{"title":"The limits of relationality in palliative care: Three case studies from Southern France.","authors":"Kimberly A Arkin","doi":"10.1111/maq.70078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70078","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article uses case studies to explore the nature and limits of accompagnement, the self-consciously \"relational\" care practiced by palliative care providers in Montagnac, a town in southern France. Medical anthropologists have attended to the ways that care premised on individual choice often fails as care, particularly for marginalized patient groups presumed to be incapable of making \"good\" decisions. This paper asks when, where, and why self-consciously relational care like accompagnement might also fail. I argue that despite a claim to \"meet patients where they are,\" accompagnement, like choice, requires providers to project their own assumptions about the nature and telos of human beings onto their patients. When patients fail to mirror those assumptions, \"relationality\" quickly turns into paternalism. This argument complicates medical anthropology's embrace of relationality as an antidote to the violence associated with choice-based models of medicine.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70078"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148253899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The uncomfortable science in the womb: How biological experience disrupts surrogacy narratives.","authors":"Orit Chorowicz Bar-Am, Elly Teman, Yael Hashiloni-Dolev","doi":"10.1111/maq.70077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70077","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The discourse surrounding surrogacy portrays pregnancy as a temporary process, depicting surrogates as neutral \"carriers\" whose involvement concludes at birth. This narrative minimizes gestation's biological significance despite evidence of its lasting effects on both women and children. We interviewed 47 retired Israeli surrogates using thematic analysis to examine how they navigate biological experiences. Surrogates employ frameworks that dismiss gestational bio-ties and emphasize genetic kinship, empowering their act of giving by rendering gestation inconsequential. This framework benefits surrogates, intended parents, and the industry by allowing narratives that overlook certain bio-ties. Two instances challenge this: bodies \"talking back\" through biological disruptions and intended mothers confronting surrogates about lasting bio-imprints on their babies. These challenges produce \"embodied dissonance\"-biology clashing with social expectations-and lead to \"collaborative biologies,\" forcing recognition of connections the dominant framework erases. This study addresses bio-ties in surrogacy, paving the way for new frameworks reflecting human reproduction's complexities.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70077"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148253846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The \"Mediterranean syndrome\" and racism in French healthcare.","authors":"Mounia El Kotni","doi":"10.1111/maq.70072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70072","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the past decade in France, several cases of mistreatment and abuse of Black women within the healthcare system have made headlines, sparking much-needed conversations among activists, and some medical personnel, on medical racism. In this article, I share insights from my work as an anthropologist, health consultant, and feminist activist in France and Mexico. I focus on one aspect of medical racism, the so-called \"Mediterranean syndrome,\" and its impact on the reproductive care (or lack thereof) offered to Black, Arab, and other-than-White women. I also reflect on the trainings I provide to medical personnel on medical racism. These trainings reveal the complexities faced by personnel who seek change, though subject to their own bias and that of their superiors.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70072"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148240259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Straddling \"The Gulf Between Medicine and Law\": Medico-legal addiction and Japanese psychiatry.","authors":"Selim Gokce Atici","doi":"10.1111/maq.70071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70071","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Increasing punitive drug regulations in Japan amplify longstanding tensions within psychiatric practice, pushing psychiatrists to balance clinical obligations with complex socio-legal demands. This article analyzes how psychiatrists specializing in illicit substance use disorders to navigate escalating criminalization by developing diagnostic frameworks such as \"carceral harm\"-attributing symptoms primarily to policing and incarceration threats-and \"future treatability,\" wherein addiction is an anticipated, incomplete phenomenon justifying ongoing medical care for patients facing imprisonment. Drawing from ethnographic research at Japan's National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry and semi-structured interviews with psychiatrists, the study demonstrates how these clinical interventions simultaneously address ethical demands for compassionate care yet risk reinforcing psychiatry's historical associations with repression. The findings reveal psychiatrists' active role in reshaping medico-legal discourses around addiction, highlighting clinical practice as a site where care and punishment intersect and reconfigure each other in reference to a medico-legal theory of illicit drug addiction.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70071"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147976386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"We always heal like this\": Illness management and identity expression in Latin American migrants in Spain.","authors":"Muriel Lamarque","doi":"10.1111/maq.70068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70068","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The following article seeks to explore and analyze the use of lay and traditional medicines among Latin migrants in Spain, and the way in which these forms of treatment are accompanied by identity discourses and collective representations. The narratives and descriptions presented in this text are the result of ethnographic research on transnational health/illness/care processes, therapeutic itineraries and the overseas reproduction of folk practices from Latin America. In a pluralistic scenario loaded with barriers and structural difficulties, actions of self-care and home-based remedies facilitate problem solving, but also seem to act as a form of affiliation, resistance, negotiation of marginalized identities and an adjustment to people's new social space.