Medical Anthropology Quarterly最新文献

Drawing from ethnographic work with women utilizing publicly funded prenatal care in El Paso, Texas, this paper considers how bureaucratic mechanisms lead to systematic exclusion of US citizens and legal permanent residents from health services for which they would appear to qualify under Texas's Medicaid for Pregnant Women. This bureaucratic exclusion contributes to cross-border utilization of health services, with the Mexican health sector functioning as a safety net for an inadequate public health system in the United States. This article considers how immigration and health care bureaucracy intersect to exclude pregnant people from publicly funded health services, even when a person appears to be legally entitled to benefits. This exclusion contributes to the normalization of cross-border utilization of health services among those with a certain degree of transnational cultural capital. Attending to transnational cultural capital is revealing of the ways individuals exert agency in the context of constrained access.

This article examines how Peru's Community Mental Health (CMH) model contributes to the exclusion and home confinement of mentally ill individuals. Based on the experience of a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia and her mother, I show how CMH's emphasis on community-based care often fails in practice, as neighbors respond to people with mental illness through stigma and violence. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lima, Peru, I argue that home confinement is produced both by the CMH model and by residents' notions of the "proper" place for the mentally ill. By analyzing public perceptions of home confinement and the unfulfilled promises of CMH, I demonstrate how home confinement becomes both a protective strategy and a form of constraint. Challenging the assumption that there is a community to return to, I propose tranquilidad (being calm/unbothered) as an unintended outcome achieved through reduced exposure and withdrawal from community life.

This article theorizes maternal rage as an ethnographic method and affective archive, drawing on interviews with birthing people of color navigating medical neglect, obstetric violence, and postpartum abandonment. Rather than treating rage as an excess or failure of care, I frame it as a form of witnessing and refusal, a bodily record of harm and survival. Situating these accounts within feminist anthropology, critical medical anthropology, and affect theory, I show how maternal rage exposes structural inequalities in reproductive care while resisting the institutional silencing of pain. The article argues for an expanded ethnographic practice attuned to affective residues, unruly testimony, and the nonlinear temporality of grief.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis in prisons and jails, with some of the largest outbreaks in the United States happening inside carceral facilities. In the absence of structural interventions to protect them, people inside prisons engaged in various forms of carework to support one another and to draw attention to the horrific conditions. We conducted interviews and focus groups with people who were incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic; healthcare workers in prisons and jails; and advocates and organizers supporting people in carceral settings. Interviews were triangulated with field notes from ethnographic observations of medical and legal advocacy efforts during the pandemic. We argue that the carework performed by people incarcerated is a key form of invisibilized labor and resistance within carceral settings. We describe how this labor is both relied on for prisons to function, particularly during a public health emergency, and an under-recognized element of abolitionist organizing in women's prisons.

This article examines the shape of care and value through an ethnographic study of an intensive, temporary housing intervention for people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, California, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on a new anthropological theory of value, the results highlight the slipperiness between surveillance and care, and how value may be produced or diminished in specific, embodied ways through respite, space, privacy, and dignity. This article troubles the concept of the social "safety net," suggesting instead that high-quality and even costly initial public investments for the poor generate public value.

This article examines the embodied and institutional forms of marginalization experienced by Mexican deportees in Tijuana. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in clinics and social service organizations, it explores how deportees are corporeally stigmatized, denied legal recognition, and pathologized as addicts in need of coercive rehabilitation. Deportees are subjected to carceral and medicalized interventions that blur the boundaries between care and punishment. The article calls for greater attention to how deportation regimes operate transnationally to manage and discipline displaced populations through a convergence of biopolitical and necropolitical practices.

This article examines the experiences of Brazilian women as they navigate digital abortion-aid spaces. It sheds light on the role that social media plays in connecting abortion seekers with abortion-pill sellers. As in other unregulated spaces where unofficial caregiving thrives, activist-caregivers seek legitimacy in Brazil's abortion black market by showcasing their knowledge and by providing emotional support to their clients throughout their procedures. At the same time, women seeking abortions often fall prey to scammers, profit-seekers, and sellers lacking training and compassion. In this online, anonymized context, making clear-cut distinctions between the real and the fake, the aid and the scammer, proved difficult for my interlocutors. Nonetheless, these online spaces offer deep hope in that they extend the possibility of abortion care to vulnerable Brazilian women who are otherwise deprived of reproductive agency.

Drawing on ethnographic research in Dudi village in Western Kenya, this article explores how the lingering legacies of the 1990s HIV/AIDS epidemic shaped local perceptions of, and responses to, the COVID-19 pandemic and related vaccine controversies. Focusing on the lives of young women living with HIV, the article traces how their experiences of navigating HIV care, stigma, and gendered expectations intersected with anxieties around COVID-19 vaccination. These narratives are embedded within a broader historical and social landscape marked by grief, moral judgement, and structural exclusion. Past experiences with HIV are shown to inform contemporary fears around vaccination, reigniting multi-layered forms of stigma and casting women's bodies as sites of risk, suspicion, and control. By situating these responses within the long shadow of the AIDS epidemic, the article highlights how disease, memory, and gendered moralities continue to shape health experiences and interventions in deeply unequal ways.

This ethnographic study analyzes Israeli Institutional Review Boards (IRBs') main practices and discourses. I describe IRB operations as bureaucratic rituals derived from idealized scientific values, with physician-scientist members serving as gatekeepers who perform boundary work to preserve professional independence. The findings show how temporal-spatial bureaucratic rituals separate scientists from nonscientists across different phases of the review process and limit ethical and scientific discussions within the IRBs that authorize clinical trials. The scientific discourse is constrained to administrative compliance, and ethical discourse is reduced to procedural form-checking. The work of IRBs thus redefines the relationship between bioscience and society as a hierarchical rather than a shared system, thereby preserving the myth of science as beyond external scrutiny and maintaining scientific autonomy despite IRBs' formal role as boundary organizations.