and management of toxic issues, which this book seeks to do. It looks at complex historical, social, and political dynamics, made up of public controversies, environmental and health crises, economic interests, and political responses, and demonstrates how and to what extent scientific knowledge about toxicants has been caught between scientific, economic, and political imperatives.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Medical Anthropology

• September 2008

  Precious Pills

  Medicine and Social Change among Tibetan Refugees in India

  Prost, A.

  Through an ethnography of the social and medical worlds of a community of Tibetan refugees in India, this book addresses two main questions: first, how has the prolonged displacement of Tibetan refugees affected concepts of health in the exile community? Second, how has exile changed traditional Tibetan medical practices? It explores how social changes linked to exile have influenced concepts of health and illness in the Tibetan refugee community of Dharamsala and by looking at recent changes in the theory and practice of traditional Tibetan medicine investigates the role of traditional Tibetan medicine in sustaining public health in the exile community.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available July 2013

  Pregnancy in Practice

  Expectation and Experience in the Contemporary US

  Han, S.

  Babies are not simply born—they are made through cultural and social practices. Based on rich empirical work, this book examines the everyday experiences that mark pregnancy in the US today, such as reading pregnancy advice books, showing ultrasound “baby pictures” to friends and co-workers, and decorating the nursery in anticipation of the new arrival. These ordinary practices of pregnancy, the author argues, are significant and revealing creative activities that produce babies. They are the activities through which babies are made important and meaningful in the lives of the women and men awaiting the child’s birth. This book brings into focus a topic that has been overlooked in the scholarship on reproduction and will be of interest to professionals and expectant parents alike.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available October 2020

  Preventing Dementia?

  Critical Perspectives on a New Paradigm of Preparing for Old Age

  Leibing, A. & Schicktanz, S. (eds)

  The conceptualization of dementia has changed dramatically in recent years with the claim that, through early detection and by controlling several risk factors, a prevention of dementia is possible. Although encouraging and providing hope against this feared condition, this claim is open to scrutiny. This volume looks at how this new conceptualization ignores many of the factors which influence a dementia sufferers’ prognosis, including their history with education, food and exercise as well as their living in different epistemic cultures. The central aim is to question the concept of prevention and analyze its impact on aging people and aging societies.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available November 2019

  Privileges of Birth

  Constellations of Care, Myth, and Race in South Africa

  Rogerson, J. J. M.

  Focussing ethnographically on private-sector maternity care in South Africa, Privileges of Birth looks at the ways healthcare and childbirth are shaped by South Africa’s racialised history. Birth is one of the most medicalised aspects of the lifecycle across all sectors of society, and there is deep division between what the privileged can afford compared with the rest of the population. Examining the ethics of care in midwife-attended birth, the author situates the argument in the context of a growing literature on care in anthropological and feminist scholarship, offering a unique account of birthing care in the context of elite care services.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• December 2007

  The Problem of Money

  African Agency & Western Medicine in Northern Ghana

  Bierlich, B. M.

  Based on long-term medical anthropological research in northern Ghana, the author analyses issues of health and healing, of gender, and of the control and use of money in a changing rural African setting. He describes the culture of medical pluralism, so typical for neo-colonial states, and people’s choices of “traditional” (local) medicine (plants and sacrifices), Islamic medicine (charms and various written solutions) and ”modern” therapy (biomedicine, in particular western pharmaceuticals). He concludes that the rural-urban divide is a fiction, that demarcations between these areas are frequently blurred, linked by a postcolonial, capitalist discourse of local markets, regional economies and national structures, which frequently emerge in local African settings but often originate in global and multinational markets.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Development Studies

• August 2012

  Problems of Conception

  Issues of Law, Biotechnology, Individuals and Kinship

  Melhuus, M.

  The Biotechnology Act in Norway, one of the most restrictive in Europe, forbids egg donation and surrogacy and has rescinded the anonymity clause with respect to donor insemination. Thus, it limits people’s choice as to how they can procreate within the boundaries of the nation state. The author pursues this significant datum ethnographically and addresses the issues surrounding contemporary biopolitics in Norway. This involves investigating such fundamental questions as the relation between individual and society, meanings of kinship and relatedness, the moral status of the embryo and the role of science, religion and ethics in state policies. Even though the book takes reproductive technologies as its focus, it reveals much about vital processes that are central to contemporary Norwegian society.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Medical Anthropology

• eBook available December 2008

  Pursuits of Happiness

  Well-Being in Anthropological Perspective

  Mathews, G. & Izquierdo, C. (eds)