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70068"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147934659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Erased by law: Kinship, care, and bureaucratic exclusion at the end of life in South Korea.","authors":"Seok Joo Youn","doi":"10.1111/maq.70067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70067","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines how institutional frameworks in South Korea erase nonlegal caregiving relationships within hospice care environments. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork, the study delineates how patients are categorized as \"unclaimed\" despite the presence of long-term companions or cohabitants who provide intimate end-of-life care. It further explores how these exclusions extend beyond dying, shaping postmortem decision-making and the institutional recognition of grief. Legal frameworks rooted in the hojeok (family registry) dictate who is authorized to grieve, make decisions, or be acknowledged as kin. Through two cases, the article demonstrates how bureaucratic classifications function as moral technologies that erase relational labor and constrain affective ties. Engaging feminist care ethics and anthropological theories of relatedness, it argues that unclaimed death is not the absence of kinship but the result of its legal misrecognition. By tracing everyday mechanisms of exclusion, the study calls for rethinking recognition, care, and kinship at end-of-life.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70067"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147785827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"That sinkin' feeling: Environmentally induced distress on a disappearing island.","authors":"Jonna Yarrington","doi":"10.1111/maq.70064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70064","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Residents of Tangier Island, Virginia, a subsiding island in the Chesapeake Bay, embody psychosocial dimensions of environmental change. Analysis of ethnographic data shows islanders' experiences and articulations of anxiety, panic, and despair as \"that sinkin' feeling,\" resulting from the stress of living with the long-term threat of imminent displacement. Islanders generally acknowledge higher-order causes, such as economic precarity, socio-spatial and institutional losses, and demographic decline, rather than the underlying ecological changes that produce them. The reality and threat of land subsidence not only reshapes the physical island, but undermines social relations among islanders, resulting in often tragic outcomes as many attempt to escape into substance abuse and suicide. On Tangier Island, ecological changes, including those caused by anthropogenic climate changes such as sea-level rise, are the prime cause of islanders' crisis of well-being-disappearing feelings among disappearing people on a disappearing island.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70064"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147464004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Aging affordances: Navigating expectations of dementia prevention for aging adults in Canada","authors":"Cynthia Lazzaroni, Annette Leibing","doi":"10.1111/maq.70027","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70027","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Dementia prevention now focuses on individual lifestyle choices as loci of intervention in the hope of delaying or preventing cognitive impairment in aging. Drawing from interviews with dementia experts and middle-aged adults in Canada, we discuss how prevention expectations compete with adults’ experiences, showing that enacting prevention is not simple but rather fraught with tensions. Addressing the troubles of prevention, we propose aging affordances as the particular ways mid-life adults construct, make sense of, and act toward their aging process, including how they navigate expectations of prevention amidst tensions that fashion their relationships with their environment. We take the environment in a broad sense to include social and cultural systems of values and discourses, such as dementia prevention recommendations. It allows us to turn the preventive focus on its head, looking not at its normative behavioral prescriptions but at the range of possibilities mid-life adults strive for as they age.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12979972/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147436717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Victoria L. Brown, Lindsey Kaufman, Sienna Ruiz, Clarissa Gaona Romero, Janet Njelesani, Siobhan Sutcliffe, Jean Hunleth
{"title":"Working through cancer: Economic precarity and the social meaning of survival for parent-survivors in the United States","authors":"Victoria L. Brown, Lindsey Kaufman, Sienna Ruiz, Clarissa Gaona Romero, Janet Njelesani, Siobhan Sutcliffe, Jean Hunleth","doi":"10.1111/maq.70047","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70047","url":null,"abstract":"<p>While US cancer survival rates have improved in recent years, the rising incidence of early-onset cancers means cancer is shifting younger, imposing new generational challenges for survivors and their families. This article explores the experience of a cancer diagnosis during one's re/productive years by analyzing how parents with dependent children maintain a future amid heightened economic precarity (e.g., loss of stable employment, downward mobility, and a degraded public sphere). By linking physical survival with the social conditions necessary for post-treatment quality of life, we develop a more collectivistic notion of survivorship, where parent-survivors’ efforts to stay employed during treatment serve as an extension of family caregiving in austere times. Reflecting on how the lead authors’ own experience of work and cancer emerged in interviews with 12 parent-survivors, we intervene on traditional team science methods, making space for the autoethnographic voices that underlie interpretations of illness.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145776081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}