Medical Anthropology最新文献

In Malta, palliative care is often seen by nurses, policymakers and others as care of doing nothing. In my study, I demonstrate how nurses working in a palliative care unit attend to what, in the Maltese language, are called ċuċati: seemingly trivial acts that, even within palliative care, are often not recognized as legitimate forms of care, yet have a profound effect on patients' well-being. In this article, I highlight a paradoxical relationship between the ċuċati and formal recognition. Formal recognition, while providing a means to legitimization, also risks depersonalizing the ċuċati, potentially undermining nurses' intent to improve patients' well-being.

Biosociality is often referenced regarding those living with HIV/AIDS, but scholarship takes for granted that these relationships exist between living beings. Based on long-term ethnography in refuge houses for Venezuelan migrants and Colombians living with HIV in Bogotá, Colombia, I argue that HIV/AIDS biosociality may also exist between the living and beyond-the-living espíritus who historically lived and died with HIV/AIDS. The discussion will show how consideration of biosociality beyond-the-living can act as an important analytical tool in understanding the experiences of migrants living with HIV in Latin America and how they come to interpret their situation and futures.

Open Dialogue is a rights-based approach to psychiatric crisis response with growing global uptake. Over the last five years, it has been subject to a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) within the UK's National Health Service. While the trial researchers have emphasized the need for more evidence to inform policy, many practitioners involved in the trial have been lobbying for Open Dialogue's immediate rollout across the country. Drawing on 24 months of clinical ethnography, we suggest this tension reveals moral dimensions of mental health care that are not adequately accounted for in evidence-based psychiatry.

We analyze the ways in which different researchers and health professionals in Argentina (physicians, biochemists, epidemiologists) develop their arguments against mass vaccination against COVID-19. In particular, we explore how these positions are related to the mobilization of scientific knowledge-or arguments compatible with scientific reasoning-and to issues related to other interests (professional, political, economic, among others). Our aim is to advance the understanding of a potentially contradictory position: that of researchers and health professionals who hold positions that contradict some of the principles that hegemonically articulate the professional field.

Ethnographic fieldwork in rural western Kenya (2022-2023) reveals how state-led public health interventions, including COVID-19 vaccination and school-based biomedical campaigns, operate through authority, hierarchy, and coercion. Such practices foster mistrust among pupils, adolescents, and parents, provoking resistance grounded in fears about reproductive futures. Health workers and teachers, pressured to meet state mandated targets, become enforcers of these interventions, often deepening suspicion. Coercion not only raises ethical concerns but also produces lasting harm, shaping community trust and influencing how children and families engage with health care systems long after the campaigns have ended.

Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is a rare inherited disease that requires continuous home-based treatment. The increasing accessibility of medical information and the presence of an active online community-particularly a dedicated Facebook group-enable parents of children with CAH to become engaged participants in discussions about therapy and innovative solutions. Drawing on ethnographic research, this study explores the complex dynamics of medical decision-making and negotiation between parents and doctors. Key areas of contention include: 1. Medication dosage. 2. The use of cortisol pump technology. 3. The availability of emergency hydrocortisone injection kits. 4. Early genital surgery. While parents actively seek knowledge and challenge medical approaches, their influence on biomedical practices remains limited. The study argues that these negotiations, though often subtle and slow, contribute to changing treatment and become the part of the "logic of care".

Responses to the threat of COVID-19 have unveiled the underlying cultural theories of contagion across various countries. In Cambodia, erecting scarecrows has emerged as a popular response. This ethnographic study on contagious diseases and cultural deathscapes, which included participant observation with 185 informants, revealed that the human perception of scarecrows was less significant than the perception of ghosts that these scarecrows were intended to repel. To serve as effective sentinels, these scarecrows must appear menacing and be well armed. These observations offer insights into the cultural construction of contagion, threat, and defense in the context of an epidemic or a pandemic.

Inequality in cancer is often framed as disparities in mortality, incidence, and treatment. Cancer rehabilitation aims to help people live the best possible life with cancer, regardless of their background. In this study, I explore how people with lung cancer who are not participating in rehabilitation perceive and navigate everyday life. I use the concepts "biographical disruption," "biographical flow," and "struggling along" to conceptualize their way of life as a "coming-around" existence. I argue that inequality in cancer rehabilitation should go beyond unequal participation and focus on unequal opportunities to be understood and embraced by the healthcare system.

Migration from Africa to Europe has become increasingly precarious due to repressive European border policies, increasing the frequency of forced returns and affecting the psychosocial health of involuntary returnees. Ethnographic research in Dakar shows that forced returnees face psychological distress mediated by the experience of failure, leading to a stigmatized state of marginalization and dishonor (gathié, in Wolof) that damages family and community bonds. Emotional suffering is expressed through relevant sociocultural idioms, such as emotional withdrawal and the malade errant. Returnees confront these challenges through active tactics of resilience, navigating a landscape characterized by therapeutic pluralism.

As radical genres of self-care are co-opted under neoliberal logics, I track an emerging "bubble-bathification" of self-care, which foregrounds rest as a therapeutic avenue toward mental health. Fieldwork at Canadian universities demonstrates that the promotion of restful self-care is often juxtaposed against environments of systemic exhaustion, resulting in a cycle of fatigue for students perpetrated by the sources promoting restorative breaks. There is a simultaneous desire among students to divest themselves from inactivity in favor of pursuing justice-oriented change in their communities. I conclude that social, mental, and bodily unrest are mutually constitutive in understanding how exhaustion threatens people's selfhood.