Set in the context of the processes and practices of human reproduction and reproductive health in Northern India, this book examines the institutional exercise of power by the state, caste and kin groups. Drawing on ethnographic research over the past eighteen years among poor Hindu and Muslim communities in Rajasthan and among development and health actors in the state, this book contributes to developing analytic perspectives on reproductive practice, agency and the body-self as particular and novel sites of a vital power and politic. Rajasthan has been among the poorest states in the country with high levels of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity. The author closely examines how social and economic inequalities are produced and sustained in discursive and on the ground contexts of family-making, how authoritative knowledge and power in the domain of childbirth is exercised across a landscape of development institutions, how maternal health becomes a category of citizenship, how health-seeking is socially and emotionally determined and political in nature, how the health sector operates as a biopolitical system, and how diverse moral claims over the fertile, infertile and reproductive body-self are asserted, contested and often realised. A compelling analysis, this book offers both new empirical data and new theoretical insights. It draws together the practices, experiences and discourse on fertility and reproduction (childbirth, infertility, loss) in Northern India into an overarching analytical framework on power and gender politics. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of medical anthropology, medical sociology, public health, gender studies, human rights and sociolegal studies, and South Asian studies.

Are you your genes? De-Sequencing: Identity Work with Genes explores this perplexing question, showing how different forms of knowledge must be contextualized to become meaningful. It is generally assumed that the genomic sequence adds up to the identity-forming material life is made of. Yet identity cannot itself adopt the form of a sequence. As the authors in this volume show, the genome must be 'de-sequenced' by human language to render it interpretable and meaningful in a social context. The book unpacks this type of 'sequence-speech' in engaging detail, adopting a personal, social, cultural, and bio-political approach to examine the transformation of human identity and reflexivity in the era of genetic citizenship.

As a biological, cultural, and social entity, the human fetus is a multifaceted subject which calls for equally diverse perspectives to fully understand. Anthropology of the Fetus seeks to achieve this by bringing together specialists in biological anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. Contributors draw on research in prehistoric, historic, and contemporary sites in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and North America to explore the biological and cultural phenomenon of the fetus, raising methodological and theoretical concerns with the ultimate goal of developing a holistic anthropology of the fetus.

This book examines how Chinese-language newspapers across greater China report on severe mental illness, and why they do so in the ways they do, given that reporting in local newspapers can strongly influence how Chinese readers view the illness. By assessing how the reporting in three leading broadsheet newspapers from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan constructs the illness, the book considers how the distinct social and political histories of the three culturally Chinese communities shape the reporting, and whether it bears out or contests the intense stigma against the illness that prevails locally. The findings can usefully encourage and inform attempts to humanise, include, and empower those with a severe mental illness across greater China and the global Chinese diaspora. Employing a well-tested, transparent discourse analytic approach, the book also includes numerous Chinese-English bilingual news report extracts to illustrate its claims. As such, Reporting Mental Illness in China will be of interest to sinologists, discourse analysts, mental health professionals and public health authorities across the globe, especially in places where there are large Chinese-speaking populations.

Care, whether viewed as acts of civility, acts of compassion and skill, or acts of close personal interaction, is the fundamental process by which society perpetuates and recreates itself. Despite social need and the undeniable benefit of occupations such as Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs), these workers-mostly female and disproportionally from minority groups-face very low wages, a notable lack of respect, and little public recognition of their abilities. The United States is experiencing what experts call a crisis of care with a current and growing shortage of nurses and CNAs. In U.S. Nursing Centers, the demand for Certified Nursing Assistants, the largest group of employees who operate on the front line of health care, is expected to grow exponentially due to dramatic increases in population aging. Over the course of a year and a half, Anne K. Vittoria examined the meaning and social construction of care work on an Alzheimer's Pavilion located in a geriatric facility in the mid-western United States. Through in-depth ethnographic research focused on the local culture and logic of care, Vittoria documents that, when given autonomy in their daily work in an institution, CNAs and the LPN Charge Nurse constructed a systematic body of knowledge and created a language of care-forging a "different" model of personal care in resistance to the medical model of care. This book challenges the assumptions of the outside world that low-level workers are alienated from their work and have minimal skills. Paradoxically, the Pavilion is both a refuge and a site of struggle for the CNAs; they desire to create a world that is the antithesis of the world in which they live on the outside. Women of Color in a World Apart provides a public forum for the voices of women of color, the development of concepts, and a practical as well as theoretical language of care that could be transformational in connecting the meanings of care with the organization of care.

