The World Health Organization is currently promoting a policy of replacing traditional or lay midwives in countries around the world. As part of an effort to record the knowledge of local midwives before it is lost, Midwives and Mothers explores birth, illness, death, and survival on a Guatemalan sugar and coffee plantation, or finca, through the lives of two local midwives, Dona Maria and her daughter Dona Siriaca, and the women they have served over a forty-year period. By comparing the practices and beliefs of the mother and daughter, Sheila Cosminsky shows the dynamics of the medicalization process and the contestation between the midwives and biomedical personnel, as the latter try to impose their system as the authoritative one. She discusses how the midwives syncretize, integrate, or reject elements from Mayan, Spanish, and biomedical systems. The midwives' story becomes a lens for understanding the impact of medicalization on people's lives and the ways in which women's bodies have become contested terrain between traditional and contemporary medical practices. Cosminsky also makes recommendations for how ethno-obstetric and biomedical systems may be accommodated, articulated, or integrated. Finally, she places the changes in the birthing system in the larger context of changes in the plantation system, including the elimination of coffee growing, which has made women, traditionally the primary harvesters of coffee beans, more economically dependent on men.

An in-depth and wide-ranging approach to the study of older adults in society Taking a holistic approach to the study of aging, this volume uses biological, archaeological, medical, and cultural perspectives to explore how older adults have functioned in societies around the globe and throughout human history. As the world's population over 65 years of age continues to increase, this wide-ranging approach fills a growing need for both academics and service professionals in gerontology, geriatrics, and related fields. Case studies from the United States, Tibet, Turkey, China, Nigeria, and Mexico provide examples of the ways age-related changes are influenced by environmental, genetic, sociocultural, and political-economic variables. Taken together, they help explain how the experience of aging varies across time and space. These contributions from noted anthropological scholars examine evolutionary and biological understandings of human aging, the roles of elders in various societies, issues of gender and ageism, and the role of chronic illness and "successful aging" among older adults. This volume highlights how an anthropology of aging can illustrate how older adults adapt to shifting life circumstances and environments, including changes to the ways in which individuals and families care for them. The research in Anthropological Perspectives on Aging can also help researchers, students, and practitioners reach across disciplines to address age discrimination and help improve health outcomes throughout the life course.

This book examines various aspects of ethnomedicine and tribal healing practices, including its importance for inclusion and integration from a health systems perspective. Tribal healing practices is an under-studied component in healthcare system, health policy and health systems research. The book consists of original research papers based on empirical studies done by anthropologists, sociologists, public health practitioners and research scientists in various parts of India. It discusses issues of non-codified folk healing, with a focus on the therapeutic ideas and practices of tribal communities, located in anthropological theory and methods. It has a balance of empirical papers, review and theoretical papers, not only explaining 'what is inside the healing practices' but also touching upon the question of 'why' and delving into 'what should be' looking into the possibility to apply it for a larger good i.e., health care for all. This book discusses several important issues related to legitimacy, evidence and efficacy, recognition, certification and integration, protection and preservation, bio-piracy and bioprospecting, benefit sharing and intellectual property rights, sustainable use of medicinal herbs and conservation of nature and natural resources, biodiversity and possibilities of mainstreaming tribal healing. It is of interest to students and researchers from medical anthropology, medical sociology, cultural geography, liberal studies, tribal studies, ecology, sustainability and development and public health.

