Transcendental Medication considers why human brains evolved to have consciousness, yet we spend much of our time trying to reduce our awareness. It outlines how limiting consciousness-rather than expanding it-is more functional and satisfying for most people, most of the time. The suggestion is that our brains evolved mechanisms to deal with the stress of awareness in concert with awareness itself-otherwise it is too costly to handle. Defining dissociation as "partitioning of awareness," Lynn touches on disparate cultural and psychological practices such as religion, drug use, 12-step programs, and dancing. The chapters draw on biological and cultural studies of Pentecostal speaking in tongues and stress, the results of our 800,000+ years watching hearth and campfires, and unconscious uses of self-deception as mating strategy. Written in a highly engaging style, Transcendental Medication will appeal to students and scholars interested in mind, altered states of consciousness, and evolution. It is particularly suitable for those approaching the issue from cultural, biological, psychological, and cognitive anthropology, as well as evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and religious studies.

This classic book, first published in 1992 and again in 2003, has inspired three generations of childbearing people, birth activists and researchers, and birth practitioners-midwives, doulas, nurses, and obstetricians-to take a fresh look at the "standard procedures" that are routinely used to "manage" American childbirth. It was the first book to identify these non-evidence-based obstetric interventions as rituals that enact and transmit the core values of the American technocracy, thereby answering the pressing question of why these interventions continue to be performed despite all evidence to the contrary. This third edition brings together Davis-Floyd's insights into the intense ritualization of labor and birth and the technocratic, humanistic, and holistic models of birth with new data collected in recent years.

Theoretical Approaches in Bioarchaeology emphasizes how several different theoretical perspectives can be used to reconstruct the biocultural experiences of humans in the past. Over the past few decades, bioarchaeology has been transformed through methodological revisions, technological advances, and the inclusion of external theoretical frameworks from the social and natural sciences. These interdisciplinary perspectives became the backbone of bioarchaeology and strengthened the discipline's ability to address questions about past biological and social dynamics. Consequently, how, why, and when to apply external theory to studies of past populations are central and timely questions tied to future developments of the discipline. This book facilitates ongoing dialogues about theoretical applications within the field and interdisciplinary connections between bioarchaeology, biological anthropology, and other disciplines. Each chapter highlights how a theoretical framework originating from a social or natural science connects to past and future bioarchaeological research. For scholars and archaeologists interested in the theoretical applications of bioarchaeology, this book will be an excellent resource.

This book centers on negotiations around cultural, governmental, and individual constructions of COVID-19. It considers how the coronavirus pandemic has been negotiated in different cultures and countries, with the final part of the volume focusing on South Asia and Pakistan in particular. The chapters include auto-ethnographic accounts and ethnographic explorations that reflect upon experiences of living with the pandemic and its implications for all areas of life. The book explicates people's dealings with COVID-19 at various levels, situates the spread of rumors, conspiracy theories, and new social rituals within micro- and/or macro-contexts, and describes the interplay between the virus and various institutionalized forms of inequalities and structural vulnerabilities. Bringing together a variety of perspectives, the volume relates to the past, describes the Covidian present, and offers futuristic implications. It enlists distinct imaginaries based on current understandings of an extraordinary challenge that holds significant importance for our human future.

Offers a new perspective on "traditional" Asian medicines Provides original insights into "traditional" Asian pharmaceutical industries Broad-ranging, multidisciplinary and comparative research on Asian medicine in China, India, Japan, Mongolia, and Nepal Relevant to scholars, students, health professionals, and policy makers Includes extensive bibliographies of essential but little-known scholarship on Asian medicines from Asia

