Medical Anthropology最新文献

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.

In an era of increasing interest in self-monitoring technologies to improve population health, this article considers how participants in a public health trial engaged with such technologies. Exploring how their engagement sits with the logic of self-monitoring and the technology of the trial highlights that the trial's blackboxing of its objects of study obscure the deeply contextualized care practices through which such technologies "work." Attending to (self-)care and what the trial neglects offers a means of disrupting entrenched values in its objects, relations, and logics, questioning what is important and for whom through a critical anthropology of/through health technology.

Preimplantation genetic testing is an ethically sensitive practice that aims to prevent the birth of children with hereditary diseases by transferring only "healthy" embryos. While French law forbids discarding healthy-carrier embryos, it leaves a "gray area" regarding the preference for non-carriers. This ambiguity creates "moral tensions" for professionals. To ease the ethical burden, they engage in a "moral labor" that involves maintaining - or even creating - ignorance about the exact genetic status of the embryos transferred, allowing them to navigate the moral complexities of their work.

Health sovereignty - the assertion of rights to culturally and ecologically appropriate medicines and the ability of communities to structure their own healthcare - is a biopolitical goal of the Rastafari movement. We examine how health sovereignty is enacted by Rastafari herbalists in south London and the contributions these healers make to health in the UK, particularly for migrants disenfranchised by "hostile environment" immigration policies. Using ethnographic data on "bitters" and "roots tonics" we show how herbal medicines are used by healers and their clientele to achieve key political and spiritual aims of the movement, as well as personal healing.

We revisit a time in 2021 when people in the UK were coming to terms with an unwanted future characterized by chronic COVID-19 infection. Drawing on experiences of people who had already experienced COVID-19 infection, we explore how they made sense of newly perceived vulnerabilities and the possibility of reinfection. We highlight the work of speculating about the future, which involved making "educated guesses" based on embodied knowledge as understanding about different consequences of "living with COVID-19" moved in and out of view.

Exploring the relationship between governmental infectious disease management and emergency systems, I examine the turn to emergency in European measles management during the resurgence of the disease between 2017 and 2020. While measles management was shaped by hope for disease eradication and as a progressive pursuit of elimination, amid growing concerns with vaccination coverage, hope was redirected toward reversing regression in the struggle against infectious disease. I argue that perception of and action on public health issues as emergencies is intricately tied to change in the fundamental construct of governmental infectious disease management, regardless of change in the disease or its categorization.

The moral terrain of caring in a social work context is often treacherous. During ethnographic fieldwork with front-line workers at an organization providing services for unhoused individuals in a U.S. city, respondents articulated a relational intimacy required in client care. However, they also recognized the limits of their endurance and their need for distance from others. In this article, we suggest that Paul Ricoeur's "little ethics," in contrast to first-person or poststructuralist approaches to ethics, captures these workers' experience more fully and allows us to see the forging and negotiation of moral relationships of care and shared vulnerability more clearly.

This research asks what is being put to the test by breast and gynecological cancer predisposition testing in Spain beyond genes or cancer. By combining document analysis and fieldwork with national healthcare professionals and drawing on the anthropology and sociology of testing, I examine how the molecular relations of these tests extend to the political economy of the national healthcare system. I show how the capacity of these tests to produce a low-risk collective has paradoxical consequences for the political economy of the national healthcare system, unsettling professionals' concerns and spotlighting what is prioritized in personalized medicine strategies.

Pre-exposure prophylaxis, commonly known as PrEP, is an HIV-preventative pill taken to reduce the risk of contracting HIV. During a PrEP study in Dar es Salaam among queer PrEP users, this ethnographic study observed how PrEP users experienced novel types of (social) risks and harms, or social iatrogenesis, imposed by the biomedical HIV prevention pill or the PrEP program. These forms of social iatrogenesis related to lack of autonomy, creating demand for PrEP, then removing services, projectivization of PrEP programs, social risks related to fear of stigma by association, and clinical encounters producing multiple understandings of adherence and usage of PrEP.