The World Health Organization is currently promoting a policy of replacing traditional or lay midwives in countries around the world. As part of an effort to record the knowledge of local midwives before it is lost, Midwives and Mothers explores birth, illness, death, and survival on a Guatemalan sugar and coffee plantation, or finca, through the lives of two local midwives, Dona Maria and her daughter Dona Siriaca, and the women they have served over a forty-year period. By comparing the practices and beliefs of the mother and daughter, Sheila Cosminsky shows the dynamics of the medicalization process and the contestation between the midwives and biomedical personnel, as the latter try to impose their system as the authoritative one. She discusses how the midwives syncretize, integrate, or reject elements from Mayan, Spanish, and biomedical systems. The midwives' story becomes a lens for understanding the impact of medicalization on people's lives and the ways in which women's bodies have become contested terrain between traditional and contemporary medical practices. Cosminsky also makes recommendations for how ethno-obstetric and biomedical systems may be accommodated, articulated, or integrated. Finally, she places the changes in the birthing system in the larger context of changes in the plantation system, including the elimination of coffee growing, which has made women, traditionally the primary harvesters of coffee beans, more economically dependent on men.

"This is a beautifully written and well-organized book, combining theoretical insights and ethnographic detail. It represents an important contribution to medical anthropological scholarship on reproduction as well as to the theoretical debates on modernity and development."--Carolyn Sargent, author of "Maternity, Medicine and Power

"By locating women's experiences of childbearing within a local political economy of class, caste and gender politics and international debates about development and human rights, "Birth on the Threshold provides a subtle and important contribution to the understanding of Indian modernity. With telling use of case material, the author shows us how poor Tamil women in contemporary south India are both willing collaborators and victims of changes in medical practice. Women's experiences at the hands of hospital staff, who often insert intrauterine contraceptive devices without their consent, are juxtaposed with their own perceptions and strategies of accommodation, negotiation and resistance. This book will be essential reading for students of gender, medical anthropology and of South Asia in general."--Patricia Jeffery, co-author of "Labour Pains and Labour Power: Women and Childbearing in India

"Compellingly argued and exquisitely written, Van Hollen's work stands as the best of a new generation of ethnographies critically rethinking the anthropology of childbirth. Accessible to anyone with an interest in the everyday and extraordinary politics of development, family planning, and poor women's lives, "Birth on the Threshold is necessary reading for all scholars of body, gender, and governmentality in South Asia and destined to become a classic in medicalanthropology. "--Lawrence Cohen, author of "No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things

How do digital technologies shape both how people care for each other and, through that, who they are? With technological innovation is on the rise and increasing migration introducing vast distances between family members--a situation additionally complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the requirements of physical distancing, especially for the most vulnerable – older adults--this is a pertinent question. Through ethnographic fieldwork among families of migrating nurses from Kerala, India, Tanja Ahlin explores how digital technologies shape elder care when adult children and their aging parents live far apart. Coming from a country in which appropriate elder care is closely associated with co-residence, these families tinker with smartphones and social media to establish how care at a distance can and should be done to be considered good. Through the notion of transnational care collectives, Calling Family uncovers the subtle workings of digital technologies on care across countries and continents when being physically together is not feasible. Calling Family provides a better understanding of technological relationality that can only be expected to further intensify in the future.

The Bushbuckridge region of South Africa has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world. Having first arrived in the area in the early 1990s, the disease spread rapidly, and by 2008 life expectancies had fallen by 12 years for men and 14 years for women. Since 2005, public health facilities have increasingly offered free HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) treatment, offering a degree of hope, but uptake and adherence to the therapy has been sporadic and uneven. Drawing on his extensive ethnographic research, carried out in Bushbuckridge over the course of 25 years, Isak Niehaus reveals how the AIDS pandemic has been experienced at the village-level. Most significantly, he shows how local cultural practices and values have shaped responses to the epidemic. For example, while local attitudes towards death and misfortune have contributed to the stigma around AIDS, kinship structures have also facilitated the adoption and care of AIDS orphans. Such practices challenge us to rethink the role played by culture in understanding and treating sickness, with Niehaus showing how an appreciation of local beliefs and customs is essential to any effective strategy of AIDS treatment. Overturning many of our assumptions on disease prevention, the book is essential reading for practitioners as well as researchers in global health, anthropology, sociology, epidemiology and scholars interested in public health and administration in sub-Saharan Africa.

