Medical Anthropology最新文献

In Putumayo, a jungle borderland in southern Colombia, thousands of farmers derive their livelihood from the cultivation and processing of coca leaf, exposing themselves to fertilizers, pesticides, and other toxic chemicals on a daily basis. In this article, we show how the coca growers' relationship with chemicals and the health risks to which they are exposed, are politically and institutionally structured. We discuss the specific impact of anti-narcotics policy in a broader context of deep inequalities and document the emergent and adaptive day-to-day attempts of the farmers to navigate the structural risk environment.

Influenced by nutritional science, feeding children is generally thought of in terms of children's health and well-being. Here, I ask whether child veganism, with its focus on animal welfare and environmental concerns, challenges this model. Drawing from reproductive studies, I focus on Swiss vegan parents' ideas about food to illuminate a "multispecies," less anthropocentric form of childcare. While their ethic opens up new perspectives on health and childcare, I discuss how "sustainable" reproductive practices can also solidify gender stereotypes and modes of ordering species.

We describe the challenges in synchronizing affect during the lengthy lead-up to organ transplantation. Our analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Eastern Germany among medical staff caring for patients with cystic fibrosis, a progressive, genetic illness. Patient and practitioners must together endure an uncertain wait for a donor organ, while simultaneously living and working toward living as well as possible. The organizing affective principle in this setting is hoping, which is a socio-material practice that must be continuously and interactively re-produced. Too little or too much hoping must be managed by adjusting affective intensities. A failure to strike this balance can lead to what we designate as the weariness of hoping.

Water is central to Haudenosaunee knowledge, philosophy, and culture. The health of Haudenosaunee mothers is tied to that of water. Today, the lack of access to reliable drinking water for Six Nations is a significant health concern. Technical measurement of water advisories in Canada fails to understand the interwoven relationship that Haudenosaunee women have with water. Highlighting the voices of 55 Haudenosaunee women, we provide expanded definitions of water insecurity and maternal health to include more-than-human beings. This comprehensive understanding of water insecurity and health shapes SN mothers' experiences with water in a settler colonial state, affecting their holistic wellbeing.

Aged care staff in Danish nursing homes feel the pressures of time scarcity acutely. But what does this mean for the well-being of residents? Using the concept "care time" we consider subjective experiences of time to make sense of the multiplicity of temporal experiences in nursing home care. We will show how the temporal structures of a neoliberal institutional care logic is at odds with what residents expect from care time. Finally, drawing on a phenomenological understanding of well-being, we explore how residents' temporal orientation to the present and the past can be drawn on to enhance well-being.

Mistrust is increasingly a daily reality of healthcare delivery worldwide. Yet it remains understudied as a form of relationship and a force in its own right. I address this gap through the ethnography of an Italian Emergency Department (ED), where conflicts have increased since the 2008 financial crisis. I show how mistrust does not result in a breakdown of healthcare interactions. Rather, mistrust is used in ambivalent care relationships to negotiate the roles, the risks, and the power that patients and staff are willing to entrust to others. Mistrust manifests in risk management strategies within relationships of "mistrustful dependency."

Drawing on ethnographic findings from an American Orthodox Christian community, I examine how forms of intimate reproductive compromise facilitate the assertive refusal to negotiate on abortion. The American Orthodox harness the values and practices of biomedicine to validate their refusal of abortion, but their inflexible views emerge from prior compromises. By not giving up modern contraception, women self-fashion forms of piety that allow them to navigate composite identities while remaining dedicated to a pro-life stance. That steadfast refusal of abortion may be the consequence of previous concessions opens up new ways of theorizing refusal as inextricably bound to - rather than exclusive of - prior compromises.

I outline the interplay between biological and socio-cultural dimensions of immunity and risk in the context of migration from Afghanistan to Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic. Documenting my interlocutors' responses to everyday situations, I explore the challenges they face in a new society. Their references to immunity reveal ideas about bodily and biological functions, as well as sociocultural aspects of risk and immunity as fluid concepts. Understanding how different groups manage risk, practice care, and perceive immunity requires attention to the circumstances that surround individual and communal experiences of care practices. I reveal their perceptions, hopes, concerns, and strategies for immunization against the real risks they encounter.

In health care and care scholarship, care is often cast as a gift that exploits caregivers, or generates social debts and inequalities among people who require it. I broaden understandings of how care acquires and distributes value through ethnographic engagement with Yolŋu (an Australian First Nations people) with lived experience of kidney disease. I expand Baldassar and Merla's concept of the circulation of care to argue that value, like blood, circulates through caregiving practices of generalized reciprocity without transferring worth between caregivers and receivers. Here, the gift of care is neither agonistic or purely altruistic, entangling individual and collective value.

Until early 2022, within the global fertility industry, Ukraine was one of the most important destinations for reproductive travel worldwide, particularly specializing in gestational surrogacy for international intended parents. Already weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions, the surrogacy market, and here especially surrogates and intended parents, was strongly affected by the Russian invasion in February 2022. In this article, I discuss and analyze the reproductive entanglements of surrogates, intended parents, and the children born through such transnational surrogacy arrangements in Ukraine and how this extreme crisis of war exposed and exacerbated existing vulnerabilities.