Medical Anthropology Quarterly最新文献

Drawing on the experiences of mothers raising children with Down syndrome in Amman, Jordan, this article approaches disability stigma as a phenomenon that attached to meaningful relations of kinship and community. These same relations, however, enabled mothers, children, spouses, relatives, and other disability advocates to (re)claim Down syndrome as normal. In doing so, they challenged extant narratives that treated embodied difference as a relational risk in need of containment. “Normal” possesses disciplinary and oppressive capacities, but it can also become an effective tool. Claiming “normal” helped some families situate Down syndrome as an unexceptional way of being in the world and a valuable mode of being in relations with others.

Despite a growing body of literature linking environmental toxins and endometriosis, environmental issues make only occasional appearances in public, patient, and specialist conversations about endometriosis. These conversations may hover at the edges of public discourse, but do not gain traction. Based on ethnographic work in the United Kingdom, this article develops the concept of “slippery” knowledge as that which evades action. Ignorance of environmental or ecological etiologies is less a dearth of information than a dearth of possibilities for action. This article elaborates two ways of conceiving of environmental or ecological disease: the exposure model predicated on harmful external factors “getting in” to damage individuals or communities and the embodied ecologies model, which posits inevitable and ongoing mutual imbrication among living and non-living entities. Knowledge regarding endometriosis is “slippery” in both models. Whether knowledge seems actionable or not is inextricable from deep-seated power dynamics related to colonialism, gender, and race, which perpetuate ways of knowing (and acting) on endometriosis that are troubling and troublingly durable.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 2022 decision to overturn the federal right to abortion, much public and political debate has surrounded gestating and in vitro embryos’ “personhood.” In this paper, I draw on 15 months of participant observation in biomedical spaces of infertility to reveal how embryos can be enacted as not only unborn children but as many different kinds of entities. I examine how embryos become “multiple” as in vitro fertilization (IVF) professionals inseminate, monitor, and transfer them into patients’ bodies: enacting them as makeable, contingent, recordable, animatable, predictable, introducible, praisable, and appraisable entities. Providing a new perspective into the varied ontologies of in vitro embryos, this paper has far-reaching implications for the anthropological study and politics of reproductive medicine and politics today

Global health regimes have reversed the role of traditional birth attendants (TBAs) from partners in the fight against maternal and child mortality to barriers to indicator-driven care. In rural Tanzania, widespread fear of government surveillance and punishment for non-compliant individuals and organizations that climaxed during the presidency of the late John Magufuli (2015–2021) put increased pressure on TBAs. To negotiate tensions, TBAs adopted the position that they only escort women to health facilities for birth. We argue that TBAs’ insistence on this only both occludes and protects their multiple caring roles and responsibilities in a context of harsher home birth penalties, yet limited efforts to improve systemic shortages in the rural health system. TBAs’ performance of “we only escort women” operates both as the sedimentation of policies, a way to resist them, and means to hold space for TBAs in the wake of ambiguous global and national health policies.