{"title":"Turning Cancer into Medicine: Storying Healing through Imagery","authors":"C. Fournier","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.1.7035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.1.7035","url":null,"abstract":"This Photo Essay explores my experience with cancer and healing using Indigenous traditional medicines. I use Photo First Voice, a form of auto-ethnography, to story my ‘living’ experience with cancer, which includes getting in touch with and honouring my Indigenous roots (Algonquin/French) attending healing ceremonies, and becoming an Oshkaabewis (a healer’s helper) myself. I integrate photographic images into this essay to illustrate my experiences and to enhance the meaning of the words I have committed to these pages. Each image represents a different aspect or level of knowledge and healing. These images and text are followed by a discussion in which I weave fragments of experience together to narrate a living (inter)relationship with the earth, towards a more balanced whole. Indigenous medicines set in motion major changes in my life, which are fundamental to my ongoing healing. In this context, the term ‘medicine’ refers to Indigenous knowledges that contribute to healing, healing ceremonies, teachings, and plant medicines (mainly Ojibwe).","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42602090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nested Ethics: The Management of Young People’s Goals in Alternative UK Mental Health Services","authors":"Rosie Jones McVey","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.1.6764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.1.6764","url":null,"abstract":"Youth mental health interventions in the UK increasingly use goal-setting procedures to shape services and measure outcomes in ways that are intended to be meaningful to service users. This research article questions this premise, departing with the ethnographic observation that many young people do not seem to welcome the invitation or requirement to direct their therapeutic aims and set the terms for service evaluation in the form of goals. I will show that goal-setting procedures are examples of a broader field of complex ethico-political dilemmas navigated by mental health service staff. While wanting to enable young people to be healthy agents, staff are simultaneously critically aware of the risk of imposing normative, unrealistic and unfair expectations onto young people. I propose that these staff are engaged in a specific form of ethico-political practice, which I call ‘nested ethics’. I use this term to describe instances where staff ethically evaluate their own conduct in line with the capacity to enable the ethical life of another person (youth, in this case). Viewing goal-setting processes as an example of an uneasy politics of nested ethics enables a new perspective from which to advance debates about the enablement of service user choice within care provisions. ","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45987185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shifting Stigma: Why Ukrainian Health Care Workers Favor a High Barrier Treatment Modality for Tuberculosis","authors":"M. Villar, J. Carroll","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.1.6521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.1.6521","url":null,"abstract":"This research article seeks to understand how the cultural context of tuberculosis (TB) care in Ukraine influences healthcare workers’ perception of their patients and the choices they make in offering TB treatment. Specifically, we aim to explore healthcare workers’ predilection towards inpatient treatment of TB in Ukraine in lieu of other, evidence-based treatment approaches. Based on qualitative research with TB care providers in Ukraine, we argue that a preference for inpatient treatment instead of the standard outpatient regimen is rooted in the care workers’ assessment of the patient’s desire to get well. In other words, the preferred treatment modality is not based on any biological characteristic of TB infection; instead, it is based on the perceived strengths and weaknesses of patients’ psychology.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45296621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Irritating Bowels: Attention and Everyday Management of Gut Trouble in Denmark","authors":"Camilla Brændstrup Laursen","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.1.6998","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.1.6998","url":null,"abstract":"Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) constitutes an irritating and embarrassing problem for an estimated 11–16% of the Danish population. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how young and middle-aged people diagnosed with IBS attend to, experience, and manage gut trouble in a Danish welfare context. It asks how we may understand the relation between IBS, irritation, and attention. Drawing on conceptualisations of ‘dys-appearance’ (Leder 1990) and ‘attentional pulls’ (Throop and Duranti 2015), I explore how afflicted individuals’ attention is pulled towards unwanted and unexpected gut sensations in everyday life, and how a Danish welfare context, manifesting itself in notions of ‘faring well’ (Langer and Højlund 2011) and moral imaginings of ‘good lives’ (Mattingly 2014), may contribute to this. Furthermore, I show how people are impelled to experiment with consciously paying attention to the gut and deciphering its signals to try to alleviate gut trouble. I suggest that irritation may not only be an empirical focal point, but also a heuristic tool for troubling and refining concepts.