Everyday violence, mobility and access to antenatal care by Nicole Ferreira
I met Libby on a cold winter morning at the clinic. She was a short woman with a strong voice and slow walk. Libby was 35 years old…
Tag: Features
The “Good-Enough Anthropologist” by Elizabeth Durham
“Where are all the anthropologists?” The question came from public health worker Douglas Hamilton on the first day of the Princeton-Fung Global Forum on Ebola, held in November…
Conference Report: The Humanization of Health Sciences through Innovation in Health Professions Education by Thomas Cousins
Brocher Foundation, May 2016 Introduction This three-day event took place at the Brocher Foundation Institute, Geneva, from May 17-20 2016, and was generously funded by a Brocher Foundation…
After the End of Ebola by Patricia Kingori
When the international teams began closing the Ebola Treatment Centres (ETCs) in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea this signalled the end of Ebola for many people. As researchers, NGO…
Grassroots Necro-tourism in Napoli
Guest contributor Markus Bell is a lecturer in the University of Sheffield’s School of East Asian Studies. Follow him on Twitter: @mpsbell. Italy is in trouble. Big trouble. The…
Humanitarianism in the Anthropocene by Sverre Molland
The decade has been conceptually rich for anthropologists. From multi-species ethnography to the practice of care, the past several years have seen a flourish of analytical concepts and…
The Limits of Rations and Cash for Food Programs: Food Related Illness in The Gihembe Refugee Camp by Emily A. Lynch
An elderly woman, whom I will call Mama Solange, walks the narrow, muddy pathway between her home and the neighbors compound in the refugee camp. She takes me…
“As Americans, We Grieve”: Mass Shootings & Collective Trauma by Elle Nurmi
“As Americans, we grieve…”[1] Mass shootings in contemporary American society have emerged as events of profound political and cultural symbolism; indeed, the news media has often attributed to…
The social framing of diagnoses and empathetic listening by Aaron J. Jackson
The account that follows depicts a visit with my neurologist. The visit was one of many within a five-month period of navigating various medical spaces to get to…
Top of the Heap: Zoë H. Wool by Hannah Gibson
For this installment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Zoë H. Wool, who is a medical anthropologist and assistant professor at Rice University in…
Bracketing time: nourishment beyond ‘the first thousand days’ by Carina Truyts
[1000 days] of focus and intense care in order to ‘secure’ infants’ future health, [6 months] of exclusive breastfeeding. These brackets of time demarcate periods of intense focus…
Messianic Medicine: Treating Disease in the Time that is Left by Janina Kehr
In “The Time that Is Left”, Giorgio Agamben sketches the problem of messianic time. He writes that the messianic is “not the end of time, but the time…
Tobias Rees’s Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms by Nima Bassiri
Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms by Tobias Rees University of California Press, 2016, 352 pages In the prefatory pages of Plastic Reason,…
Susan Reynolds Whyte’s Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda by Jason Johnson Peretz
Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda Susan Reynolds Whyte, editor Contributions by Godfrey Etyang, Phoebe Kajubi, David Kyaddondo, Lotte Meinert, Hanne Mogensen, Jenipher Twebaze, Michael A. Whyte …
Sarah Richardson’s Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome by Paula Martin
Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome Sarah Richardson University of Chicago Press, 2013, 320 pages In Sex Itself: The Search for…
Mara Buchbinder’s “All In Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain” by Joanna Kempner
All In Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain by Mara Buchbinder University of California Press, 2015, 256 pages Pain has a famously intangible quality. To paraphrase…
Untimely Ends and the Pandemic Imaginary by Christos Lynteris
It was one of those typical late spring afternoons in Beijing, when the desert sand blowing from the North begins to give way to an electric atmosphere more…
Fixing things: Moving image stories into case stories by Jenna Grant
During her pregnancy, Puthea went to a private maternity clinic for regular ultrasound exams. This clinic was one of the larger and more popular in Phnom Penh at…
Book Forum––Sabine Arnaud’s On Hysteria by Todd Meyers
Sabine Arnaud’s On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category Between 1670 and 1820 focuses on the socio-medical category before its better-known (and more heavily studied) late ninet…
Joanna Kempner’s Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health by Christine Labuski
Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health Joanna Kempner University of Chicago Press, 2014, 232 pages In her thoroughly engaging new book, Not Tonight: Migraine…
Flagged: Children on July 4th
Author Cindy Dell Clark, associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, did fieldwork on Memorial Day and July 4th during 2005-2012. She has also studied American families at…
1000 Risks and Birth-and-Death in Cape Town by Kathleen McDougall
“I was willing to die,” Terri told me, “I just didn’t want to have another caesarian.” She referred to her vaginal birth after three c-sections (a VBA3C), which…
Conference Report: Ludwik Fleck’s theory of thought styles and thought collectives – translations and receptions by Sandra Lang
Ludwik Fleck’s theory of thought styles and thought collectives – translations and receptions March 10th – 11th 2016 Wrocław, Poland Organizing committee: Paweł Jarnicki (Project Science …
Never Ending Stories: Narrating Frozen Evidence of Infectious Epidemics Past by Joanna Radin
Early Elegy: Smallpox by Claudia Emerson The world has certified itself rid of all but the argument: to eradicate or not the small stock of variola frozen, quarantined—a…