Medical Anthropology Quarterly最新文献

Based on ethnographic interviews with healthcare professionals from faith-based, Christian clinics in the United States, I develop the concept of the “relational time ethic.” This ethic refers to the ways that healthcare professionals seek to build relations with patients as persons and to demonstrate their valuing of lives through time expansion. In advancing this ethic, healthcare professionals are in part reflecting on their own well-being but are primarily making moral claims about the high quality of their care and critiquing a bureaucratic time model for healthcare delivery. The on-the-ground intricacies of the relational time ethic further anthropological understandings of the religious justifications for care and critique in biomedicine and bring attention to the ways that time comes to be constructed as an ethical practice in and of itself.

By tracking lead toxicology and politics from the United States to Peru, this article shows how contemporary discourses of human lead exposure have become complexly racialized. Despite its nearly global ban from gasoline and paint, lead poisoning remains a systemic health problem in marginalized communities throughout the world. Viewed as a “social pharmakon,” lead's ongoing “cures” outweigh current social valuations of its systemic physiological harm in racially devalued communities. While scientific research linking lead to decreased IQ and increased violent behavior has attempted to animate broader public interest in the inequitable spread of lead exposure, it does so by reanimating racist tropes of biogeographic inferiority. Rather than dehumanizing lead-exposed individuals and communities, narratives of lead intoxication must integrate its immediate social and material harms in specific locales and as a symptom of systemic racial injustice at a global scale.

This article builds on years of ethnographic conversations I sustained with my father, 89, who lives in Colombia. Soon after getting diagnosed with an incurable Multiple Myeloma—a cancer known for unleashing prolonged and painful agonies—he withdrew from oncology treatments and secured access to euthanasia (assisted-dying) on his own, bypassing medico-insurance guidelines created to regulate this medical practice and prevent abuses. Eight years after withdrawing treatments, my dad is still alive. His case shines a light on how securing access to euthanasia may have had unintended therapeutic effects on existential fears, pain perception, and quality of life on his way to dying. My storytelling also seeks to discuss the ethical and legal dimensions of assisted-dying in Colombia, especially for patients who do not consider life as biological deterioration, and who are caught between aggressive treatments and painful agonies, on the one side, and burdensome medico-insurance bureaucracy, on the other.

Stories of “mass hysteria” among teenage girls have often graced the headlines of Nepal's local and national newspapers, creating a public spectacle of a strange and mysterious form of affliction. Treatments include both shamanic rituals and psychosocial interventions, a new therapeutic modality that has gained prominence over the past two decades following the rise of global mental health. This article shows how the discourse around the collective affliction of teenage girls reveals a number of anxieties at the heart of Nepali society regarding the moral rupture of community, the status of shamanic knowledge, and gender and the management of emotion. I argue that due to the ambiguity of cause, the dramatic public display of symptoms, and the absence of the experiencing subject of affliction, cases of “mass hysteria” offer a blank screen onto which the broader collective anxieties of a society in flux are projected and debated.

Marshallese mothers face the highest rates of adverse maternal and child health outcomes compared to other ethnic groups in Hawaiʻi. Previous studies used interviews with healthcare providers to understand these disparate outcomes; however, the voices of Marshallese women are relatively absent. This project explores the bwebwenato (Marshallese mode of storytelling) of first-generation Marshallese mothers who navigated discrimination before, during, and after pregnancy in Hawaiʻi. Using collaborative methodology, we co-produced research that centers the bwebwenato of Marshallese women. In addition to the intersections of power and race in healthcare settings, Marshallese mothers chose to highlight the discrimination they faced growing up in Hawaiʻi. Through these stories, they profess their ability to navigate their cultural traditions and beliefs within and against a local racial hierarchy that places Micronesians at the bottom. Bwebwenato as a method has the potential to transform research into a more acceptable form for groups experiencing discrimination and patient-provider interactions into more equitable exchanges.