Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-04-03Epub Date: 2025-02-27DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2025.2471926
Whitney Arey
{"title":"Reproductive Coercion and Abortion Care: Care and Surveillance in Abortion Decision-Making in North Carolina, USA.","authors":"Whitney Arey","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2471926","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2471926","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, I explore connections of reproductive coercion and surveillance care through ethnographic research conducted at two independent abortion clinics in North Carolina from 2018 to 2019. Examining the lived experiences of those who seek abortion care shows how patients navigate surveillance during the clinical encounter to receive care. Patients experiencing reproductive coercion often need to maintain existing social ties, involving the providers as mediators to ensure their preferred outcome. Because patients may only receive care if they express an autonomous decision for abortion, providers often observe and negotiate specific social-relational cues, draw-specific ethical conclusions about patient autonomy, and act accordingly.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"215-229"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143516980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-04-03Epub Date: 2025-03-30DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2025.2487009
Rahi Patel, Adrienne E Strong
{"title":"iPhone Pregnancies: Self-Testing as Surveillance and Care in the Trying to Conceive Community.","authors":"Rahi Patel, Adrienne E Strong","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2487009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2487009","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>People trying to conceive (TTC) often rely on accessible technologies and associated apps to track aspects of menstrual cycles. We explore this growing phenomenon from the perspective of self-testing as surveillance-care for the TTC individual or couple and their current and future fertility and pregnancy. Through an analysis of anonymous fora posts, we argue that surveillance-care provides those TTC with a sense of community, as well as agency and control over inexact bodily processes. Here, surveillance-care enacted on the self is about care for the hoped-for future pregnancy, and resulting baby, as opposed to one's own current health status.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":"44 3","pages":"258-272"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143754725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-04-03Epub Date: 2025-03-23DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2025.2482147
Richard Powis, Adrienne E Strong
{"title":"Over-looked Spaces: Theorizing Surveillance Care in Reproductive Health.","authors":"Richard Powis, Adrienne E Strong","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2482147","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2482147","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>At the 2022 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Seattle, WA, we organized a session called \"Landscapes of Surveillance Care in Reproductive Health.\" This introduction to our special issue represents a sustained conversation among panelists and other scholars regarding the complicated ways that surveillance and care play upon each other in our own ethnographic research and what we might learn from them.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"203-214"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143694088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-04-03Epub Date: 2025-03-10DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2025.2475926
Megan D Cogburn
{"title":"Waiting in a Place of Impossible Demands: Surveillance-Care in a Tanzanian Maternity Waiting Home.","authors":"Megan D Cogburn","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2475926","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2475926","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Today in rural Tanzania, nurses instruct pregnant women to go to maternity waiting homes (MWH), spaces of surveillance-care, long before due dates. Envisioned as a place <i>for</i> risk in policies of global safe motherhood, ethnography shows how the MWH becomes a place <i>of</i> risk to pregnant women and nurses. Negotiations at the MWH show how surveillance-care can be used to control and reinforce hierarchies - inadvertently creating risk - but also, in surprising ways, mitigate risk by insisting on other forms of care. Surveillance-care is both a tool of governance and a means to assess and bring about kinship and care.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"230-244"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143598067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-04-03Epub Date: 2024-10-31DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2423166
Richard Powis
{"title":"Making Sure She Eats Right: Absent-Presence, Articulation, and Surveillance-Care in Senegalese Men's Maternal Support.","authors":"Richard Powis","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2423166","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2423166","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In Senegal, where pregnancy is \"women's business,\" men's roles in prenatal and postpartum care are mediated by gendered expectations of what expectant fathers are allowed to know and do. Expectant fathers' roles map onto masculine expectations of the authoritative, sovereign head-of-household. Using the state-authored <i>Handbook of Mother and Child Health</i>, I argue that state surveillance is refracted through preexisting masculine prenatal care roles, and that men willingly articulate themselves to the role of the surveillance state by relying on the Handbook as a guide for how to watch their pregnant partners and make sure they are adhering to its guidance.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"273-285"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142559142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-04-03Epub Date: 2024-11-05DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2423171
Adrienne E Strong
{"title":"Bureaucracy and Surveillance-Care: The Partograph in Tanzanian Maternity Care.","authors":"Adrienne E Strong","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2423171","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2423171","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Based on fieldwork in maternity wards in Tanzania, I argue that the partograph - a graphical representation of a pregnant woman's labor - far exceeds its intended role as tracking and surveillance of labor progress. Through surveillance and its concomitant documentation, nurses, especially, also utilize this document to co-create care for themselves and their colleagues. These forms of care proliferate largely unseen by global health systems but are vital for understanding the meeting point of bureaucracy, surveillance, and care and the dynamics of maternity care in this and other lower resource settings. Nurses use the partograph to generate novel forms of surveillance-care.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"286-300"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142584593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-04-03Epub Date: 2025-02-16DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2025.2465736
Alexandra Desy, Diana Marre
{"title":"Surveillance in Medically Assisted Reproductive Care in France.","authors":"Alexandra Desy, Diana Marre","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2465736","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2465736","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Beyond the laws, different institutions watch over - or <i>veille sur</i> - the access to and practice of medically assisted reproductive care in France. Although a shift in the moral regimes underlying French reproductive governance can be observed, ART practices are monitored through surveillance mechanisms, the economic and medical nature of which conceals their normalizing function. Woman and couples who do not correspond to these norms are prevented from forming a family through the French ART system. In this article we show how, faced with this reproductive exclusion, French women and couples choose to undertake cross-border reproductive care in an attempt to circumvent surveillance and fulfil their reproductive desire.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"245-257"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143434064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sensing Rhabdomyolysis: Building Sensorial Knowledge in Inherited Metabolic Disorders in Poland.","authors":"Małgorzata Rajtar","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2475925","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2475925","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Sensations have emerged as an increasingly important topic in anthropological studies of health and disease. In this article, I draw from ethnographic research conducted among people living with selected rare inherited metabolic diseases (IMDs) and their caregivers in Poland, focusing specifically on recurrent rhabdomyolysis, a long-term complication that affects energy-consuming organs and muscles. Employing insights from sensorial and medical anthropology, I examine how people with IMDs and their caregivers, as parent-patient units, build anticipatory sensorial knowledge that enables them to attend to bodily sensations symptomatic of elevated creatine kinase levels, which are characteristic of rhabdomyolysis.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143574235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Reconfiguration of Stigma: (Mis)understanding the COVID-19 Infection and Contagion in Rural Central China.","authors":"Siyi Chen","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2475927","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2475927","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Based on an ethnography of a Chinese village, this article examines the re-stigmatization of recovered COVID-19 patients in China's COVID-19 response between 2020 and 2022. I show that distrust in the local government was reactivated in epidemic governance and led to the production of localized knowledge as a proactive response to official knowledge, which prompted stigma driven by health concerns. As the epidemic governance intensified alongside viral mutations, the stigma was reconfigured into a broader threat to livelihoods. This research indicates stigmatization is a complex and nuanced process shaped by the interplay between epidemic governance and local social dynamics.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-14"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143573772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}