How Belonging Shapes the Vaccination Crisis
[no-caption] Marcel Hirshegger/SAPIENS Anthropologist Elisa Sobo never wanted to study the issue of vaccination. The topic was too fraught, she says, and she didn’t want to touch it…
Tag: health
Does Tattooing Boost Health?
A Samoan schoolteacher receives a full pe’a, the traditional tattoo generally worn by males. Christopher D. Lynn This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been rep…
Ep. #35: Loneliness, Positionality, ‘Person’ & Violence: This Month on TFS
This month Julia (0:59) starts us off with the relationship between loneliness and health after listening to an episode of ‘All in the Mind’, a podcast that explores…
Searching, Studying and Doing Sociology in the Medico-Legal Borderlands by Laura Bisaillon
Medico-legal borderlands? What is this nebulous sounding compound concept, “medico-legal borderlands”? How has it been used by social scientists whose ethnographic studies scratch at itches in the…
How I kicked chronic migraine (And what that has to do with anthropology)
This post is about the biopsychosocial medical model and how it relates to the treatment of chronic pain. As an anthropologist, I’m particularly interested in the social part…
How Traditional Knowledge Opens Nature’s Medicine Cabinet
A natural pharmacist at a complementary medicine clinic in Trujillo, Peru, displays a plant tincture. Jane Palmer Under the clear, moonlit sky of Friday, July 13, 2018, Elide…
Chelation Chronicles – 1H 2019
I’ve been fighting a host of chronic health issues for 10+years now. I have come to believe that heavy metal poisoning is likely the root cause. In this…
Who Decided It Was Bad to Be Fat?
In 2009, supermodel Kate Moss caused a stir when she categorically stated that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” As jaw-dropping as the sentiment might have seemed…
Fat Gets No Respect (But That Should Change)
Every human has it. But nearly every human society sees it differently. Fat. What purpose does it serve? In this video, a collaboration between SAPIENS and Aeon, anthropological…
Chelation Chronicles – 2H 2018
I’ve been fighting a host of chronic health issues for 10+years now. I have come to believe that heavy metal poisoning is likely the root cause. In this…
Issuing Trigger Warnings in an Age of Mass Shootings
Ellie Fleischer writes “Enough Is Enough” at a memorial near the Tree of Life Synagogue on Monday, October 29, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Salwan Georges/Getty Images On the last…
Thesis Review and Interview: Deorukhe Women’s Agency in the Making of Bodies, Cuisine, and Culture in Maharashtra, India
Photograph: Gauri A. Pitale – Waterlogged rice fields of rural Konkan, Maharashtra Please note: As Associate Editor, I am soliciting reviews of recent dissertations in the Anthropology of Food….
A Rise in Vulnerability? Academic Studies, Paid Work and Mental Health
**This is the second of three posts on student experience, debt and austerity in higher education; see the other posts published on October 8th and 22nd.** by Anne-Meike Fechter…
Raising Health Expectations for Schizophrenia Patients
People living with chronic illness and medication also manage their health in experimental and often quite ordinary ways. Blood tests, echocardiograms, waist measurements, and body weigh-ins comprise…
Dis/ability to do Fieldwork
Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Tio’tia:ke/Montréal, Canada. They are currently researching how UK asylum tribunals consider religion and conversion, with a focus on…
Remarkably Good Health … except for the deaths; Siletz Health report 1863
Reservation Health Reports previous to the 1870’s are fairly rare. there are about two reports a year for each reservation. The annual reports also have some health information,…
How to Book an Appointment Online when you have Aphasia
I’m meeting a fellow speech therapist researcher at a weekly drop-in session for people with aphasia when Markus* comes in, brandishing an envelope. “I went!” he exclaims. Markus…
Ethnographic Ableism: Structural Silencing of Physical Disability in Anthropological Research
Micha Rahder is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Geography & Anthropology at Louisiana State University. Her research centers on the intersection of science and social…
Ep #20 Wearing the black armband: Mick Dodson talks ongoing colonisation in Australia
“We don’t look back enough to go forward, I don’t think. We need to look in the rear view mirror everyday”. Professor Mick Dodson AM, a Yawuru Aboriginal…
How Cutting-Edge Archaeology Can Improve Public Health
[no-caption] Megan Brickley Twenty years ago, I held in my hands the leg bones of a 2-year-old child who had died in Birmingham in the early 1800s. They…
Why Eradicating Polio Is More Complicated Than It Seems
A health worker in Karachi, Pakistan, delivers polio vaccine drops to a child. Rizwan Tabassum/Getty Images In a rapidly urbanizing sector of Karachi, Pakistan, dry and dusty hills…
Indifference to the Needs of the Tribes: Testimony of William Miller, Physician at Grand Ronde, 1862
In 1862, there remained many problems at the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation. Problems of food and shelter, medicine and education where not solved yet. The seven treaties of…
When Doctors Don’t Listen
[no-caption] Michelle Jones/SAPIENS It’s been almost a year since I tried to kill myself. As a doctoral student living in the leafy suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts, in 2015,…