In Human and Nonhuman Bone Identification: A Color Atlas, Diane L. France, one of the most respected forensic anthropologists in the world, offered a comprehensive handbook of photographs and other information essential for examining skeletal remains and determining species and body parts. Conveniently designed for field use, this compact version of the book presents the major skeletal elements from the same species as the bestselling Atlas. Focusing on the bones most often discovered in field scenarios, the book is divided into two major sections: * General Osteology includes major features of bone growth and development and highlights general comparisons of quadrupedal mammals to human bones. This section includes an introduction to bird skeletal anatomy and some suggestions on how to clean and preserve bones. * Major Bones of the Bodies of Different Animals includes most bones from the cranium to the metatarsal. Filled with more than 1200 annotated, crisp photographs, this handy guide enables law enforcement, medicolegal death investigators, forensic anthropologists, and others in the field and in the lab ready access to the information needed to help solve the mystery of discovered bones.

Medical Materialities investigates possible points of cross-fertilisation between medical anthropology and material culture studies, and considers the successes and limitations of both sub-disciplines as they attempt to understand places, practices, methods, and cultures of healing. The editors present and expand upon a definition of 'medical materiality', namely the social impact of the agency of often mundane, at times non-clinical, materials within contexts of health and illness, as caused by the properties and affordances of this material. The chapters address material culture in various clinical and biomedical contexts and in discussions that link the body and healing. The diverse ethnographic case studies provide valuable insight into the way cultures of medicine are understood and practised.

Olumwullah examines disease, biomedicine, and processes of social change among the AbaNyole of Western Kenya and analyzes the introduction and use of biomedicine as a cultural tool of domination by British colonizers and the AbaNyole's reaction to this therapeutic tradition and its technologies. He argues that biomedicine is a tool that the colonizers used to think about the colonized. Through an examination of ideas about order and disorder in Nyole cosmology, Nyole experiences with new diseases and biomedical practices that were brought to bear on these diseases; and how these experiences and the meanings they produced transformed metaphors of disease, illness, and healing, this study argues that, just as colonialism was more than a quest for the construction of exploitative political and economic institutions, so was biomedicine more than a mere matter of scientific interest based on benevolent neutrality.

By setting the terms of discourse between the West and the African culural environment, and by insinuating itself at the center of contestation over knowledge between a British science and African ways of knowing, colonial biomedical science turned the African body into a site of colonizing power and of contestation between the colonized and the colonizer. Narratives about the incidence of diseases like the plague were in themselves experiences of suffering that opened a window to how local knowledge about disease etiology and disease causation was produced among the AbaNyole. Instead of being passive victims of capitalistic forces of domination and exploitation, the Nyole confronted biomedicine as its assemblage of practices inhabited, passed through, transformed, conserved, or escaped the terrain sketched by a pre-European Nyole worldview. Conventioanl expectations about disease as misfortune were altered as colonialism came to be seen and experienced as a form of social death the AbaNyole had never before encountered.

