Medical Anthropology最新文献

In Denmark, injunctions of "early" cancer diagnosis increasingly imply surveillance of small tissue changes, which may or may not develop into cancer. Based on fieldwork at diagnostic lung cancer clinics and with people in CT surveillance for tissue changes, I explore how detected tissue changes are ascribed meaning as signs of "nothing" or "something." Inspired by Peircean semiotics, I suggest that the semiotic indeterminacy of tissue changes points to how diagnostic socialities both expand medical semiotics and enable this expansion. The article, thereby, contributes to understandings of signs as diagnostic infrastructures.

HIV prevention programs focus on global "key populations" and more localized "priority populations" to ensure effective targeting of interventions. These HIV population categories have been subject to considerable scholarly scrutiny, particularly key populations, with less attention given to critically unpacking priority populations at local levels, for example "serodiscordant couples" (one partner has HIV, but not the other). We examine this population in the context of Papua New Guinea to consider how local configurations, relational pathways, and lived realities of serodiscordant relationships strain the boundaries of this population category and raise intriguing questions about its intersection with contemporary biomedical agendas.

In Germany, both apnea and insomnia are highly prevalent sleep disorders. But while there is an extensive and growing infrastructure to deal with apnea, there is very little support for insomnia patients. I argue that this is due to various interrelated factors: the role of evidence and experience in diagnosis, the availability of treatment, and-importantly-how evidence, experience, and treatment can (or cannot) be materialized in the medical economy. Drawing on phenomenology and affordance theory, and based on fieldwork among German sleep doctors and their patients, I analyze how different sleep disorders are perceived, evaluated, and acted upon. I use different examples to reflect on the possibilities of "objectively" knowing and "subjectively" experiencing (disordered) sleep, and on how different perspectives (patient versus doctor, first-person versus third-person) and modes of perception (direct or indirect, narrative-based anamnesis or technology-based assessment) matter (or not) for the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders.

We explore partner exclusion from perinatal care in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants' narratives show that pregnant couples frame partner presence as a [human] right that was denied, and articulated this as denial of the "right to experience" and the "right to care." These restrictions deprived birth partners and families of an experience that is important to them, and represent a repudiation of the resurgence of birth as a social event which entails valued forms of care. We show that the medical establishment's commitment to partner presence during perinatal care is weak, although caring masculinity is normative.

This article builds on fieldwork conducted during lockdown in Denmark among users of services at the intersection of homelessness and drug use. The paper bridges two distinct approaches to understanding the relation between marginalization and crisis, with one focused on the impact of "big events" on marginalized populations, and another on everyday strategies employed to survive situations of homelessness and drug use. The paper shows how past experiences of hardship became relevant for coping with pandemic crisis. It further exploreshow, through critical engagement with dominant accounts of vulnerability, research participants carved out a space for negotiating their marginality in the Danish welfare state.

Drawing on sources relating to the Brazilian scenario - from ethnographic research in lower-income neighorhoods to the analysis of official documents and public debates - we build on cases of forced child removals to explore the intersectional dynamics of class, race, and gender that underlie institutionalized practices of discrimination against poverty-stricken families. After first addressing the influence of recent global trends in child-protection policy, we observe how adoption procedures in Brazil have been increasingly facilitated by the resignification of rights and corresponding changes in the country's legal infrastructures. Next, asking what sort of authoritative knowledge is invoked to define a child's best interests, we reflect on the role played by biomedicine in appraising the limits of acceptable parenthood. Guided by the notion of stratified reproduction, our investigation of these political, scientific, and moral technologies suggests plausible connections between policies that condition the demand for and the supply of adoptable children.

Management of what Somalis call "dacar" - translated as digestive bile, bitterness, aloe, and masses of tiny beings in the gut - is key to popular health cultures and ethnophysiologies in eastern Ethiopia. Managing bodily dacar requires cultivating multispecies sociality and flows of life between humans, vegetation that nourishes livestock, and animals that produce milk consumed for therapeutic and nutritional properties. Transcending Western scientific conceptualizations of the "gut microbiome" and the instrumentalization of microbes to improve human health, Somalis' gut epistemologies and concept of dacar provide an ecological perspective on the co-constructed, mutable, and multispecies nature of digestion and life itself.

Inclusive participatory approaches strive to make participants with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) co-researchers. However, academic standards of knowledge production and the need for cognitive skills can complicate collaboration. I argue that collaboration with people with disabilities is not about efforts of inclusion, but instead, it is our methodologies that need to be "cripped." This means moving away from the ideal of inclusion, toward a more interdependent and relational understanding of access and collaboration. This multimodal article shows how my "research subject" Olof and I explored this way of working together by describing the coproduction of the science-fiction film "O."