This collection is dedicated to the diagnostic moment and its unrivaled influence on encompassment and exclusion in health care. Diagnosis is seen as both an expression and a vehicle of biomedical hegemony, yet it is also a necessary and speculative tool for the identification of and response to suffering in any healing system. Social scientific studies of medicalization and the production of medical knowledge have revealed tremendous controversy within, and factitiousness at the outer parameters of, diagnosable conditions. Yet the ethnographically rich and theoretically complex history of such studies has not yet congealed into a coherent structural critique of the process and broader implications of diagnosis. This volume meets that challenge, directing attention to three distinctive realms of diagnostic conflict: in the role of diagnosis to grant access to care, in processes of medicalization and resistance, and in the transforming and transformative position of diagnosis for 21st-century global health. Smith-Morris's framework repositions diagnosis as central to critical global health inquiry. The collected authors question specific diagnoses (e.g., Lyme disease, Parkinson's, andropause, psychosis) as well as the structural and epistemological factors behind a disease's naming and experience.

Based on an ethnography of postpartum consultations by independent midwives in Switzerland, this book produces unique insights into home-birth parents' breastfeeding journey from the first hours after birth to weaning. Considered the "natural" continuity of childbirth without intervention, breastfeeding is a fundamental component of the holistic, continuous and individualised care independent midwives provide as they engage with parents in a shared construction of meaning around breastfeeding. This book offers new perspectives on the conceptualisation of breastfeeding as a shared process. Parents, in collaboration with their midwife and baby, are jointly constructing "negotiated breastfeeding". As the child grows and develops, questions arise regarding the management of risks, the construction of the lactating body and the body work required, and the perception of breastfeeding as a means of communication with the child, consistent with a "child-centred" approach to parenting. Fostering a reflection on the contrasts and similarities between the marginal model of holistic care and the dominant biomedical model, this book sheds light on issues of a broader scope: the relationship to health risks and health promotion, gender inequalities regarding parental roles and responsibilities, the concept of the child as a "project", and the consequential "intensification" of parenthood. The book also explores transversal themes by outlining how reproduction and parenting are undertaken in Switzerland, framed by the local cultural, political and economic context, including the gender system and resulting power relationships.

Banking on Milk takes the reader on a journey through the everyday life of donor human milk banking across the United Kingdom (UK) and beyond, asking questions such as the following: Why do people decide to donate? How do parents of recipients hear about human milk? How does milk donation impact on lifestyle choices? Chapters record the practical everyday reality of work in a milk bank by drawing on extensive ethnographic observations and sensitive interview data from donors, mothers of recipients and the staff of four different milk banks from across the UK, and visits to milk banks across Europe and North America. It discusses the ongoing pressures to do with supply, demand and distribution. An empirically informed "ethnography of the contemporary", where both biosociality and biopower abound, this book includes an exploration of how milk banks evolved from registering wet nurses with hospitals, showing how a regulatory culture of medical authority began to quantify and organize human milk as a commodity. This book is a valuable read for all those with an interest in breastfeeding or organ and tissue donation from a range of fields, including midwifery, sociology, anthropology, geography, cultural studies and public health.

This book will be a vital resource for researchers in the field of health communication, especially in the aftermath of COVID-19, as we begin confronting the reality of which countries can afford to declare an 'end to the pandemic', and which ones can't A unique feature of this book is that its center and focus is on persons living with HIV - It highlights their experiences and voices It examines the discourse of a "post-AIDS" culture using a range of methodological tools, and the medical-discursive shift from crisis and death to survival and living It includes contributions from a diverse group of international scholars, and interrogates and engages with the cultural, social, political, scientific, historical, global, and local consumptions of the term "post-AIDS" from the perspective of meaning-making on health, illness, and well-being This book will be an essential read for scholars and students of health communication, sociology of health and illness, medical humanities, political science, and medical anthropology, as well as for policy makers and activists

This book sets out to define and consolidate the field of bioinformation studies in its transnational and global dimensions, drawing on debates in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology. It provides situated analyses of bioinformation journeys across domains and spheres of interpretation. As unprecedented amounts of data relating to biological processes and lives are collected, aggregated, traded and exchanged, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, scientific researchers and consumers. Bioinformation accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures. The volume harnesses the anthropological sensibility for situated, fine-grained, ethnographically grounded analysis to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on the conceptual, political, social and ethical dimensions posed by bioinformation.