Offers the most up to date research on the subject

Care, whether viewed as acts of civility, acts of compassion and skill, or acts of close personal interaction, is the fundamental process by which society perpetuates and recreates itself. Despite social need and the undeniable benefit of occupations such as Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs), these workers-mostly female and disproportionally from minority groups-face very low wages, a notable lack of respect, and little public recognition of their abilities. The United States is experiencing what experts call a crisis of care with a current and growing shortage of nurses and CNAs. In U.S. Nursing Centers, the demand for Certified Nursing Assistants, the largest group of employees who operate on the front line of health care, is expected to grow exponentially due to dramatic increases in population aging. Over the course of a year and a half, Anne K. Vittoria examined the meaning and social construction of care work on an Alzheimer's Pavilion located in a geriatric facility in the mid-western United States. Through in-depth ethnographic research focused on the local culture and logic of care, Vittoria documents that, when given autonomy in their daily work in an institution, CNAs and the LPN Charge Nurse constructed a systematic body of knowledge and created a language of care-forging a "different" model of personal care in resistance to the medical model of care. This book challenges the assumptions of the outside world that low-level workers are alienated from their work and have minimal skills. Paradoxically, the Pavilion is both a refuge and a site of struggle for the CNAs; they desire to create a world that is the antithesis of the world in which they live on the outside. Women of Color in a World Apart provides a public forum for the voices of women of color, the development of concepts, and a practical as well as theoretical language of care that could be transformational in connecting the meanings of care with the organization of care.

This reader offers some of the most important writing to date from the science of COVID-19 and what science says about its spread and social implications. The readings have been carefully selected, introduced, and interpreted for an introductory or graduate student readership by a distinguished medical sociology and political science team. While some of the early science was inaccurate, lacking sufficient data, or otherwise incomplete, the author team has selected the most important and reliable early work for teachers and students in courses on medical sociology, public health, nursing, infectious diseases, epidemiology, anthropology of medicine, sociology of health and illness, social aspects of medicine, comparative health systems, health policy and management, health behaviors, and community health. Global in scope, the book tells the story of what happened and how COVID-19 was dealt with. Much of this material is in clinical journals, normally not considered in the social sciences, which are nonetheless informative and authoritative for student and faculty readers. Their selection and interpretation for students makes this concise reader an essential teaching source about COVID-19. An accompanying online resource on the book's Routledge web page will update and evolve by providing links to new readings as the science develops.

Ancestral Diets and Nutrition supplies dietary advice based on the study of prehuman and human populations worldwide over the last two million years. This thorough, accessible book uses prehistory and history as a laboratory for testing the health effects of various foods. It examines all food groups by drawing evidence from skeletons and their teeth, middens, and coprolites along with written records where they exist to determine peoples' health and diet. Fully illustrated and grounded in extensive research, this book enhances knowledge about diet, nutrition, and health. It appeals to practitioners in medicine, nutrition, anthropology, biology, chemistry, economics, and history, and those seeking a clear explanation of what humans have eaten across the ages and what we should eat now. Features: Sixteen chapters examine fat, sweeteners, grains, roots and tubers, fruits, vegetables, and animal and plant sources of protein. Integrates information about diet, nutrition, and health from ancient, medieval, modern and current sources, drawing from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Provides comprehensive coverage based on the study of several hundred sources and the provision of over 2,000 footnotes. Presents practical information to help shape readers' next meal through recommendations of what to eat and what to avoid.

Haemophilia in Aotearoa New Zealand provides a richly detailed analysis of the experience of the bleeding disorder of haemophilia based on longterm ethnographic research. The chapters consider experiences of diagnosis; how parents, children, and adults care and integrate medical routines into family life; the creation of a gendered haemophilia; the use and ethical dilemmas of new technologies for treatment, testing and reproduction; and how individuals and the haemophilia community experienced the infected blood tragedy and its aftermath, which included extended and ultimately successful political struggles with the neoliberalising state. The authors reveal a complex interplay of cultural values and present a close-up view of the effects of health system reforms on lives and communities. While the book focuses on the local biology of haemophilia in Aotearoa New Zealand, the analysis allows for comparison with haemophilia elsewhere and with other chronic and genetic conditions.

Transforming Cities examines the profound changes that have characterised cities of the advanced capitalist societies in the final decades of the twentieth century. It analyses ways in which relationships of contest, conflict and co-operation are realised in and through the social and spatial forms of contemporary urban life. This book focuses on the impact of economic restructuring and changing forms of urban deprivation and social exclusion. It contends that these processes are creating new patterns of social division and new forms of regulation and control.

