Beach by Meg Samuelson
Beaches are good places to think with about waste and ruination. They were once generically places of waste (in the etymological sense of “unoccupied, uncultivated”) while recognized as…
Tag: Features
Book forum — Alondra Nelson’s The Social Life of DNA by Eugene Raikhel
In The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome, Alondra Nelson traces the multiple ways in which genetic testing and related technologies have become…
Body by Joshua O. Reno
It is increasingly impossible to think of the problem of waste, or discarded and denigrated materials, separately from the problem of race, or discarded and denigrated people. There…
Teaching Medical Anthropology by Thomas A Williamson
I am grateful to those who have shared their medical anthropology syllabi here and thought I would add mine to the mix. There is so much one could…
Texting Like A State: mHealth and the first thousand days in South Africa by Nanna Schneidermann
What does making a new life look like from the perspective of a mobile phone? For the phone of a woman using the public health care system in…
Beauty by Lynn M. Thomas
In the late 1990s, a group of Japanese researchers set out to investigate whether small-scale gold mining operations near the shores of East Africa’s Lake Victoria were resulting…
Soft Power: The Over-Determined Politicization of Vulnerable in the #CDC7words by Elizabeth Bromley
At first blush, the inclusion of the word vulnerable alongside words like fetus, evidence-based, and diversity in the list of 7 words discouraged for use in budget documents…
Dust by Nick Caverly
The building pictured below sat near Mack Avenue on Detroit’s far east side and, according to the municipal government, was an environmental hazard. Following years of complaints from…
Residue by Gabrielle Hecht
Waste and toxicity are foundational categories of knowledge for the Anthropocene. Consider how natural scientists approach the topic. Empirically, the “great acceleration” they’ve identified correspon…
Public health politicised: A response to the politics of CDC language and implications for global health, wellbeing and inequalities by Ben Kasstan
In this response we address how the recent language controversy surrounding the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) must be considered as part of a broader politicisation…
Beyond “Banned Words”: The CDC, Trump’s Anti-Science, and Anthropological Outrage by Charles L. Briggs
I am delighted that anthropologists joined the debate unleashed by a story published in the Washington Post on 15 December 2017, in which health reporter Lena Sun and…
Somatosphere in 2017 by Eugene Raikhel
As 2018 begins we pause to briefly look back at the posts that appeared in the past year on Somatosphere. Last year we were happy to publish a…
Justice, Science, and Pedagogy by Myrna Perez Sheldon
As we consider the role of justice in pedagogy and scholarship, I want to ask a simple but difficult question: What is our ethical task? Do we desire…
Drift by Charne Lavery
The ocean has long been considered the ideal location for the disposal of waste—including, among many other things, treated and untreated sewage poured easily into the sea, the…
Minerals by Robyn d’Avignon
Mining is a toxic business and gold mining is particularly noxious. Mercury and cyanide pollute river-ways and sentient bodies. The large-scale evacuation of earth often acidifies water tables,…
Fish by Jennifer Lee Johnson
If you’ve seen Hubert Sauper’s (2004) documentary film Darwin’s Nightmare you may remember the stark contrast he draws between the sterile disassembly line of a factory producing Nile…
Lake by Muchaparara Musemwa
Introduction Urban man-made bodies of water such as lakes can be sources of aesthetic beauty and leisure and can boost a city’s economy and tourism industry. They satisfy…
Art by Mehita Iqani
Cape Mongo is a multimedia installation that focuses on consumer waste as medium and subject. It is a complex artwork, comprising sculpture using found materials (mostly what viewers…
Anomie and aftermath: the historical residue of Flemish nationalism in present-day debates on refugees in Belgium by Hunter Keys
I. ‘Everything is the same level as the ground’ As protests against Assad morphed into slaughter, Khalid[i] did his best to avoid fighting. At the time, he was…
Poop by Joshua Grace
For colonial officials in British East Africa, African excrement endangered public health because Africans were reckless defecators. The world was their toilet, and they simply went where they…
Medical Student Activism: Political x Institutional x Personal by Robert Rock
Robert Rock and Nientara Anderson are medical students involved in a broad range of activism efforts at the Yale School of Medicine, including the US Health Justice initiatives…
Island by Pamila Gupta
Island. They are meditative, graspable and productive to think with. On the one hand, they are often conceptualized as the beginning of the world, sites of existential and…
Dump by Anne Berg
South Africa, 1994. Apartheid before, democracy after. Nonetheless, obstinate continuities stretch across this important rupture. Bisasar Road Landfill, the largest registered landfill on the A…
Port by Jatin Dua
Indian Ocean port cities are worlds of coral and glass. Consider Lamu or Zanzibar on the East African coast with their labyrinthine old towns where ornate buildings made…