{"title":"Contextualizing adherence: Iron supplementation treatment among Peruvian caretakers and their anemic children","authors":"Achsah F. Dorsey","doi":"10.1111/maq.70014","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70014","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article describes an ethnographic study of adherence to iron supplementation protocols in 50 anemic preschoolers and their caregivers living in a peri-urban district in Lima, Peru. I use aspects of the syndemic approach to highlight the challenges caregivers face in following the recommended treatment and burden of treatment theory to develop a deeper understanding of adherence in a community with persistent childhood anemia. Interpreting adherence as an ideology also helps illuminate how health professionals’ claims about patient behavior reflect social inequalities. Thematic analysis of qualitative data identified three major challenges to iron supplementation adherence—time constraints, acute health concerns, and child agency. These themes show how socioeconomic conditions and emotional burdens impact caregivers’ ability to follow the prescribed treatment. Despite these challenges, the relatively high rate of adherence contests assumptions that lack of adherence is the primary explanation for persistent anemia rates among preschoolers living in this community.</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":"144585281","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":"Living with acuteness in chronic illness: The temporal underpinnings of endometriosis","authors":"Venla Oikkonen, Elina Helosvuori","doi":"10.1111/maq.12909","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.12909","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores how acuteness is experienced by people with endometriosis in Finland. Drawing on in-depth interviews as well as anonymous written endometriosis stories, we trace instances when the sense of chronicity and cyclicality of endometriosis is disrupted by a possibility of risk to life. These instances include when endometriosis tissue grows in unanticipated and aggressive ways, when medical interventions lead to unexpected complications or medications raise concerns about a gradually developing risk, and when endometriosis diagnosis becomes a catch-all category that could mask the onset of a life-threatening condition. Our analysis of illness experiences suggests that, while risk to life is an unlikely outcome in chronic conditions such as endometriosis, concerns about risk shape how the chronicity and cyclicality of endometriosis are felt and managed in everyday life.</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.12909","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142899225","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":"Fragile kinships: Child welfare and well-being in Japan By Kathryn E. Goldfarb, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2024. 220 pp.","authors":"Amy Borovoy","doi":"10.1111/maq.70038","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70038","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":"145772598","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":"Collateral damages: Tracing the debts and displacements of the Iraq War By Nadia El-Shaarawi, Oakland: University of California Press. 2025. 239 pp.","authors":"Zainab Saleh","doi":"10.1111/maq.70036","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70036","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":"145772572","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":"\"Nowhere else to go\": Slow abandonment and (en)closures of long-term care in Los Angeles.","authors":"Maxwell A Hellmann","doi":"10.1111/maq.70044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70044","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Residential long-term care facilities, known in California as \"board and care\" homes, have been closing rapidly in the last decade. Proponents assert these provide vital forms of housing and care to the poor and must be saved, while critics contend they perpetuate the institutionalization of people with disabilities and should be abolished. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork in Los Angeles, I demonstrate that board and cares offer residents much-needed shelter and sustenance while also trapping them in worsening conditions amid ongoing \"slow abandonment\" by the state. Residents are confined by neoliberal state policy and political-economic forces that leave them with \"nowhere else to go,\" and articulate critiques of their predicament that far exceed reformist solutions intended to salvage this peculiar, struggling institution. Seen through the lens of slow abandonment, meaningfully addressing residents' concerns requires an abolitionist project of building life-affirming structures of support.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70044"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145649763","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 psychiatric fix.","authors":"Jeremy Levenson","doi":"10.1111/maq.70043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article draws on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles' (LA) jail mental health facility to describe the interrelated crises of rising numbers of people declared incompetent to stand trial and the recurrent failure of managing madness in jail. It draws on the concept of a \"spatial fix,\" which refers to provisional solutions that displace, without resolving, systemic problems while, in fact, creating new ones. Within LA's carceral system, psychiatry has offered one such \"fix\": institutional and extra-institutional actors have mobilized the personnel, discourses, and technologies of psychiatry to manage the carceral system's apparent excesses. However, such a mobilization of psychiatry deepens, rather than resolves, these crises, while ideologically and spatially securing the wider carceral social order. This psychiatric fix, thus, has important implications for understanding how psychiatric power sustains, reproduces, and extends the shape-shifting US carceral state.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70043"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145649783","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":"Home sweet harm: Confinement and tranquilidad in post-asylum Peru.","authors":"Julio Villa-Palomino","doi":"10.1111/maq.70032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70032","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines how Peru's Community Mental Health (CMH) model contributes to the exclusion and home confinement of mentally ill individuals. Based on the experience of a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia and her mother, I show how CMH's emphasis on community-based care often fails in practice, as neighbors respond to people with mental illness through stigma and violence. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lima, Peru, I argue that home confinement is produced both by the CMH model and by residents' notions of the \"proper\" place for the mentally ill. By analyzing public perceptions of home confinement and the unfulfilled promises of CMH, I demonstrate how home confinement becomes both a protective strategy and a form of constraint. Challenging the assumption that there is a community to return to, I propose tranquilidad (being calm/unbothered) as an unintended outcome achieved through reduced exposure and withdrawal from community life.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70032"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145497028","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}
Esther Melton, Leslie Riddle, Jennifer Elyse James
{"title":"Carework as resistance: How incarcerated women care for each other to survive carcerality amid a global pandemic.","authors":"Esther Melton, Leslie Riddle, Jennifer Elyse James","doi":"10.1111/maq.70034","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70034","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis in prisons and jails, with some of the largest outbreaks in the United States happening inside carceral facilities. In the absence of structural interventions to protect them, people inside prisons engaged in various forms of carework to support one another and to draw attention to the horrific conditions. We conducted interviews and focus groups with people who were incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic; healthcare workers in prisons and jails; and advocates and organizers supporting people in carceral settings. Interviews were triangulated with field notes from ethnographic observations of medical and legal advocacy efforts during the pandemic. We argue that the carework performed by people incarcerated is a key form of invisibilized labor and resistance within carceral settings. We describe how this labor is both relied on for prisons to function, particularly during a public health emergency, and an under-recognized element of abolitionist organizing in women's prisons.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70034"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13068207/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145490683","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":"Beyond safety net value(s): Tourist hotel rooms for people experiencing homelessness.","authors":"Naomi C Schoenfeld","doi":"10.1111/maq.70033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70033","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the shape of care and value through an ethnographic study of an intensive, temporary housing intervention for people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, California, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on a new anthropological theory of value, the results highlight the slipperiness between surveillance and care, and how value may be produced or diminished in specific, embodied ways through respite, space, privacy, and dignity. This article troubles the concept of the social \"safety net,\" suggesting instead that high-quality and even costly initial public investments for the poor generate public value.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70033"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145496979","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}