This book examines how pacemakers and defibrillators participate in transforming life and death in high-tech societies. In both popular and medical accounts, these internal devices are often portrayed as almost magical technologies. Once implanted in bodies, they do not require any 'user' agency. In this unique and timely book, Nelly Oudshoorn argues that any discourse or policy assuming a passive role for people living with these implants silences the fact that keeping cyborg bodies alive involves their active engagement. Pacemakers and defibrillators not only act as potentially life-saving technologies, but simultaneously transform the fragility of bodies by introducing new vulnerabilities. Oudshoorn offers a fascinating examination of what it takes to become a resilient cyborg, and in the process develops a valuable new sociology of creating 'resilient' cyborgs.

The problem of addiction is one of the major challenges and controversies confronting medicine and society. It also poses important and complex philosophical and scientific problems. What is addiction? Why does it occur? And how should we respond to it, as individuals and as a society? The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject. It spans several disciplines and is the first collection of its kind. Organised into three clear parts, forty-five chapters by a team of international contributors examine key areas, including: the meaning of addiction to individuals conceptions of addiction varieties and taxonomies of addiction methods and models of addiction evolution and addiction history, sociology and anthropology population distribution and epidemiology developmental processes vulnerabilities and resilience psychological and neural mechanisms prevention, treatment and spontaneous recovery public health and the ethics of care social justice, law and policy. Essential reading for students and researchers in addiction research and in philosophy, particularly philosophy of mind and psychology and ethics, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction will also be of great interest to those in related fields, such as medicine, mental health, social work, and social policy.

A ground-breaking ethnographic study of suckling in the Arabian Gulf , this book reenergises the study of kinship. It analyses the misunderstood and marginalized phenomenon of suckling drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Qatar over a seven-year period. Fadwa El Guindi situates suckling (often given other names or subsumed under misleading classifications) squarely in the analytical category of kinship, with recognition that kinship is necessarily biological, societal and cultural. The volume takes kinship study beyond origins, nature-culture debates, and social nurturing and relatedness, and challenges claims of deterministic, reductionist formulas. As well as key reading for those involved in milk kinship research, this book is valuable for anthropologists, Middle East scholars and others with an interest in breastfeeding, family and social organisation, and religion.

Originally published in 1986, this book draws upon a range of authors to reflect wide interest in systematising traditional medicine, and to include material on significant instances of regulation or organisation. It was the first book to study the efforts of traditional healers and their newly formed professional associations and as such constitutes a pioneering collection of sources. Because of the changing position of traditional medicine it may well also be a unique record: before long what is described here will largely have disappeared.

A diagnosis of dementia changes the ways people engage with each other - for those living with dementia, as well their families, caregivers, friends, health professionals, neighbours, shopkeepers and the community. Medical understandings, necessary as they are, provide no insights into how we may all live good lives with dementia. This innovative volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners to focus on dementia as lived experience. It foregrounds dementia's social, moral, political and economic dimensions, investigating the challenges of reframing the dementia experience for all involved. Part I critiques the stigmas, the negativity, language and fears often associated with a dementia diagnosis, challenging debilitating representations and examining ways to tackle these. Part II examines proactive practices that can support better long-term outcomes for those living with dementia. Part III looks at the relational aspects of dementia care, acknowledging and going beyond the notion of person-centred care. Collectively, these contributions highlight the social and relational change required to enhance life for those with dementia and those who care for them. Engaging in a critical conversation around personhood and social value, this book examines the wider social contexts within which dementia care takes place. It calls for social change, and looks for inspiration to the growing movement for relational care and the caring society. Dementia as Social Experience is important reading for all those people who, in various ways, are living with dementia, as well as for those working in this area as clinicians, researcher and carers.