These original essays, which combine theoretical argument with empirical observation, constitute a state-of-the-art platform for future research in medical anthropology. Ranging in time and locale, the essays are based on research in historical and cultural settings. The contributors accept the notion that all knowledge is socially and culturally constructed and examine the contexts in which that knowledge is produced and practiced in medicine, psychiatry, epidemiology, and anthropology. Professionals in behavioral medicine, public health, and epidemiology as well as medical anthropologists will find their insights significant.

"With finely crafted ethnography, Tsipy Ivry engages her readers in the most intimate of experiences-pregnancy. Research in Japan and Israel reveals how medical knowledge and technologies are made use of differentially in these two locations by both physicians and women to accomplish a remarkably dissimilar embodiment of future motherhood. Ivry's position is that concern about the ramifications of technologically assisted reproduction should not usurp representations of the cultures of pregnancy." -Margaret Lock, author of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death "A fascinating double-ethnography of pregnancy in two cultures. This outstanding book reveals stunning cultural differences in the interpretation of the embodied experience of pregnancy. In spite of their mutual technological sophistication, Japanese and Israeli views on pregnancy could hardly be more different, nor could the biomedical advice that women in each culture receive. Ivry's work takes Brigitte Jordan's analysis of birth in four cultures to a new level, focusing specifically on the cultural influences that profoundly affect both women's and obstetricians' perceptions and management of pregnancy, and deeply demonstrating the influence of culture on biomedical 'science.'" -Robbie Davis-Floyd, author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage With all of the burgeoning social interest in new reproductive technologies and in childbirth, why has pregnancy been forgotten? Isn't pregnancy just as culturally variant as other aspects of reproduction? Embodying Culture looks at pregnancy as much more than just "expecting." Tsipy Ivry juxtaposes pregnancy in two non-western postindustrial democracies, one preoccupied with military conflicts and existential threats (Israel), the other horrified by the graying of society and shrinking birth rates (Japan). Through ethnographic exploration of pregnancy experiences of Japanese and Israeli women and comparative study of ob-gyns and the bioemedical cultures that medicalize pregnancy in divergent ways, Ivry illuminates pregnancy as a meaningful cultural category for social analysis: a first step toward an anthropology of pregnancy. Tsipy Ivry is a lecturer in anthropology at the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. A volume in the Studies in Medical Anthropology series, edited by Mac Marshall

Abject Relations presents an alternative approach to anorexia nervosa, long considered the epitome of a Western obsession with individualism, beauty, self-control, and autonomy. Through detailed ethnographic investigations, Megan Warin looks at the heart of what it means to live with anorexia on a daily basis. Participants describe difficulties with social relatedness, not being at home in their body, and feeling disgusting and worthless. For them, anorexia becomes a seductive and empowering practice that cleanses bodies of shame and guilt, becomes a friend and support, and allows them to forge new social relations. Unraveling anorexia's complex relationships and contradictions, Warin constructs a new theoretical perspective rooted in a socio-cultural context of bodies and gender. Abject Relations departs from conventional psychotherapy approaches and offers a different "logic," one that involves the shifting forces of power, disgust, and desire. It provides new ways of thinking that may have implications for future treatment regimes. Megan Warin is a social anthropologist in the Discipline of Gender, Work, and Social Inquiry at the University of Adelaide. She has previously worked across anthropology, psychiatry, and public health at various institutions, including Durham University, the University of Adelaide, and Flinders University of South Australia. Praise for Abject Relations: "Warin has taken the topic of anorexia, which many of us feel that we know something about, and brilliantly cast a whole new light on it. Through vivid ethnography and evocative prose, she ensures that you won't think about anorexia or those affected by it in quite the same way ever again."-C. H. Browner, UCLA School of Medicine "Anthropologist Megan Warin combines rich multisited ethnographic research on anorexic women's lived experiences with a sophisticated theoretical approach based on concepts of abjection and relatedness to offer fascinating and original insights into anorexia nervosa."-Carole M. Counihan, author of The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power

