Medical Anthropology最新文献

At the 2022 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Seattle, WA, we organized a session called "Landscapes of Surveillance Care in Reproductive Health." This introduction to our special issue represents a sustained conversation among panelists and other scholars regarding the complicated ways that surveillance and care play upon each other in our own ethnographic research and what we might learn from them.

Today in rural Tanzania, nurses instruct pregnant women to go to maternity waiting homes (MWH), spaces of surveillance-care, long before due dates. Envisioned as a place for risk in policies of global safe motherhood, ethnography shows how the MWH becomes a place of risk to pregnant women and nurses. Negotiations at the MWH show how surveillance-care can be used to control and reinforce hierarchies - inadvertently creating risk - but also, in surprising ways, mitigate risk by insisting on other forms of care. Surveillance-care is both a tool of governance and a means to assess and bring about kinship and care.

In Senegal, where pregnancy is "women's business," men's roles in prenatal and postpartum care are mediated by gendered expectations of what expectant fathers are allowed to know and do. Expectant fathers' roles map onto masculine expectations of the authoritative, sovereign head-of-household. Using the state-authored Handbook of Mother and Child Health, I argue that state surveillance is refracted through preexisting masculine prenatal care roles, and that men willingly articulate themselves to the role of the surveillance state by relying on the Handbook as a guide for how to watch their pregnant partners and make sure they are adhering to its guidance.

Based on fieldwork in maternity wards in Tanzania, I argue that the partograph - a graphical representation of a pregnant woman's labor - far exceeds its intended role as tracking and surveillance of labor progress. Through surveillance and its concomitant documentation, nurses, especially, also utilize this document to co-create care for themselves and their colleagues. These forms of care proliferate largely unseen by global health systems but are vital for understanding the meeting point of bureaucracy, surveillance, and care and the dynamics of maternity care in this and other lower resource settings. Nurses use the partograph to generate novel forms of surveillance-care.

Beyond the laws, different institutions watch over - or veille sur - the access to and practice of medically assisted reproductive care in France. Although a shift in the moral regimes underlying French reproductive governance can be observed, ART practices are monitored through surveillance mechanisms, the economic and medical nature of which conceals their normalizing function. Woman and couples who do not correspond to these norms are prevented from forming a family through the French ART system. In this article we show how, faced with this reproductive exclusion, French women and couples choose to undertake cross-border reproductive care in an attempt to circumvent surveillance and fulfil their reproductive desire.

This article concerns vernacular practices of "self-help" among the indigenous Makushi people of Amazonian Guyana. Contrasted with "Western" self-care, the article examines mayu, a traditional system of communal work grounded in a collaborative ethic of "helping each other out." A convivial event, mayu is always accompanied by feasting, drinking, and the celebration of social relationships. This cooperative ethos passes beyond the human realm to harness the agency of nonhuman beings who participate in this shared work. The article moves on to investigate how shamanism and the use of plant-charms are integral in mediating these generative relations of shared selfhood.

In this article I engage with the complex interplay of primates, plants and parasites. We learn about the ethnobotanical records of an indigenous population and their medicinal plants, and get a glimpse into the interplay of man and ape in a jointly used ecosystem. I combine my long-term research on free-living bonobos, a species endemic to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with historical work. I show the surprising and extraordinary ingestion of Manniophyton fulvum, a wild Euphorbiaceae plant widely used across Africa, bearing specific chemical and mechanical properties that make it suitable for gastro-intestinal self-care.

This special section on self-care introduces a research perspective sensitive to aspects of caring for self and other that are core to sociogenesis. We start with critical post-humanist research that highlights how bondaries between self and other get blurred in the context of caring. This is also demonstrated by ethno- and evolutionary biological research that leaves unmentioned the selfish gene and, instead, foregrounds the socially relevant in humans and primates. The focus throughout this research project into self-care, which goes beyond disciplinary boundaries, is on socio-ecologically comprehended selves.

Contrary to public health framings of self-care as individualized bodily regulation, people's transnational COVID-19 narratives revealed self-care to be a means of crafting social relatedness. In their self-care practices, interviewees drew on their richly structured field of relations, exercised dexterity and discernment in attending to them, and forged new webs of relatedness. Moreover, some recounted moments of radical care when they disregarded bodily boundaries in co-isolating with and caring for infected friends or relatives. These narratives of caring with rather than in isolation from one's social entanglements provide an alternative imaginary through which we can consider future pandemic responses.