Recognizing the interplay between biomedicine and indigenous medicine among the Mapuche in Southern Chile, this book explores notions of culture and personhood through the bodily experiences and medical choices of patients. Through case studies of patients in the context of medical pluralism, Kristensen argues that medical practices are powerful social symbol indicative of overarching socio-political processes. As certain types of extreme and violent experiences-known as olvidos-lack a framework that allows them to be expressed openly, they therefore surface as symptoms of an illness, often with no apparent organic pathology. In these contexts, indigenous medicine, thanks to its sensitivity to socio-political contexts, provides a space for articulation and management of collective experiences and suffering among patients in Southern Chile.

Please see the website of author Thurka Sangaramoorthy for extra resources and material related to this book, at thurkasangaramoorthy.com. Click on the book's cover and be sure to check back for updated content This book provides provides a practical guide to understanding and conducting rapid ethnographic assessments (REAs) with an emphasis on their use in public health contexts. This team-based, multi-method, relatively low-cost approach results in rich understandings of social, economic, and policy factors that contribute to the root causes of an emerging situation and provides rapid, practical feedback to policy makers and programs. Using real-world examples and case studies of completed REAs, Sangaramoorthy and Kroeger provide readers with a logical, easy-to-follow introduction into key concepts, principles, and methods of REAs, including interview and observation techniques, triangulation, field notes and debriefing, theoretical saturation, and qualitative analysis. They also provide a practical guide for planning and implementing REAs and suggestions for transforming findings into written reports and actionable recommendations. Materials and detailed tools regarding the conduct of REAs are designed to help readers apply this method to their own research regardless of topic or discipline. REA is an applied approach that can facilitate collaborative work with communities and become a catalyst for action. Rapid Ethnographic Assessment will appeal to professionals and researchers interested in using REAs for research efficiency and productivity as well as action-oriented and translational research in a variety of fields and contexts.

In Thailand, infertility remains a source of stigma for those couples that combine a range of religious, traditional and high-tech interventions in their quest for a child. This book explores this experience of infertility and the pursuit and use of assisted reproductive technologies by Thai couples. Though using assisted reproductive technologies is becoming more acceptable in Thai society, access to and choices about such technologies are mediated by differences in class position. These stories of women and men in private and public infertility clinics reveal how local social and moral sensitivities influence the practices and meanings of treatment.

The second decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed a surging interest in personalized medicine with the concomitant promise to enable more precise diagnosis and treatment of disease and illness, based upon an individual's unique genetic makeup. In this book, my goal is to contribute to a growing body of literature on personalized medicine by tracing and analyzing how this field has blossomed in Asia. In so doing, I aim to illustrate how various social and economic forces shape the co-production of science and social order in global contexts. This book shows that there are inextricable transnational linkages between developing and developed countries and also provides a theoretically guided and empirically grounded understanding of the formation and usage of particular racial and ethnic human taxonomies in local, national and transnational settings. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315537177 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book focuses on developing the use of ethnographic research for rehabilitation practitioners by recognizing its value methodologically and empirically in the field of rehabilitation. The very nature of ethnographic research offers an array of opportunities for researchers to understand the social world around them. The book identifies the multifaceted use of ethnographic methods in the rehabilitation setting. It touches on how acute and chronic conditions can affect the nature of ethnographic work in attempts to offer originality in a range of rehabilitation settings. Readers will find this collection of examples useful for informing their own research, and it aims to enlighten new discussion and arguments regarding both methodological and empirical use of ethnographic work internationally.

Focusing on practice more than theory, this collection offers new perspectives for studying the so-called "humoral medical traditions," as they have flourished around the globe during the last 2,000 years. Exploring notions of "balance" in medical cultures across Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, from antiquity to the present, the volume revisits "harmony" and "holism" as main characteristics of those traditions. It foregrounds a dynamic notion of balance and asks how balance is defined or conceptualized, by whom, for whom and in what circumstances. Balance need not connoteegalitarianism or equilibrium. Rather, it alludes to morals of self care exercised in place of excessiveness and indulgences after long periods of a life in dearth. As the moral becomes visceral, the question arises: what constitutes the visceral in a body that is in constant flux and flow? How far, and in what ways, are there fundamental properties or constituents in those bodies?