  Anthropology has long shied away from examining how human beings may lead happy and fulfilling lives. This book, however, shows that the ethnographic examination of well-being—defined as “the optimal state for an individual, a community, and a society”—and the comparison of well-being within and across societies is a new and important area for anthropological inquiry. Distinctly different in different places, but also reflecting our common humanity, well-being is intimately linked to the idea of happiness and its pursuits. Noted anthropological researchers have come together in this volume to examine well-being in a range of diverse ways and to investigate it in a range of settings: from the Peruvian Amazon, the Australian outback, and the Canadian north, to India, China, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• December 2007

  Race, Ethnicity, and Nation

  Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics

  Wade, P. (ed)

  Race, ethnicity and nation are all intimately linked to family and kinship, yet these links deserve closer attention than they usually get in social science, above all when family and kinship are changing rapidly in the context of genomic and biotechnological revolutions. Drawing on data from assisted reproduction, transnational adoption, mixed race families, Basque identity politics and post-Soviet nation-building, this volume provides new and challenging ways to understand race, ethnicity and nation.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• August 2009

  Reconceiving the Second Sex

  Men, Masculinity, and Reproduction

  Inhorn, M. C., Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, T., Goldberg, H. & Cour Mosegaard, M. la (eds)

  Extensive social science research, particularly by anthropologists, has explored women’s reproductive lives, their use of reproductive technologies, and their experiences as mothers and nurturers of children. Meanwhile, few if any volumes have explored men’s reproductive concerns or contributions to women’s reproductive health: Men are clearly viewed as the “second sex” in reproduction. This volume argues that the marginalization of men is an oversight of considerable proportions. It sheds new light on male reproduction from a cross-cultural, global perspective, focusing not only upon men in Europe and America but also those in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Both heterosexual and homosexual, married and unmarried men are featured in this volume, which assesses concerns ranging from masculinity and sexuality to childbirth and fatherhood.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available October 2013

  Reconstructing Obesity

  The Meaning of Measures and the Measure of Meanings

  McCullough, M. & Hardin, J. (eds)

  In the crowded and busy arena of obesity and fat studies, there is a lack of attention to the lived experiences of people, how and why they eat what they do, and how people in cross-cultural settings understand risk, health, and bodies. This volume addresses the lacuna by drawing on ethnographic methods and analytical emic explorations in order to consider the impact of cultural difference, embodiment, and local knowledge on understanding obesity. It is through this reconstruction of how obesity and fatness are studied and understood that a new discussion will be introduced and a new set of analytical explorations about obesity research and the effectiveness of obesity interventions will be established.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Food & Nutrition

• eBook available September 2016

  Reluctant Intimacies

  Japanese Eldercare in Indonesian Hands

  Świtek, B.

  Based on seventeen months of ethnographic research among Indonesian eldercare workers in Japan and Indonesia, this book is the first ethnography to research Indonesian care workers’ relationships with the cared-for elderly, their Japanese colleagues, and their employers. Through the notion of intimacy, the book brings together sociological and anthropological scholarship on the body, migration, demographic change, and eldercare in a vivid account of societal transformation. Placed against the background of mass media representations, the Indonesian workers’ experiences serve as a basis for discussion of the role of bodily experience in shaping the image of a national “other” in Japan.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available April 2021

  Remaking the Human

  Cosmetic Technologies of Body Repair, Reshaping, and Replacement

  Jarrín, A. & Pussetti, C. (eds)

  The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions – is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people’s motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• October 2004

  Reproductive Agency, Medicine and the State

  Cultural Transformations in Childbearing

  Unnithan-Kumar, M. (ed)

  Recent years have seen many changes in human reproduction resulting from state and medical interventions in childbearing processes. Based on empirical work in a variety of societies and countries, this volume considers the relationship between reproductive processes (of fertility, pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period) on the one hand and attitudes, medical technologies and state health policies in diverse cultural contexts on the other.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available October 2007

  Reproductive Disruptions

  Gender, Technology, and Biopolitics in the New Millennium

  Inhorn, M. C. (ed)

  Nominated for the 2007 Book Prize by the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction (AAA)

  Reproductive disruptions, such as infertility, pregnancy loss, adoption, and childhood disability, are among the most distressing experiences in people’s lives. Based on research by leading medical anthropologists from around the world, this book examines such issues as local practices detrimental to safe pregnancy and birth; conflicting reproductive goals between women and men; miscommunications between pregnant women and their genetic counselors; cultural anxieties over gamete donation and adoption; the contested meanings of abortion; cultural critiques of hormone replacement therapy; and the globalization of new pharmaceutical and assisted reproductive technologies. This breadth - with its explicit move from the “local” to the “global,” from the realm of everyday reproductive practice to international programs and policies - illuminates most effectively the workings of power, the tensions between women’s and men’s reproductive agency, and various cultural and structural inequalities in reproductive health.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• March 2015

  Ritual Retellings

  Luangan Healing Performances through Practice

  Herrmans, I.

