{"title":"Claiming normal: Disability, stigma, and relationality in Amman","authors":"Christine Sargent","doi":"10.1111/maq.70003","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70003","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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 <i>normal</i>. 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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144152397","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":"“I'd rather die”: Patients' will and decision-making practice in Japanese community psychiatry","authors":"Yuto Kano","doi":"10.1111/maq.70021","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70021","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Recent mental health reforms have embraced patient autonomy and shared decision-making, where care unfolds through collaboration between clinicians and patients. However, how decision-making can improve in marginalized psychiatric clinics remains unclear. This paper examines how social psychiatrists at a Japanese community clinic engage with patients’ will—especially when it appears resistant, ambivalent, or self-destructive. At Sakura Clinic in Kanagawa, the challenge lies in navigating “strong will” (<i>tsuyoi ishi</i>)—instances where patients reject treatment, defy medical logic, or say, simply, “I'd rather die.” Here, decision-making stretches across time, shaped by evolving attunement between patients, clinicians, and their environments. When patients make risky choices, psychiatrists face an urgent ethical question: is this will an existential stance to be respected, or the mark of structural violence to be refused?</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/maq.70021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144974101","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":"Disability worlds By Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, Durham: Duke University Press. 2024. 288 pp.","authors":"Kim Fernandes","doi":"10.1111/maq.70037","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70037","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145772601","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":"From leprosy to ground zero: Imagining futures in a world of elimination","authors":"James Staples","doi":"10.1111/maq.12905","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.12905","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Achieving a target of zero—zero disease, zero disability, and zero discrimination—has become the dominant focus of campaigns to control or eliminate diseases, from HIV/AIDS to malaria to leprosy. Given the historical failure of most eradication programs over the last century, such teleological imaginings of disease-free futures might seem overly utopian. But even if it were possible to eradicate such diseases in their entirety, would this be universally welcomed, even by those most affected by them? In this article, I compare the narratives of national and international bodies concerned with eliminating leprosy, in particular, with the more ambivalent narratives of those affected by the disease in India, the country where the disease is most prevalent. For the latter, the promise of elimination not only seems unrealistic, but represents a potential loss of identity. Imagining disease trajectories in less linear terms, I argue, might also nuance understanding of them.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/maq.12905","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142848121","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":"Epidemiology of conspiracy: Infected vaccines, infectious patients, and superspreaders for hire","authors":"Tankut Atuk","doi":"10.1111/maq.70019","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70019","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article traces the viral life of HIV conspiracies in Turkey, not as peripheral noise but as central to the ways public health crises are interpreted, contested, and experienced. By offering “epidemiology of conspiracy” both as a metaphor and an analytic, the article treats disease conspiracies not as epistemological failures, but as vernacular tools of meaning making—fragile yet forceful ways of navigating biopolitical abandonment, institutional opacity, and medical precarity. The paper examines three distinct conspiratorial narratives—ranging from infected vaccines to murderous patients to superspreaders hired by Big Pharma—and argues that these stories, while often dismissed as illogical or paranoid, are saturated with socio-political meaning and historical memory. Ultimately, the paper calls for a reparative, rather than dismissive, reading of conspiracy in medical anthropology, especially when studying epidemics in places where data is scarce, speech is policed, and stigma circulates with viral efficiency.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144876000","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":"Lead as pharmakon: IQ, violence, and the racialization of a toxic element","authors":"Stefanie Toney Graeter","doi":"10.1111/maq.70009","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70009","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144327268","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":"Slippery Knowledge: Ignorance, Ecologies, and Environment in Endometriosis Framing","authors":"Andrea Ford","doi":"10.1111/maq.70002","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70002","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/maq.70002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144112285","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":"Anxious Projections: Mass Hysteria and the Problem of Interpretation","authors":"Aidan Seale-Feldman","doi":"10.1111/maq.70007","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70007","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/maq.70007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144259122","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":"How to be disabled in a pandemic By Mara Mills, Harris Kornstein, Faye Ginsburg, and Rayna Rapp, New York, New York: New York University Press. 2025. 392 pp.","authors":"Megan Moodie","doi":"10.1111/maq.70040","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70040","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145772613","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":"Making sense: Language, ethics, and understanding in deaf Nepal By E. Mara Green, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2024. pp. 240","authors":"Kelly Fagan Robinson","doi":"10.1111/maq.70041","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70041","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145772578","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}