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":"93 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136319559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Epidemic States: Reading China’s Mao-era Public Health after Zero-COVID","authors":"L. Fearnley","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.1.7123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.1.7123","url":null,"abstract":"This Review essay discusses three recent historical works about Mao-era public health, dealing with mass vaccination, anti-parisitic disease campaigns, and cholera epidemic response. The review identifies two key themes that cross-cut these works: the importance of pharmaceutical technology within the Mao-era, despite common assumptions that science and technology were repressed or declined during this period; and how new administrative reforms that reordered Chinese society after the Communist Revolution intersected with public health governance. Tracing how Maoist forms of state governance emerged in and through the response to epidemic disease, the review essay suggests that we can also examine China’s COVID-19 response as a crucible for implementing new forms of governing. ","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46717411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"River Swimming Through Uncertainty: Pandemic Immersions in a Therapeutic Chalkscape","authors":"M. Pearson","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.1.7045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.1.7045","url":null,"abstract":"In this Field Note, I share my experiences of an immersive period of ethnography undertaken with river swimmers in and along the River Beane and River Lea in the county town of Hertford, South-East England, from July 2020 until January 2021. As well as my personal experiences of being a swimmer, I include insights and observations from those I swam alongside to reflect on the feeling of wellbeing that river swimming instills in those dipping, swimming, and ‘dwelling’ in their local rivers. I use these insights to expand the notion of therapeutic landscapes, noting not only their temporality during a pandemic period of uncertainty and disconnection but also their minerality. I explore how therapeutic connections and closer relations between humans, non-humans and rivers, all watered by the same chalk aquifer, might be framed through the connective substance of chalk. ","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41364837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jonathan Yahalom, Sheila Frankfurt, Alison B. Hamilton
{"title":"Between Moral Injury and Moral Agency: Exploring Treatment for Men with Histories of Military Sexual Trauma","authors":"Jonathan Yahalom, Sheila Frankfurt, Alison B. Hamilton","doi":"10.17157/mat.10.1.6876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.10.1.6876","url":null,"abstract":"This Research Article deploys the frameworks of moral injury and moral agency to explore the experiences of veteran men who completed group therapy for military sexual trauma (MST). The article analyses ethnographically how veteran men with MST experience psychological growth via a replenishment of their sense of moral agency, thereby blending psychological theory about moral injury with anthropological theory about moral agency. It highlights how broader cultural experience can intersect and contribute to shame around MST, then depicts the ways that veterans recovered from a life characterised by pervasive shame, isolation, and compromised identity—psychological signs of moral injury—and made gains toward a life characterised by greater self-acceptance, an ability to tell one’s own story, and intimacy with others—signs of moral agency. In so doing, the article highlights the social and moral dimensions that can constitute psychological injury, and the way that addressing these dimensions can promote moral agency and thus mental health recovery.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136273300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Politics of Breathing Troubles in COVID-19: Pandemic Inequalities and the Right to Breathe across India and Germany","authors":"N. Selim","doi":"10.17157/mat.9.3.5750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.9.3.5750","url":null,"abstract":"‘Breathing trouble’ refers both to a biopolitical process and a metaphor for the current global condition. This Position Piece draws inspiration from the ‘universal right to breathe’ frame suggested by Joseph-Achille Mbembe (2021a) to discuss pandemic inequalities in Kolkata (India) from a location in the global north, Berlin (Germany), where the author currently lives and works. Drawing from the circumstances surrounding the interruption of my fieldwork in urban India, I argue how the border-crossing pandemic and the choking politics of the ruling governments in India and Germany are entangled in the production of pandemic inequalities. The coeval discussions of lived experiences and political grievances ‘there’ (India/Kolkata) and the critical questioning of the image of India from ‘here’ (Germany/Berlin) invite an understanding of breathing beyond its purely biological function to what we have in common, as the universal right to breathe. Such framing may help anthropologists to reattune to spatial, temporal, and ethical dimensions of excess empirical events in the constantly changing yet simultaneous pandemic realities.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67460624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Behind the Scenes at MAT: Labour at an open access journal","authors":"Mat Editorial Collective","doi":"10.17157/mat.9.3.7396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.9.3.7396","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Editorial to the September issue of 2022. \u0000 \u0000","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47206145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Colonial Entanglements and African Health Worlds","authors":"T. Cochrane","doi":"10.17157/mat.9.3.6991","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.9.3.6991","url":null,"abstract":"Following Ann Stoler’s (2016) idea of colonial and (post)colonial history as recursive, a history which folds back upon itself, emerging in new shapes and forms yet still carrying the formations that they are folded into, and Achille Mbembe’s argument that in the (post)colony the ‘past and present are entangled in hydra-headed ways’ (Mbembe and Hofmeyr 2006), this Review essay puts into conversation three recent publications: Marrku Hokkanen’s Medicine, Mobility and Empire (2017), Simukai Chigudu’s The Political Life of an Epidemic (2020), and Luke Messac’s No More to Spend (2020). I argue that these books help elucidate the transitions from colonial to postcolonial biomedicine in Africa and show what has endured. Focusing on books that look at a small part of south-eastern Africa, the essay examines how detailed historical analysis of the colonial creation of the medical world in the region can allow a temporally entangled understanding of medicine in the (post)colony. In particular, I observe how these three books highlight the impact of colonial logics of spatiality on African medical and healthcare worlds and suggest that paying careful attention to the colonial entanglements of African health worlds is crucial to understanding their contemporary shapes and forms. ","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45306269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}