The relationships between religion, spirituality, health, biomedical institutions, complementary, and alternative healing systems are widely discussed today. While many of these debates revolve around the biomedical legitimacy of religious modes of healing, the market for them continues to grow. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty-five chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into five parts: Healing practices with religious roots and frames Religious actors in and around the medical field Organizing infrastructures of religion and medicine: pluralism and competition Boundary-making between religion and medicine Religion and epidemics Within these sections, central issues, debates and problems are examined, including health and healing, religiosity, spirituality, biomedicine, medicalization, complementary medicine, medical therapy, efficacy, agency, and the nexus of body, mind, and spirit. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as sociology, anthropology, and medicine.

1. This is a comprehensive book dealing with cultural history of Ayurveda Medicine. 2. The book has rich archival material and extensive primary data from the field. 3. With popularity of alternative medicine, Yoga and emergence of indigenous studies, this book will have a good market in both UK and USA.

1. This is a comprehensive book dealing with cultural history of Ayurveda Medicine. 2. The book has rich archival material and extensive primary data from the field. 3. With popularity of alternative medicine, Yoga and emergence of indigenous studies, this book will have a good market in both UK and USA.

This book examines the intersectionality and stratified lived experience of rural poor and urban middle-class childless women in Bangladesh. Childless women in Bangladesh, an over-populated country where fertility control is the primary focus of health policy, are all but non-existent. Papreen Nahar offers an alarming account of stigma, abuse, ostracism and violence against these women, sharing their experiences of marginalisation in a culture that idealises motherhood. In such a reality, the experience of childlessness, particularly for women, can be much more severe than what is defined as 'infertility' in the biomedical sense. As childlessness is a complex interaction between biology, society and culture, the book illustrates the ways in which infertility transforms a health problem into social suffering. Although Bangladeshi childless women are systematically excluded by various structural forces, it appears they do not succumb to their circumstances; rather, they develop resilience and agency to become survivors of their new, albeit bleak, lives. The volume will be of interest to scholars working in anthropology, reproductive and women's health, global health, gender studies, development studies and Asian studies.

The emergence of Zika virus in 2015 challenged conventional ideas of mosquito-borne diseases, tested the resilience of health systems and embedded itself within local sociocultural worlds, with major implications for environmental, sexual, reproductive and paediatric health. This book explores this complex viral epidemic and situates it within its broader social, epidemiological and historical context in Latin America and the Caribbean. The chapters include a diverse set of case studies from scholars and health practitioners working across the region, from Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, the United States and Haiti. The book explores how mosquito-borne disease epidemics (not only Zika but also chikungunya, dengue and malaria) intersect with social change and health governance. By doing so, the authors reflect on the ways in which situated knowledge and social science approaches can contribute to more effective health policy and practice for mosquito-borne disease threats in a changing world. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com , has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Through an ethnohistorical chronicling of the emotionally-laden treatment of selected suicide media-events, this book offers a neo-Durkheimean account of suicide, addressing its social-moral threat and the ensuing need to gloss over its unsettling incomprehensibility. An analysis of the social dramas, cultural performances, and suicide talk aired in the Israeli public sphere, it suggests that such public glossing practices atone for and bring about the symbolic rectification of the socially detrimental effects of suicide. Drawing on Durkheim's thought on the social significance of suicide and the sacred cohesive power of society's self-representations through rituals and commemorations, the authors revamp the contemporary pertinence of these cultural devices, showing how, in the process of reconstituting and redressing the disrupted order, suicide talk constitutes a revival mechanism of communal 'life giving'. A rekindling of the Durkheimian approach to suicide that examines how society deals with suicide's shattering of normative we-feelings, Suicide Social Dramas: Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and anthropology with interests in social theory, Israel studies, suicide studies, and the interpretation of societal and cultural processes.

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.

