New Horizons in Medical Anthropology is a festschrift in honor of Charles Leslie whose influential career helped shape this subfield of anthropology. This collection of cutting-edge essays explores medical innovation and medical pluralism at the turn of the 21st century. The book accomplishes two things: it reflects recent research by medical anthropologists working in Asia who have been inspired by Charles Leslie's writing on such topics as medical pluralism and the early emergence of what has become a globalized biomedicine, the social relations of therapy management, and the relationship between the politics of the state and discourse about the health of populations, illness, and medicine. The book also takes up lesser known aspects of Leslie's work: his contribution as an editor and the role he played in carrying the field forward; his ethics as a medical anthropologist committed to humanism and sensitive to racism and eugenics; and the passion he inspired in his co-workers and students.
Charles Leslie is a remarkable and influential social scientist. New Horizons in Medical Anthropology is a fitting tribute to a sensitive scholar whose theories and codes of practice provide an essential guide to future generations of medical anthropologists.

Contents:
1. Introduction - From documenting medical pluralism to critical interpretations of globalized health knowledge, policies, and practices Mark Nichter and Margaret Lock 2. Governing bodies in new order Indonesia Steve Ferzacca 3. Too bold, too hot: Crossing 'culture' in AIDS prevention in Nepal Stacy Leigh Pigg 4. The social relations of therapy management Mark Nichter 5.Making sense out of modernity Marina Roseman 6. A return to scientific racism in medical social sciences: the case of sexuality and the AIDS epidemic in Africa Gilles Bibeau and Duncan Pedersen 7. 'We five, our twenty-five': Myths of population out of control in contemporary India Patricia Jeffrey and Roger Jeffrey 8. Establishing proof: translating 'science' and the state in Tibetan medicine Vincanne Adams 9. Notes on the evolution of evolutionary psychiatry Allan Young 10. Utopias of health, eugenics, and germline engineering Margaret Lock 11. Killing and healing revisited: on cultural difference, warfare, and sacrifice Margaret Trawick

This stimulating collection of essays, a product of a dialogue among anthropologists, sociologists, and philosopher-historians, focuses on the newly created biomedical technologies and their practical applications. Drawing on ethnographic and historical case studies, the authors show how biomedical technologies are produced through the agencies of tools and techniques, scientists and doctors, funding bodies, patients, and the public. Despite shared concerns, the authors achieve no consensus about their research objectives, and deep epistemological divides clearly remain, making for provocative reading.

This thought-provoking volume explores women's responses to medical issues and technologies, from infertility in East Africa to prenatal screening in America. It also addresses wider themes, including the emergence of the breast cancer movement, and reactions to environmental hazards. In a series of accessible case studies, the contributors show that women react pragmatically to medical technology, with responses ranging from acceptance to resistance to indifference. This book will be a key text in medical anthropology and women's studies.

Because of rapidly aging populations, the number of people worldwide experiencing dementia is increasing and the projections are grim. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars invested in medical research, no effective treatment has been discovered for Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia. "The Alzheimer Conundrum" exposes the predicaments embedded in current efforts to slow down or halt Alzheimer's disease through early detection of presymptomatic biological changes in healthy individuals.

Based on a careful study of the history of Alzheimer's disease and extensive in-depth interviews with clinicians, scientists, epidemiologists, geneticists, and others, Margaret Lock highlights the limitations and the dissent implicated in this approach. She stresses that one major difficulty is the well-documented absence of behavioral signs of Alzheimer's disease in a significant proportion of elderly individuals, even when Alzheimer neuropathology is present in their brains. This incongruity makes it difficult to distinguish between what counts as normal versus pathological and, further, makes it evident that social and biological processes contribute inseparably to aging. Lock argues that basic research must continue, but it should be complemented by a realistic public health approach available everywhere that will be more effective and more humane than one focused almost exclusively on an increasingly frenzied search for a cure.

Due to rapidly aging populations, the number of people worldwide experiencing dementia is increasing, and the projections are grim. Despite billions of dollars invested in medical research, no effective treatment has been discovered for Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia. The Alzheimer Conundrum exposes the predicaments embedded in current efforts to slow down or halt Alzheimer's disease through early detection of pre-symptomatic biological changes in healthy individuals. Based on a meticulous account of the history of Alzheimer's disease and extensive in-depth interviews, Margaret Lock highlights the limitations and the dissent associated with biomarker detection. Lock argues that basic research must continue, but should be complemented by a public health approach to prevention that is economically feasible, more humane, and much more effective globally than one exclusively focused on an increasingly harried search for a cure.

