{"title":"Dust inside: Fighting and living with asbestos-related disasters in Brazil By Agata Mazzeo, New York: Berghahn Books. 2020. 202 pp.","authors":"David Loher","doi":"10.1111/maq.70058","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70058","url":null,"abstract":"","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":"147649440","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":"Enduring and the horizon of repair: French Caribbean post-stroke rehabilitation amid health inequity","authors":"Raphaëlle Melissa Rabanes","doi":"10.1111/maq.70042","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70042","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Drawing on ethnographic research with patients and therapists in post-stroke rehabilitation, this article explores how Guadeloupeans strive to exist on their own terms amid postcolonial health inequities, forms of marginalization and institutional disrepair. I argue that French territorial health inequities must be understood in relation to colonial health inequities and reveal the long history of socioracial stratification in the French Caribbean. I then turn to the experience of a patient to examine how she confronts the limitations of her life chances. As she and other Guadeloupean stroke survivors push back against the contours of life delineated by systemic issues, they exist in close engagement with the horizon of life, in a movement I propose to call enduring.</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/PMC12979958/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145776143","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}
{"title":"Living a “good death”: Caring for solitary deaths in Japan","authors":"Hiroko Kumaki","doi":"10.1111/maq.70051","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70051","url":null,"abstract":"<p>How do public health metrics of “good death” shape care and everyday life? Concerns over dying alone has become prevalent worldwide. In Japan, social anxieties over solitary deaths (<i>kodokushi</i>) have intensified in a rapidly aging society. In response, care practices have emerged to keep people social in life and death. Through ethnographic fieldwork in a tsunami-affected town in Miyagi, I examine how post-disaster care has been reorganized in response to fears of <i>kodokushi</i>. Care workers improvised their activities to reconcile bureaucratic demands for “statistics of sociality” with survivors’ shifting needs and desires. These activities demonstrate the impact of standardized scripts of “good death” on the quality of life and care of those they aim to protect. At the same time, they reveal the potential for care that embraces the indeterminacy and situatedness of what constitutes a good death, allowing for diverse ways of living and dying well.</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":"145866047","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":"Scientific Ritual: The Institutional Review Boards for Human Clinical Trials in Israel","authors":"Hedva Eyal","doi":"10.1111/maq.70028","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70028","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</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/PMC12979974/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145337548","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}
Mariam Florence Yusuf, Washington Onyango-Ouma, Ruth Jane Prince, Paul Wenzel Geissler
{"title":"In the shadow of HIV: Fear, rumor, and stigma among young women living with HIV in COVID-19 pandemic in Western Kenya","authors":"Mariam Florence Yusuf, Washington Onyango-Ouma, Ruth Jane Prince, Paul Wenzel Geissler","doi":"10.1111/maq.70026","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70026","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</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":"145349218","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":"Embodied progress: A cultural account of assisted conception By Sarah Franklin, New York: Routledge. 2022. 231 pp.","authors":"Katie Waeldner","doi":"10.1111/maq.70059","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70059","url":null,"abstract":"","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":"147653170","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 Promise and Perils of Online Abortion in Brazil","authors":"Alejandra Marks","doi":"10.1111/maq.70030","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70030","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</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":"145402361","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":"Maraña: War and disease in the jungles of Colombia By Lina Pinto-García, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2025. 205 pp.","authors":"Sebastián Ramírez H.","doi":"10.1111/maq.70057","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70057","url":null,"abstract":"","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":"147649441","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}