Many serious public health problems confront the world in the new millennium. Anthropology and Public Health examines the critical role of anthropology in four crucial public health domains: (1) anthropological understandings of public health problems such as malaria, HIV/AIDS, and diabetes; (2) anthropological design of public health interventions in areas such as tobacco control and elder care; (3) anthropological evaluations of public health initiatives such as Safe Motherhood and polio eradication; and (4) anthropological critiques of public health policies, including neoliberal health care reforms. As the volume demonstrates, anthropologists provide crucial understandings of public health problems from the perspectives of the populations in which the problems occur. On the basis of such understandings, anthropologists may develop and implement interventions to address particular public health problems, often working in collaboration with local participants. Anthropologists also work as evaluators, examining the activities of public health institutions and the successes and failures of public health programs. Anthropological critiques may focus on major international public health agencies and their workings, as well as public health responses to the threats of infectious disease and other disasters. Through twenty-four compelling case studies from around the world, the volume provides a powerful argument for the imperative of anthropological perspectives, methods, information, and collaboration in the understanding and practice of public health. Written in plain English, with significant attention to anthropological methodology, the book should be required reading for public health practitioners, medical anthropologists, and health policy makers. It should also be of interest to those in the behavioral and allied health sciences, as well as programs of public health administration, planning, and management. As the single most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of anthropology's role in public health, this volume will inform debates about how to solve the world's most pressing public health problems at a critical moment in human history.

"Deep China" investigates the emotional and moral lives of the Chinese people as they adjust to the challenges of modernity. Sharing a medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry perspective, Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, and Guo Jinhua delve into intimate and sometimes hidden areas of personal life and social practice to observe and narrate the drama of Chinese individualization. The essays explore the remaking of the moral person during China's profound social and economic transformation, unraveling the shifting practices and struggles of contemporary life.

"With finely crafted ethnography, Tsipy Ivry engages her readers in the most intimate of experiences-pregnancy. Research in Japan and Israel reveals how medical knowledge and technologies are made use of differentially in these two locations by both physicians and women to accomplish a remarkably dissimilar embodiment of future motherhood. Ivry's position is that concern about the ramifications of technologically assisted reproduction should not usurp representations of the cultures of pregnancy." -Margaret Lock, author of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death "A fascinating double-ethnography of pregnancy in two cultures. This outstanding book reveals stunning cultural differences in the interpretation of the embodied experience of pregnancy. In spite of their mutual technological sophistication, Japanese and Israeli views on pregnancy could hardly be more different, nor could the biomedical advice that women in each culture receive. Ivry's work takes Brigitte Jordan's analysis of birth in four cultures to a new level, focusing specifically on the cultural influences that profoundly affect both women's and obstetricians' perceptions and management of pregnancy, and deeply demonstrating the influence of culture on biomedical 'science.'" -Robbie Davis-Floyd, author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage With all of the burgeoning social interest in new reproductive technologies and in childbirth, why has pregnancy been forgotten? Isn't pregnancy just as culturally variant as other aspects of reproduction? Embodying Culture looks at pregnancy as much more than just "expecting." Tsipy Ivry juxtaposes pregnancy in two non-western postindustrial democracies, one preoccupied with military conflicts and existential threats (Israel), the other horrified by the graying of society and shrinking birth rates (Japan). Through ethnographic exploration of pregnancy experiences of Japanese and Israeli women and comparative study of ob-gyns and the bioemedical cultures that medicalize pregnancy in divergent ways, Ivry illuminates pregnancy as a meaningful cultural category for social analysis: a first step toward an anthropology of pregnancy. Tsipy Ivry is a lecturer in anthropology at the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. A volume in the Studies in Medical Anthropology series, edited by Mac Marshall

