A forum on the Zika virus by Sudeepa Abeysinghe
Zika is in the air. The beginning of 2016 has seen the world thrust into another global infectious disease crisis, fanned by the politics and fear of uncertainty…
Zika is in the air. The beginning of 2016 has seen the world thrust into another global infectious disease crisis, fanned by the politics and fear of uncertainty…
In 1956, Claude Lévi-Strauss addressed a letter to the 1st International Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris. In the letter, he stated that “after the…
“Bioculturalism” resumes this week with the first of three new interviews with self-professed biocultural anthropologists. This series aims to get anthropologists and closely-related othe…
“The necessity of respecting game is still widely acknowledged by Inuit. The awareness, that the continuity of society depends on the maintenance of correct relationships with animals and the…
What a difference a month makes. At the start of 2016, its likely that Zika virus was on very few of our radars, yet as we reach the…
In this report we offer an overview of a two-day workshop entitled Ethnographies and Health that was held in October at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical…
For this installment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Alexander I. Stingl, who is a sociologist and a research consultant for Medical Humanities and…
Editor’s Note: In March of 2013 the Annals of Internal Medicine added the Graphic Medicine series as part of their medical humanities features. As they describe, “Annals Graphic…
In my fieldwork at the Cardiology Unit at Vilnius public hospital I encountered what I call “the cake case.” In 2009-2010 I was in Lithuania to study how…
The investor-boy-wunderkind-turned-pharmaceutical-CEO Martin Shkreli was the end of the year’s emblem of schadenfreude. Shkreli has been in the news regularly since September 2015 when his company, Tu…
For this installment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Elly Teman, a medical anthropologist specializing in the anthropology of reproduction and a senior lecturer…
On a boat sailing through the still waters of the Noi River, a tributary of the Chao Phraya River in Thailand, Miura-san, a senior male engineer from a…
There was a small glitch when our book Second Chances was almost ready to go to press. It was a layout problem. The Table of Contents was congested…
Anand Pandian’s Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation is a fascinating and truly inspired inquiry into questions of experience and the media through which experience is rendered…
Thanks to everyone who participated in our readership survey last month. One of the things that became immediately clear upon reading the responses was that many of our…
Introduction A U.S. public discourse of addiction as a disabling psychiatric condition (as opposed to a moral flaw or social deviancy) was codified into Social Security policy in…
I was doing chest compressions on a 29-year-old woman who had just come up from the Emergency Room, and I was trying not to look at her face.…
Tashi thought they were his kids. They were his kids. He was the only father they had ever known. He had been their father since the day each…
In this last roundup of our summer posts, we draw your attention to the many insightful book reviews published on Somatosphere during the hazy days of summer, just…
Here’s comes the first round of what you’ll find ‘In the Journals’ from November. Apart from the listings below, also see the Somatosphere post on a Special Issue…
Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India by Bianca Brijnath Berghahn Books, 2014, 240 pages Bianca Brijnath’s book, Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia…
A conversation with Mario Biagioli. Mario Biagioli is a Distinguished Professor of Law and Science and Technology Studies, as well as Director of the Center for Science and…
This commentary on Gregg Mitman and Sarita Siegel’s In the Shadow of Ebola is intended as a post-script to the forum on the film which appeared earlier this…
Ever felt like the best conversation at the party is happening in the next room? When I did my field research in an urban neighborhood in Java some…