Medical Anthropology最新文献

Health technologies to monitor glucose values are an important part of daily diabetes self-care. Based on 12 months of fieldwork in Denmark with 14 people with type 2 diabetes, I explore people's experience of living with Continuous Glucose Monitoring. This new technology automatically measures glucose levels throughout the day but is not yet common in type 2 diabetes treatment in Denmark. In this article, I capture the social shaping of Continuous Glucose Monitoring, employing the concept of time. I show how adoption of the technology is embedded in a form of biographical time. This refers to people's use of the technology linked to their stories about themselves. Drawing on a notion of habitus, people's embodied past experiences and future prospects come to shape its use, I propose. My main claim is that while people with diabetes implement the technology into their lives in unique ways, adapting it to their circumstances and social conditions, practice of Continuous Glucose Monitoring reproduce social structures. This is evinced, I argue, in people's tinkering with the technology and the frames of reference used to inform it. I introduce the term "tinkering in time", highlighting the introduction of new health technology within the frame of lived human time.

Yoga-informed sound bath providers orchestrate vibrations from singing bowls, chimes, gongs, and other simple instruments to promote client well-being - sometimes in ways that create a trauma trap. Drawing on immersive research with sound bath providers and receivers in California, USA, I explore how these ritual performances feed on and fuel narratives regarding trauma, stress, and dysregulation, diverting attention from structural and cultural factors creating said disharmony. Beyond thereby ensuring a market, they can perpetuate a trauma-informed self-identification and subjectivity that harmonizes with the American work ethic, diminishes nonproductive sensual enjoyment, promotes self-care over community care, undermines resilience, and amplifies suffering.

Pregnancy is a processual dialectic that involves continual acts of tactical, responsive, and creative accommodation by pregnant women. This article is a phenomenological investigation of pregnancy experience of working-class women in Manila. In it, I provide an outline of "accommodation:" acts which vary according to the political ecology of procreation in which they are enmeshed, and which are particularly evident in unexpected or unplanned pregnancies. Accommodation constitutes the core act in which the mother-to-be is engaged as the protagonist of procreation, transforming the character of unexpected pregnancy from uncertain and troubled to stable and even joyous as acts of accommodation restore bodily integrity.

Medical anthropologists working in interdisciplinary teams often articulate expertise with respect to ethnography. Yet increasingly, health scientists utilize ethnographic methods. Through a comparative review of health ethnographies, and autoethnographic observations from interdisciplinary research, we find that anthropological ethnographies and health science ethnographies are founded on different epistemic sensibilities. Differences center on temporalities of research, writing processes, sites of social intervention, uses of theory, and analytic processes. Understanding what distinguishes anthropological ethnography from health science ethnography enables medical anthropologists - who sometimes straddle these two ethnographic modes - to better articulate their epistemic positionality and facilitate interdisciplinary research collaborations.

We explore the temporalities that shape and alleviate serious health-related suffering among those with chronic and terminal conditions in Kerala, India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork between 2009 and 2019, we examine the entanglements between waiting for care within dominant institutions and the community organizing that palliates this waiting. Specifically, people navigate multiple medical institutions, experience loneliness and abandonment, loss of autonomy, and delays and denials of recognition as they wait for care. Community palliative care organizations offering free, routine, home-based care provide samadhanam (peace of mind) and swatantrayam (self-determination) in lifeworlds mired with chronic waiting. We document how community care sustains an alternative politics of shared time, untethered from marketized notions of efficiency and productivity toward profits. In so doing, we cast in high relief community healthcare imaginaries that alleviate serious health-related suffering and reconfigure Global North-centric perspectives.

In Denmark, people are expected to take responsibility for their health, not least as their bodies age and they experience signs of physical or mental decline. Drawing on fieldwork among older Danes, I illustrate that an excessive focus on health gives rise to social and structural controversies and disparities, linking ideas of healthy behavior at the individual level with the societal framing of disease and aging. I argue that this emphasis contributes to the unwarranted diagnosis of bodily variations that naturally occur in the aging process, a phenomenon referred to as overdiagnosis, adding to a broader medicalization of old age.

COVID-19 testing programs in the UK often called on people to test to "protect others." In this article we explore motivations to test and the relationships to "others" involved in an asymptomatic testing program at a Scottish university. We show that participants engaged with testing as a relational technology, through which they navigated multiple overlapping responsibilities to kin, colleagues, flatmates, strangers, and to more diffuse publics. We argue that the success of testing as a technique of governance depends not only on the production of disciplined selves, but also on the program's capacity to align interpersonal and public scales of responsibility.

In this article, we examine a group of older marginalized substance-using citizens and their relations to Danish health care. We offer empirical examples collected through ethnographic fieldwork, about how they handle their health situation and encounters with the Danish healthcare system. Analytically, we particularly draw on the concept of disposable ties, and suggest the term "brittle ties" to nuance the term and examine how perceived individual autonomy is weighted against health care trajectories and how these citizens often prefer to fend for themselves or lean on provisional networks rather than enter into health care trajectories and follow-up treatment.

In Brazil, lack of quality in the delivery of prenatal care is a persistent concern. In this study, I analyze the dynamics taking place in the prenatal clinical encounter, and illuminate how the requirement to produce metrics through registration and monitoring endorses a form of bureaucratic care. This form of care develops in a context characterized by scarcity and a lack of medical resources, where healthcare professionals attempt to contain uncertainty. Ruled by notions of risk, centered in measuring practices, and saturated by an overvaluation of technology, bureaucratic care reinforces the disenfranchizement and stigmatization of Black rural women.

Drawing on ethnographic research at a hospital in rural Zambia, I show how the presence of white Christian medical volunteers from the United States damaged relations between local health workers and patients. Working from a position of economic and racial privilege, medical volunteers received praise from many patients and residents. However, these positive attitudes incited resentment among many Zambian health workers who felt that their own efforts and expertise were being undervalued or ignored. Focusing on these disrupted relationships, I argue that it is crucial to understand how global health volunteering can produce enduring forms of "relational harm".