Medical Anthropology最新文献

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.

We explore the care work of parents in the lives of adults with intellectual disabilities in Norway. We theorize these parental contributions as a form of care infrastructure. Through their presence in the daily lives of the persons with intellectual disabilities as well as through maintenance work and repair work on welfare services, parents respond to unpredictable care provision in the welfare state. These efforts sometimes entail invention and result in new types of care structures, which we call "care pioneering."

During the first days of COVID-19, stories about health and life circulated quickly and with resolve. The phrase "only the immunocompromised and elderly will die" became a touchpoint of disagreement, meaning fascist sacrifice to some and comfort to others. Examples provide insights into how, in times of disruption, meanings embedded in diffusive phrases expose and reinforce existing systems of power. We use the concept of shoring, borrowed from engineering, to discuss how health narratives reinforce and challenge existing structures of power and injustice in moments of social and political strife.

Public representations of rare diseases often depict patients as neglected and isolated. In response, initiatives promoting patient involvement have emerged, with illness narratives considered as key tools. However, the relationship between narratives and involvement remains underexplored. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Piedmont (Italy), I explore the narratives of two patients, which are deeply entangled with spiritual and religious perspectives, and explore the forms of involvement that emerged within the clinical space. I suggest that, depending on how moral and structural conditions intertwine, patients may be differently legitimized: roles of "experts of experience" or "implicated actors" arose within the field.

Human papillomavirus (HPV)-related anal infection is high among African gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM). In Kenya, queer men living with HPV-related anal warts often avoid health facilities, fearing homophobic retaliation from providers. In this paper, we present data collected over 24 months of ethnographic research, foregrounding the therapeutic trajectories of 35 men with advanced cases of anal warts requiring surgical intervention. The therapeutic trajectories we present here help to make visible how iatrogenesis exceeds the clinic's socio-spatial, temporal, and institutional confines and spills out into the intimate, social, and political spheres of human existence.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the medical practices of Miao internal migrants in China, in this article we critique the hierarchical and discrete ontologies of "pluralism" prevalent in anthropological studies of medical pluralism. It examines how Miao migrants construct an informal pluralistic medical system that integrates shamanistic ritual healing, herbalism, and "folk" biomedicine within a pragmatically grounded yet spiritually coherent framework rooted in Miao religion and cosmologies. Furthermore, we explore how their medical-seeking practices, grounded in a transcendent ontology of well-being, operate through affective economies of trust and renqing, thereby enhancing their medical resilience and socio-economic embeddedness into local society.

In this article I explore the dual impact of framing egg donation and surrogacy as work in Ukraine's fertility market. Egg donors, surrogates, and ART professionals use the labor narrative to legitimize these practices, albeit with differing aims. Women emphasize their economic role as worker-mothers, demanding fair treatment and recognition, while clinics employ the framework to market surrogates and donors and hold them accountable for outcomes. Without legal labor protections, this discourse empowers women to claim dignity and rights yet imposes disciplinary demands and shifts risks onto them, reflecting the precarities of their work.

The result of a collaboration between an anthropologist and a photographer, in this photo essay we aim to visualize the medical process of egg donation and the quotidian lives of egg donors in Spain. By extending their biographies beyond the moment of extraction, we shed light on the intertwined messiness of medical procedures and everyday life and the precarious circumstances in which egg donation takes place in Spain today. Our aim is to highlight the participants who, although they matter most in the egg donation economy, are concealed: the egg donors.

In 2019, Spanish fertility clinics reached a historical record of ova extractions. A total of 14,521 surgeries were performed to serve the growing egg demand internationally. Here I show how bringing a cycle to completion is not an easy task for egg donors. Selecting a clinic, understanding their own biocapital in the industry and how to invest it, fitting the cycle into their lives, and managing pain and emotions become crucial parts of their work. I argue that these activities constitute a vast amount of labor that, although essential for the generation of value in reproductive bioeconomies, remains invisible and undertheorized.

In response to the changing landscape of transnational surrogacy, the industry has introduced flexible business models requiring women to move within and across borders to act as surrogate mothers. However, knowledge about their experiences remain vague, particularly concerning women traveling abroad under illegal conditions. Building upon interviews with Thai surrogate mothers, I demonstrate how their im/mobility reveals critical insights into labor conditions and power relations and is formed within the global reproductive industry as well as the specific national context. I also argue that the women's im/mobility and flexibility are central when making themselves bioavailable for the global surrogacy market.