  Belian is an exceptionally lively tradition of shamanistic curing rituals performed by the Luangans, a politically marginalized population of Indonesian Borneo. This volume explores the significance of these rituals in practice and asks what belian rituals do – socially, politically, and existentially – for particular people in particular circumstances. Departing from the conception that rituals exist as ethereal, liminal or insulated traditional domains, this volume demonstrates the importance of understanding rituals as emergent within their specific historical and social settings. It offers an analysis of a number of concrete ritual performances, exemplifying a diversity of ritual genres, stylistic modalities and sensual ambiences, from low-key, habitual affairs to drawn-out, crowd-seizing community rituals and innovative, montage-like cultural experiments.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

• May 2002

  A Sealed and Secret Kinship

  The Culture of Policies and Practices in American Adoption

  Modell, J.

  Adoption has long been a controversial subject in the United States as well as in other western countries, but never more so than in the past three decades. Why that is and how public attention affects the decisions made by those who arrange, legalize, and experience adoptive kinship constitutes the subject of this book. Adoption, the author argues, touches on major preoccupations we all have: who we are; why we are what we are; the balance of "nature" and "culture" in self-definition; the conflict between individual rights and social order.

  The problematic nature of adoption in western societies is effectively contrasted by the author with cultures in many other parts of the world in which children are exchanged frequently, openly, and happily. There is no stigma, often even a high value, placed on being the adopted child in a family. This comparative perspective brings into sharp relief American, and by implication other western, policies that reflect a very different notion of kinship and family. Adoption thus reveals itself as one of the keys to western ideas about human nature, the person, rights, privacy, and family relationships.

  Subjects: Applied Anthropology Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available March 2009

  Social Bodies

  Lambert, H. & McDonald, M. (eds)

  A proliferation of press headlines, social science texts and “ethical” concerns about the social implications of recent developments in human genetics and biomedicine have created a sense that, at least in European and American contexts, both the way we treat the human body and our attitudes towards it have changed.

  This volume asks what really happens to social relations in the face of new types of transaction – such as organ donation, forensic identification and other new medical and reproductive technologies - that involve the use of corporeal material. Drawing on comparative insights into how human biological material is treated, it aims to consider how far human bodies and their components are themselves inherently “social.”

  The case studies – ranging from animal-human transformations in Amazonia to forensic reconstruction in post-conflict Serbia and the treatment of Native American specimens in English museums – all underline that, without social relations, there are no bodies but only “human remains.” The volume gives us new and striking ethnographic insights into bodies as sociality, as well as a potentially powerful analytical reconsideration of notions of embodiment. It makes a novel contribution, too, to “science and society” debates.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• June 2010

  Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies

  Edwards, J., Harvey, P. & Wade, P. (eds)

  The modern world is saturated with images. Scientific knowledge of the human body (in all its variety) is highly dependent on the technological generation of visual data – brain and body scans, x-rays, diagrams, graphs and charts. New technologies afford scientists and medical experts new possibilities for probing and revealing previously invisible and inaccessible areas of the body. The existing literature has been successful in mapping the impact and implications of new medical technologies and in marrying the visual and the body but thus far has focused only narrowly on particular kinds of technology or taken only a purely textual/visual (cultural studies) approach to images of the body. Combining approaches from three of the most dynamic and popular fields of contemporary social anthropology – the study of the visual, the study of the technological and the study of the human body – this volume draws these together and interrogates their intersection using insights from ethnographic approaches. Offering a fascinating and wide range of perspectives, the chapters in this volume bring an innovative focus that reflects the authors’ shared interest in ‘the body’ and visualising technologies.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• June 2015

  Thai in Vitro

  Gender, Culture and Assisted Reproduction

  Whittaker, A.

  In Thailand, infertility remains a source of stigma for those couples that combine a range of religious, traditional and high-tech interventions in their quest for a child. This book explores this experience of infertility and the pursuit and use of assisted reproductive technologies by Thai couples. Though using assisted reproductive technologies is becoming more acceptable in Thai society, access to and choices about such technologies are mediated by differences in class position. These stories of women and men in private and public infertility clinics reveal how local social and moral sensitivities influence the practices and meanings of treatment.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available February 2009

  Transgressive Sex

  Subversion and Control in Erotic Encounters

  Donnan, H. & Magowan, F. (eds)