How are we to read and understand stories of Jesus healing the lame, deaf, blind, and those with a variety of other maladies? Pilch takes us beyond the historical and literary questions to examine the social questions of how the earliest followers of Jesus and ancient Judeans understood healing, what roles healers played, and the different emphases on healing among the gospels. In his comparative analysis, the author draws on the anthropology of the Mediterranean as well as the models employed by medical anthropologists to understand peasant societies and their health-care systems.Utilizes social-science modelsFeatures a complementary web- site with additional resources

Like its classic predecessor, "Asian Medical Systems," "Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge" significantly expands the study of Asian medicine. These essays ask how patients and practitioners know what they know--what evidence of disease or health they consider convincing and what cultural traditions and symbols guide their thinking. Whether discussing Japanese anatomy texts, Islamic humoralism, Ayurvedic clinical practice, or a variety of other subjects, the authors offer an exciting range of information and suggest new theoretical avenues for medical anthropology.

An in-depth and wide-ranging approach to the study of older adults in society Taking a holistic approach to the study of aging, this volume uses biological, archaeological, medical, and cultural perspectives to explore how older adults have functioned in societies around the globe and throughout human history. As the world's population over 65 years of age continues to increase, this wide-ranging approach fills a growing need for both academics and service professionals in gerontology, geriatrics, and related fields. Case studies from the United States, Tibet, Turkey, China, Nigeria, and Mexico provide examples of the ways age-related changes are influenced by environmental, genetic, sociocultural, and political-economic variables. Taken together, they help explain how the experience of aging varies across time and space. These contributions from noted anthropological scholars examine evolutionary and biological understandings of human aging, the roles of elders in various societies, issues of gender and ageism, and the role of chronic illness and "successful aging" among older adults. This volume highlights how an anthropology of aging can illustrate how older adults adapt to shifting life circumstances and environments, including changes to the ways in which individuals and families care for them. The research in Anthropological Perspectives on Aging can also help researchers, students, and practitioners reach across disciplines to address age discrimination and help improve health outcomes throughout the life course.

Sumud, meaning steadfastness in Arabic, is central to the issues of survival and resistance that are part of daily life for Palestinians. Although much has been written about the politics, leaders, and history of Palestine, less is known about how everyday working-class Palestinians exist day to day, negotiating military occupation and shifting social infrastructure. Wick's powerful ethnography opens a window onto the lives of Palestinians, exploring specifically the experience of giving birth. Drawing upon oral histories, Wick follows the stories of mothers, nurses, and midwives in villages and refugee camps. She maps the ways in which individuals narrate and experience birth, calling attention to the genre and form of these stories. Placing these oral histories in context, the book looks at the history of the infrastructure surrounding birth and medicine in Palestine, from large hospitals to village clinics, to private homes. As the medical landscape changed from centralized urban hospitals to decentralized independent caregivers, women increasingly carved a space for themselves in public discourse and employed the concept of sumud to relate their everyday struggles.

Sumud, meaning steadfastness in Arabic, is central to the issues of survival and resistance that are part of daily life for Palestinians. Although much has been written about the politics, leaders, and history of Palestine, less is known about how everyday working-class Palestinians exist day to day, negotiating military occupation and shifting social infrastructure. Wick's powerful ethnography opens a window onto the lives of Palestinians, exploring specifically the experience of giving birth. Drawing upon oral histories, Wick follows the stories of mothers, nurses, and midwives in villages and refugee camps. She maps the ways in which individuals narrate and experience birth, calling attention to the genre and form of these stories. Placing these oral histories in context, the book looks at the history of the infrastructure surrounding birth and medicine in Palestine, from large hospitals to village clinics, to private homes. As the medical landscape changed from centralized urban hospitals to decentralized independent caregivers, women increasingly carved a space for themselves in public discourse and employed the concept of sumud to relate their everyday struggles.

