Is Donated Blood a Gift or a Commodity?
In 1950, human blood was stored for patient use at a U.S. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons In the spring…
Tag: health
Is Donated Blood a Gift or a Commodity?
An anthropologist dives into the morally fraught blood and plasma industry and what it reveals about human societies—the good, the bad, and the gory. ✽ In the spring…
Do Children Need Special Foods?
Ultraprocessed breakfast cereals, sometimes touted as “healthy” thanks to vitamin fortification, are one of the most popular foods targeted toward kids. Education Images/Getty Images In c…
We Should Talk More About the Abortion Pill
In May 2018, activists took abortion pills as part of a protest against anti-abortion laws in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Many were dressed as characters from The Handmaid’s Tale,…
Impossible Choices at the Crossroads of Motherhood and Fieldwork
Co-author Jamie Hodgkins holds her daughter as she co-directs the excavations at the Arma Veirana site in northwestern Italy. Fabio Negrino/University of Genoa Many women* in science who…
Unmasked: Illustrating COVID-19 in Okoboji
[no-caption] Aaron Gronstal These illustrations tell the story of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in a small tourist town in the Iowa Great Lakes region: my…
Nurturing Autism Acceptance in Indonesia
Idris (right), a teenager on the autism spectrum, visits a local mosque in Indonesia to pray with his father. Elemental Productions On a typical day, Wawan, a teenager…
Sixty may be the New Fifty but is Twenty Six the New Old?
Author: Sheba Mohammid In Trinidad and Tobago, we may not have Ponce De Leon’s fountain of youth, but we do have a pool. It’s technically an offshore sandbar,…
Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
Our recent book, Racism, Not Race, tackles a big lie: The idea that human beings have biological races. Biological races do not exist in humans. Why, then, do…
Does Green on COVID-19 Maps Mean What You Think?
Picture a traffic light. This isn’t a trick question. We want you to visualize some sort of box housing three lightbulbs, each behind a colored filter: red on…
At the Limits of Cure for Tuberculosis
As part of a tuberculosis screening, a radiologist in Germany examines a lung X-ray of a refugee from the 2022 Russian war in Ukraine. Matthias Balk/Picture Alliance/Getty Images…
An Anthropological Approach to mHealth: Health & Care in the Smartphone Age
Author: Charlotte Hawkins As part of the ASSA project, we are currently working to publish a volume called: ‘An Anthropological Approach to mHealth: Health & Care in the…
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (Book Review)
by Ellie Plumb In Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Seth M. Holmes seeks to uncover the synergistic effects that citizenship, race, ethnicity, and…
Should You Feel Bad About Your Pandemic-Era Plastic Waste?
Plastic waste has grown exponentially across the globe during the pandemic. Matthew Williams-Ellis/Universal Images Group/Getty Images “Sometimes I want to avoid producing excessive waste…
The Cultural Anxieties of Xenotransplantation
In January, news broke that David Bennett Sr.—a 57-year-old man with a serious heart disease—received a heart from a genetically modified pig. The eight-hour operation, which took place…
What’s the Appeal of Deep Voices in Men?
Deep voices, like singer Barry White’s bass-baritone, are seen as appealing across a variety of cultures and sexual identities. POP-EYE/ullstein bild/Getty Images For many people, Barry W…
Negative heritage and de-normalizing necropolitics
Upon entering the Orthodox Christian cemetery in Siret, a town on the Romanian-Ukrainian border, we were met with neatly kept marvel gravestones, occasionally adorned with plastic flowers and…
Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement (Book Review)
By Jack Payne-Cook If I was asked by someone unfamiliar with anthropology to provide an example of the contemporary relevance of the discipline, I would consider offering Alex…
Trinidad – The Potential of ‘Online Only’ Ethnography
By Daniel Miller and Sheba Mohammid The ASSA project runs until October 2022. Mostly the last year of the project is dedicated to publishing our results, for example…
Cultural Dimensions of health – Introduction
Cultural Dimensions of health Contents Cultural Dimensions of health. 1
On the Edge of the Body
By Renata Carvalho Anthropology’s many attempts of conceptualising the body into clear and useful analytical categories has raised significant ontological questions that problematise the very basi…
Book Review: Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the Covid-19 Crisis edited by Marina Sitrin and Colectiva Sembrar
In Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the Covid-19 Crisis, Marina Sitrin and Colectiva Sembrar explore how communities in different areas of the world mobilised to help one another during the…
Recognising the Spirit of Ubuntu in Khayelitsha Community Response to the Covid-19 pandemic
by Megan Anderson In the second-largest peri-urban settlement in South Africa, Khayelitsha, the coronavirus has proliferated with recorded cases over 6,500. The township has become one of the…
Enigmas of Corporeal Justice: Surrogacy and Legality in India
Over the last two decades, India has become a popular global destination for what is commonly referred to as reproductive tourism, wherein clients travel from one part of…