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…
Tag: Features
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…
Top of the Heap: Anna Waldstein by Hannah Gibson
[For this installment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Anna Waldstein, who is an ecological anthropologist and lecturer in medical anthropology and ethnobotany at…
Storage and stockpiling as techniques of preparedness: Managing the bottlenecks of flu pandemics by Frédéric Keck
In the last twenty years, influenza has been considered by global health experts as a model for the emergence of new pathogens from animal reservoirs. In the logic…
Graphic Medicine and Medical Anthropology by Dana Walrath
Introduction When I began my graphic memoir series, Aliceheimers, it focused just on life with my mother Alice before and during dementia. But the revelatory insight that she…
Where Has SARS Gone? The Strange Case of the Disappearing Coronavirus by Robert Peckham
The emergence of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China’s Guangdong Province in the winter of 2002 was an exemplary spillover event: it marked the passage of a…
Extractivism, Refusals, and the Mining of Failure by Teresa Velasquez
Is ethnographic research analogous to a gold mine project, an extractive industry that makes a social and material landscape knowable, and hence governable? Is knowledge construction a veil…
Sex/Gender: Part III: What Counts as Adequate Function? by Constance Cummings
A Critical Moment: Sex/Gender Research at the Intersections of Culture, Brain, and Behavior FPR-UCLA 2016 Conference Summary The sex/gender conference succeeded in bringing together people “with dif…
Diagnosing Failure: The Post-Hoc Report as an Administrative Epilogue by Andrew Lakoff
The World Health Organization recently released its long-awaited final report on the organization’s response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic. The report opens by explaining that, however tragic the…
Technologies of Care: Administering Donated Breast Milk in a South African Neonatal Intensive Care Unit by Miriam Waltz
This is the third installment of the series from the University of Cape Town’s First Thousand Day Research Group. My research traces out the pathways of donated milk…
Being Seen: An Interview with Anlor Davin by David Platzer
Introduction In the early years of the 21st century, Ian Hacking wrote a series of essays on the theme of autistic subjectivity. These eclectic, occasional essays were, he…
Awakenings by Bharat Jayram Venkat
Tuberculosis is curable. Figure 1: Propaganda materials rehearsing the curability of tuberculosis are produced by a variety of institutional actors across India. From left to right: poster from…
Disability as Diversity: A New Biopolitics by Michele Friedner
We’re a medical anthropologist and a literary critic, and while our research interests seemingly have little overlap, we found ourselves engaged in a series of conversations about how…
Who’s Playing the ‘Nazi Card’ in Anthropology?: Rhetorical Spectres of Anti-Semitism in the BDS Debate by David Rosen
Two recent articles by BDS leaders in anthropology have accused boycott opponents of debasing the debate in anthropology, either by playing the “Nazi card” or by introducing the…
Manufacturing neglect: What happens to drugs once the epidemic has passed? by Jeremy Greene
We like to think that drugs help put an end to disease, although in the aggregate this is seldom the case. However many individual infections and infestations might…
After the End of Disease: Rethinking the Epidemic Narrative by Dora Vargha
In conversations with people living with polio in Hungary, I often encountered members of the tight-knit community referring to themselves as “dinosaurs”. We are a breed that is…
Earthly togetherness: making a case for living with worms by Filippo Bertoni
In this short essay, I will try to convince you of the importance of earthworms in thinking about politics. If this sounds like an argument, that is because…
Creative Collaborations: The Making of “Lissa (Still Time): a graphic medical ethnography of friendship, loss, and revolution” by Sherine Hamdy
Is there a widely accessible yet conceptually rigorous way to convey anthropological insights into the lived complexities and bioethical dilemmas that attend managing chronic illness in two vastly…
Autism Spectrum Disorders in Global, Local and Personal Perspective: a conference report by Elizabeth Fein
Last September, a group of scholars gathered at the State University of Rio de Janeiro for “Autism Spectrum Disorders in Global, Local and Personal Perspective: A Cross-Cultural Workshop”.…
Graduate Student Response to “When It’s Time to Vote, Don’t Boycott Academics–Cut the Purse Strings” by Emma Shaw Crane
As graduate students and new members of the American Association of Anthropologists, we approach the academic boycott resolution vote with hope. We write today in response to “When…
Top of the Heap: Helen Verran by Hannah Gibson
For this installment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Helen Verran, a historian and philosopher of science who is Adjunct Professor at Charles Darwin…
Web Roundup: The Electronic Over-Soul and our Worst Selves (and Other Mishaps) by Sara M Bergstresser
The web roundup for this month is a sequel to last month’s roundup on Mind, Consciousness, and Artificial Intelligence. I will address another interface between machines and minds,…
The discernment of knowledge: sexualized violence in the Mennonite church by Stephanie Krehbiel
This case begins with an unsettling email. It came from a powerful man of the church, a Mennonite executive, and it was a response to an email from…