Clinical Anthropology 2.0 presents a new approach to applied medical anthropology that engages with clinical spaces, healthcare systems, care delivery and patient experience, public health, as well as the education and training of physicians. In this book, Jason W. Wilson and Robert D. Baer highlight the key role that medical anthropologists can play on interdisciplinary care teams by improving patient experience and medical education. Included throughout are real life examples of this approach, such as the training of medical and anthropology students, creation of clinical pathways, improvement of patient experiences and communication, and design patient-informed interventions. This book includes contributions by Heather Henderson, Emily Holbrook, Kilian Kelly, Carlos Osorno-Cruz, and Seiichi Villalona.

In this widely-praised study, Carol Laderman provides a vivid picture of the daily life of rural Malays as she focuses on their dietary practices and the ritual and medical aspects of childbirth procedures. Apprenticed to a village midwife and a local shaman, she was able to observe a traditional culture adapting to modern practices.

AIDS. Ebola. "Killer microbes." All around us the alarms are going off, warning of the danger of new, deadly diseases. And yet, as Nancy Tomes reminds us in her absorbing book, this is really nothing new. A remarkable work of medical and cultural history, The Gospel of Germs takes us back to the first great "germ panic" in American history, which peaked in the early 1900s, to explore the origins of our modern disease consciousness. Little more than a hundred years ago, ordinary Americans had no idea that many deadly ailments were the work of microorganisms, let alone that their own behavior spread such diseases. The Gospel of Germs shows how the revolutionary findings of late nineteenth-century bacteriology made their way from the laboratory to the lavatory and kitchen, with public health reformers spreading the word and women taking up the battle on the domestic front. Drawing on a wealth of advice books, patent applications, advertisements, and oral histories, Tomes traces the new awareness of the microbe as it radiated outward from middle-class homes into the world of American business and crossed the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Just as we take some of the weapons in this germ war for granted--fixtures as familiar as the white porcelain toilet, the window screen, the refrigerator, and the vacuum cleaner--so we rarely think of the drastic measures deployed against disease in the dangerous old days before antibiotics. But, as Tomes notes, many of the hygiene rules first popularized in those days remain the foundation of infectious disease control today. Her work offers a timely look into the history of our long-standing obsession with germs, its impact on twentieth-century culture and society, and its troubling new relevance to our own lives.

Psychiatric Encounters presents an intimate portrait of a public inpatient psychiatric facility in the Southeastern state of Yucatan, Mexico. The book explores the experiences of patients and psychiatrists as they navigate the challenges of public psychiatric care in Mexico. While international reports condemning conditions in Mexican psychiatric institutions abound, Psychiatric Encounters considers the large- and small-scale obstacles to quality care encountered by doctors and patients alike as they struggle to live and act like human beings under inhumane conditions. Beatriz Mireya Reyes-Foster closely examines the impact of the Mexican state's neoliberal health reforms on how patients access care and doctors perform their duties. Engaging with madness, modernity, and identity, Psychiatric Encounters considers the enduring role of colonialism in the context of Mexico's troubled contemporary mental health care institutions.

More than ten million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition globally each year. In Uganda, longstanding efforts to understand, treat, and then prevent the condition initially served to medicalize it, in the eyes of both biomedical personnel and Ugandans who brought their children to the hospital for treatment and care. Medicalization meant malnutrition came to be seen as a disease-as a medical emergency-not a preventable condition, further compromising nutritional health in Uganda. Rather than rely on a foreign-led model, physicians in Uganda responded to this failure by developing a novel public health program known as Mwanamugimu. The new approach prioritized local expertise and empowering Ugandan women, blending biomedical knowledge with African sensibilities and cultural competencies. In The Riddle of Malnutrition, Jennifer Tappan examines how over the course of half a century Mwanamugimu tackled the most fatal form of childhood malnutrition-kwashiorkor-and promoted nutritional health in the midst of postcolonial violence, political upheaval, and neoliberal resource constraints. She draws on a diverse array of sources to illuminate the interplay between colonialism, the production of scientific knowledge, and the delivery of health services in contemporary Africa.