The first comprehensive Cannabis Handbook situated in an era when prohibition of marijuana has become more common in many US states and countries. Broad coverage The first comprehensive Cannabis Handbook situated in an era when prohibition of marijuana has become more common in many US states and countries. Broad coverage of the major topics in the field, especially those related to cannabis and various aspects of society. While many perspectives are represented, contributions include critical perspectives on legalization--pointing to issues that must be successfully managed by governments and other institutions. of the major topics in the field, especially those related to cannabis and various aspects of society. While many perspectives are represented, contributions include critical perspectives on legalization--pointing to issues that must be successfully managed by governments and other institutions.

Adopting an anthrozoological perspective to study the participation of non-human animals in regimes of care, this book examines the use of canine scent detection to alert 'hypo-unaware' individuals to symptoms of human chronic illness. Based on ethnographic research and interviews, it focuses on the manner in which trained assistance dogs are able to use their sense of smell to alert human companions with Type 1 diabetes to imminent hypoglycaemic episodes, thus reducing the risk of collapse into unconsciousness, coma or, at worst, death. Through analyses of participant narrations of the everyday complexities of 'doing' diabetes with the assistance of medical alert dogs, the author sheds light on the way in which each human-canine dyad becomes acknowledged as a team of 'one' in society. Based on the concept of dogs as friends and work colleagues, as animate instruments and biomedical resources, the book raises conceptual questions surrounding the acceptable use of animals and their role within society. As such, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in human-animal interactions and intersections. It may also appeal to healthcare practitioners and individuals interested in innovative multispecies methods of managing chronic illness.

Focusing on the world of Norwegian Opioid Substitution Treatment (OST) in the aftermath of significant reforms, this book casts a critical light on the intersections between medicine and law, and the ideologies infusing the notions of "individual choice" and "patient involvement" in the field of addiction globally. With ethnographic attention to the encounters between patients, clinicians, and bureaucrats, the volume shows that OST sustains the realities it is meant to address. The chapters follow one particular patient through complex clinical and legal battles as they fight to achieve a better quality of life. The study provides ethnographic insight that captures the individual, experiential aspects of addiction treatment, and how these experiences find a register within different domains of treatment and policy, including the familial, social, legal, and clinical. Offering a rare view of addiction treatment in a Scandinavian welfare state, this book will be of interest to scholars of medical and legal anthropology and sociology, and others with an interest in drug policy and addiction treatment.

Tobacco has become one of the most widely used and traded commoditites on the planet. Reflecting contemporary anthropological interest in material culture studies, Anthropology of Tobacco makes the plant the centre of its own contentious, global story in which, instead of a passive commodity, tobacco becomes a powerful player in a global adventure involving people, corporations and public health. Bringing together a range of perspectives from the social and natural sciences as well as the arts and humanities, Anthropology of Tobacco weaves stories together from a range of historical, cross-cultural and literary sources and empirical research. These combine with contemporary anthropological theories of agency and cross-species relationships to offer fresh perspectives on how an apparently humble plant has progressed to world domination, and the consequences of it having done so. It also considers what needs to happen if, as some public health advocates would have it, we are seriously to imagine 'a world without tobacco'. This book presents students, scholars and practitioners in anthropology, public health and social policy with unique and multiple perspectives on tobacco-human relations.

As a group, western diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, allergies and mental health problems constitute one of the major problems facing humans at the beginning of the 21st century, particularly as they extend into poorer countries. An evolutionary perspective has much to offer standard biomedical understandings of western diseases. At the heart of this approach is the notion that human evolution occurred in circumstances very different from the modern affluent western environment and that, as a consequence, human biology is not adapted to the contemporary western environment. Written with an anthropological perspective and aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduates taking courses in the ecology and evolution of disease, Tessa Pollard applies and extends this evolutionary perspective by analysing trends in rates of western diseases and providing a new synthesis of current understandings of evolutionary processes, and of the biology and epidemiology of disease.

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.

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.