  Sex is often regarded as a dangerous business that must be rigorously controlled, regulated, and subjected to rules. Sexual acts that defy acceptable practices may be seen as variously defiling, immoral, and even unnatural. They may challenge and subvert both cultural preconceptions and the social order in a politics of sexual transgression that threatens to transform permissible boundaries and restructure bodily engagements. This collection of essays explores acts of sexual transgression that have the power to reconfigure perceptions of bodily intimacy and the social norms of interaction. Considering issues such as domestic violence, child prostitution, health and sex, teenage sex, and sex with animals across a range of settings from contemporary Oceania, the Pacific, South Africa, and southeast Asia to Euro-America, this book should interest all those who question the "naturalness" of sex, including public health workers, clinical practitioners and students of sex, sexuality, and gender in the humanities and social sciences.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available April 2013

  Transitions and Transformations

  Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course

  Lynch, C. & Danely, J. (eds)

  Rapid population aging, once associated with only a select group of modern industrialized nations, has now become a topic of increasing global concern. This volume reframes aging on a global scale by illustrating the multiple ways it is embedded within individual, social, and cultural life courses. It presents a broad range of ethnographic work, introducing a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to studying life-course transitions in conjunction with broader sociocultural transformations. Through detailed accounts, in such diverse settings as nursing homes in Sri Lanka, a factory in Massachusetts, cemeteries in Japan and clinics in Mexico, the authors explore not simply our understandings of growing older, but the interweaving of individual maturity and intergenerational relationships, social and economic institutions, and intimate experiences of gender, identity, and the body.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available September 2021

  Traumatic Pasts in Asia

  History, Psychiatry, and Trauma from the 1930s to the Present

  Micale, M. S. & Pols, H. (eds)

  In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere, whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases, such as World War I or the Holocaust, in which Western experiences and actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in Traumatic Pasts in Asia make just such an intervention, extending Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, exploring how these new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies Medical Anthropology

• July 2014

  Unforgotten

  Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India

  Brijnath, B.

  As life expectancy increases in India, the number of people living with dementia will also rise. Yet little is known about how people in India cope with dementia, how relationships and identities change through illness and loss. In addressing this question, this book offers a rich ethnographic account of how middle-class families in urban India care for their relatives with dementia. From the husband who wakes up at 3 am to feed his wife ice-cream to the daughters who gave up employment for seven years to care for their mother with dementia, this book illuminates the local idioms on dementia and aging, the personal experience of care-giving, the functioning of stigma in daily life, and the social and cultural barriers in accessing support.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

• eBook available October 2010

  Unsafe Motherhood

  Mayan Maternal Mortality and Subjectivity in Post-War Guatemala

  Berry, N.

  “[S]heds light not only on the obstacles to making motherhood safer, but to improving the health of poor populations in general.”—Social Anthropology

  Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Sololá, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women.

  The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally.

  From the Introduction:
  An unspoken effect of reducing maternal mortality to a medical problem is that life and death become the only outcomes by which pregnancy and birth are understood. The specter of death looms large and limits our full exploration of either our attempts to curb maternal mortality, or the phenomenon itself. Certainly women’s survival during childbirth is the ultimate measure of success of our efforts. Yet using pregnancy outcomes and biomedical attendance at birth as the primary feedback on global efforts to make pregnancy safer is misguided.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available March 2008

  Where There Is No Midwife

  Birth and Loss in Rural India

  Pinto, S.

  In the Sitapurdistrict of Uttar Pradesh, an agricultural region with high rates of infant mortality, maternal health services are poor while family planning efforts are intensive. By following the daily lives of women in this setting, the author considers the women’s own experiences of birth and infant death, their ways of making-do, and the hierarchies they create and contend with. This book develops an approach to the care that focuses on emotion, domestic spaces, illicit and extra-institutional biomedicine, and household and neighborly relations that these women are able to access. It shows that, as part of the concatenation of affect and access, globalized moralities about reproduction are dependent on ambiguous ideas about caste. Through the unfolding of birth and death, a new vision of "untouchability" emerges that is integral to visions of progress.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• May 2008

  Working with Spirit

  Experiencing Izangoma Healing in Contemporary South Africa

  Wreford, J. T.

  In the current model of health dispensation in South Africa there are two major paradigms, the spirit-inspired tradition of izangoma sinyanga and biomedicine. These operate at best in parallel, but more often than not are at odds with one another. This book, based on the author’s personal experience as a practitioner of traditional African medicine, considers the effects of the absence of spirit in biomedicine on collaborative relationships. Given the unprecedented challenge of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country, the author suggests that more cooperation is vital. Taking a critical look at the role of anthropology in this endeavor, she proposes the development of a “language of spirit” by means of which the spirit-inspired aetiology of izangoma sinyanga may be made comprehensible to academic scientists and applicable to medical interventions. The author discusses white izangoma in the context of current debates on healing and hybridity and insists that there exists a powerful role for izangoma in the realm of societal healing. Above all, the book constitutes a start in what the author hopes will develop into an ongoing intellectual conversation between traditional African healing, academe, and biomedicine in South Africa.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion