Refraction of daily life by Jeannette Pols
Attending to what makes up ‘the everyday’ has long been a challenge for scholars in the social sciences. [1] Researchers from different disciplines and perspectives have explored how mundane…
Tag: Features
The Milk of Human Kindness by Penny Van Esterik
Sour Milk At the World Health Assembly (WHA) meetings in late May, 2018, the US delegation tried to water-down or dump a very mild resolution to confirm and…
A Report on the 2018 4S Conference in Sydney, Australia by Tessa Leach
What characterises STS in different regions? What kinds of research projects, educational programs, and people are doing STS around the world? What problems exist in different regions? Can…
The fool with the watering can, or asynchronous time travelling by Jeannette Pols
One of the most bewildering and fascinating things about spending time with people with dementia is that they can rapidly travel through time. This was most clear with…
Six photos of my father at 91 by Alessandro Duranti
I have chosen to tell a story based on six photographs I took of my father, Ivio Duranti (1918-2009) in the last year of his life. He was…
Re-enacting memories by Elinor Ochs
One way to ‘think with dementia’ is to phenomenologically shift from ‘memory’ to ‘remembering’ and to mine ‘remembering’ for its qualities and potentialities as socio-culturally limned experience. Whe…
“I do want euthanasia, but not now.” Timing a request for euthanasia with dementia in the Netherlands by Natashe Lemos Dekker
Sitting on orange seats in the corridor, Ms Verbeek, her niece Hannie and I are waiting for the general practitioner. Ms Verbeek seems a little restless and is…
Folding time: walk-talking joint moments in the nursing home by Laura Vermeulen
We knew each other from the drop-in centre. Aspects of our daily life concerns had been shared. ‘We’ were drop-in centre participants: the majority had been diagnosed with…
Refraction of time by Jeannette Pols
On a Thursday evening, five men gather around a dinner table. Their host, a scientist from Surrey, England, has left them a note telling them to begin eating…
The Banality of Lost Guns: Producing Null Data Sets by Kristin Doughty
On the evening of June 6, 2016, a man with a concealed carry permit misplaced his loaded 9mm Kahr handgun in the middle of a park filled with…
Top of the Heap: Reading in pairs with Ayo Wahlberg by Hannah Gibson
For this instalment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Professor Ayo Wahlberg, who is Professor MSO in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. He…
Remaking Reproduction Conference: A Review by Risa Cromer
More than 150 scholars of reproduction descended upon an uncharacteristically sunny Cambridge in June 2018 to put reproduction at the center of social analysis at the Remaking Reproduction:…
How to Pay Attention by Nick Seaver
The main challenge in running a seminar on the anthropology of attention is that such a thing doesn’t exist.* While anthropologists often think quite deeply about attention, worrying…
Politics by Other Means: Health in Việt Nam by Martha Lincoln
My research in Việt Nam addresses how medicine, health, and disease function as political and cultural signifiers as well as telegraphing – in the form of epidemiological data…
Breaking news! Big Shift in Biomediatization from “Swine Flu” to H3N2 to the Trump Administration’s Attack on Breastfeeding by Charles L. Briggs
The H3N2 epidemic didn’t really take off until early January 2018—at least as far as US media coverage is concerned. A crucial marker was the New York Times‘…
Cancer Culture avant la lettre by Vincent Bruyère
Figure 1. Two views of Clara Jacobi (Netherlands, 1689). U.S. National Library of Medicinehttps://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101392944-img In the class I teach on illness narratives, c…
Respect, care, and labor in collaborative scholarly projects by Nayantara Sheoran Appleton
As members of Somatosphere’s Editorial Collaborative, we have been following the unfolding crisis surrounding Hau with profound concern (Agro 2018, Flaherty 2018). As others have noted, this crisis…
The Power and Precarity of Global Health Partnerships by Clare Herrick
A recent issue of Medicine Anthropology Theory devoted to the critique of global health partnerships (GHPs) raises a question of great significance to many Somatosphere readers: ‘In real world…
We Need to Talk About “Gun Violence”: Reflections on Terminology and Contexts of Violence by Joe Anderson
Among the many political challenges of our time, gun violence in America has emerged as one of the most divisive. A retreat into partisan communities prevents us from…
North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics, an Interview with Byung-Ho Chung
The following is an interview of Byung-Ho Chung Professor at Hanyang University and President of the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology, conducted by AAA Executive Director Ed Liebow. EL: I…
Funny, Awkward, Tender, Focused: Drawing Bodies by Andrea Ford
Drawings from my research on childbirth in California created an opportunity for sharing reflections on fieldwork and “seeing.” Birth is a highly mediated experience, with ubiquitous images of…
Is Health Activism a Collective Responsibility? by Beza Merid
During the tumultuous “repeal and replace” frenzy in the spring and summer of 2017, the US House of Representatives and Senate moved quickly to consider bills intended to…
Who was Bobby Kennedy?
This post was submitted by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of medical anthropology at UC Berkeley where she directs the doctoral program in Critical Studies in Medicine, Science and the…
In The Journals, May 2018 by Ann Marie Thornburg
We hope you find articles of interest in this month’s In The Journals selections. Happy reading! American Ethnologist Quantitative care: Caring for the aggregate in US academic population…