Over the past several decades, scholars in both the social sciences and humanities have moved beyond the idea that there is a "body proper": a singular, discrete biological organism with an individual psyche. They have begun to perceive embodiment as dynamic rather than static, as experiences that vary over time and across the world as they are shaped by discourses, institutions, practices, technologies, and ideologies. What has emerged is a multiplicity of bodies, inviting a great many disciplinary points of view and modes of interpretation. The forty-seven readings presented in this volume range from classic works of social theory, history, and ethnography to more recent investigations into historical and contemporary modes of embodiment.Beyond the Body Proper includes nine sections conceptually organized around themes such as everyday life, sex and gender, and science. Each section is preceded by interpretive commentary by the volume's editors. Within the collection are articles and book excerpts focused on bodies using tools and participating in rituals, on bodies walking and eating, and on the female circumcision controversy, as well as pieces on medical classifications, spirit possession, the commodification of body parts, in vitro fertilization, and an artist/anatomist's "plastination" of cadavers for display. Materialist, phenomenological, and feminist perspectives on embodiment appear along with writings on interpretations of pain and the changing meanings of sexual intercourse. Essays on these topics and many others challenge Eurocentric assumptions about the body as they speak to each other and to the most influential contemporary trends in the human sciences. With selections by: Henry Abelove, Walter Benjamin, Janice Boddy, John Boswell, Judith Butler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Stuart Cosgrove, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze, Alice Domurat Dreger, Barbara Duden, Friedrich Engels, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Judith Farquhar, Marcel Granet, Felix Guattari, Ian Hacking, Robert Hertz, Patricia Leyland Kaufert, Arthur Kleinman, Shigehisa Kuriyama, Jean Langford, Bruno Latour, Margaret Lock, Emily Martin, Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nancy K. Miller, Lisa Jean Moore, John D. O'Neil, Aihwa Ong, Mariella Pandolfi, Susan Pedersen, Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Rayna Rapp, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Kristofer Schipper, Matthew Schmidt, Peter Stallybrass, Michael Taussig, Charis Thompson, E.P. Thompson, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Victor Turner, Terence Turner, Jose van Dijck, Keith Wailoo, Brad Weiss, Allon White

"Social suffering" takes in the human consequences of war, famine, depression, disease, torture--the whole assemblage of human problems that result from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people--and also human responses to social problems as they are influenced by those forms of power. In the same way that the notion of social suffering breaks down boundaries between specific scholarly disciplines, this cross-disciplinary investigation allows us to see the twentieth century in a new frame, with new emphases.
Anthropologists, historians, literary theorists, social medicine experts, and scholars engaged in the study of religion join together to investigate the cultural representations, collective experiences, and professional and popular appropriations of human suffering in the world today. These authors contest traditional research and policy approaches. Recognizing that neither the cultural resources of tradition nor those of modernity's various programs seem adequate to cope with social suffering in our times, they base their distinctive vision on the understanding that moral, political, and medical issues cannot be kept separate.

This thought-provoking volume compares the responses of women in a variety of countries and cultural settings to modern medical technologies. The contributors describe how women in East Africa deal with infertility, how American women respond to pre-natal diagnostic screening, how women in China and Japan choose to make use of reproductive technologies. The essays also explore wider themes, such as the emergence of the breast cancer movement, and how women confront environmental hazards which threaten them and their families. It is often assumed that women are passive in the face of biomedical technology, but this book shows that they make pragmatic choices, with responses ranging from acceptance to rejection or indifference. The reception of biomedical technology is situated in its local cultural contexts, and vital issues of women's health are related to political and ethnic concerns.

This stimulating collection of essays, a product of a dialogue among anthropologists, sociologists, and philosopher-historians, focuses on the newly created biomedical technologies and their practical applications. Drawing on ethnographic and historical case studies, the authors show how biomedical technologies are produced through the agencies of tools and techniques, scientists and doctors, funding bodies, patients, and the public. Despite shared concerns, the authors achieve no consensus about their research objectives, and deep epistemological divides clearly remain, making for provocative reading.