Water, Secularism, and Love are the themes of Cultural Anthropology‘s November Issue.  Of special interest to the Somatosphere readership might be the theme of secularism under which Charles Hirschkind looks to explore and develop secularism and the ways in which it is reflected as affect and in embodiment in Is There A Secular Body?  while Talal Asad examines the embodied subjectivities induced by the painful body as they relate to the secular body and the implications of the secular body for a Democratic body politic in Thinking About the Secular Body, Pain, and Liberal Politics.

In Social Science and Medicine, Michelle Kelly-Irving et al. ask how patients’ education levels affected general practicioners estimation of the patients health status, and Liang Liu et al. explore the roles of relationship insecurity and somatization, and Ping Sun et al. examine the relationship between self-perceived income inequality and health outcomes of youth in urban China.

Stephen Timmons and Linda East analyze the tensions between organizational and professional allegiances as mediated through a hospital’s newly required uniform policy in Uniforms, Status, and Professional Bourdaries in Hospital for Sociology of Health & Illness.  In the same journal, Alan Dolan and Christine Coe draw on qualitative research of first-time fathers and health care professionals to see the relationship between masculinity and the marginalization of men in pregnancy and childbirth in Men, Masculine Identities, and Childbirth.   Also of note, Richard Tutton and Barbara Prainsack examine 23andMe, a direct-to-consumer personal genomics company that offers genetic testing services to paying clients while also using data obtained from these clients for research purposes, and explore the ‘enterprising’ and ‘altruistic’ subjectivities formed with this type of research and business model.

Mauro C. Balieiro et al., Jason A. Nieuwsma et al., Loganathan and Murthy, Guzder, and Brijnath all focus on diverse topics such as depression, suicide, dementia, and schizophrenia in India while James Mugisha et al. focus on suicide in Baganda, Uganda, Joseph Osafo et al. examine suidical behavior in Ghana qualitatively, and Ria Borra analyzes depressive disorder among Turkish women all in Transcultural Psychiatry.

In Psychosomatic Medicine, Marta Jackowska et al. look at subjective and objective discrepencies in sleep evaluation  reports and measures, and James A. McCubbin et al. examine the relationship between emotion recognition and blood pressure.  James M. Ussher et al. explore the relationship dynamics between primary informal carers and the people with cancer for whom they care in Health while  L.C. Hydén and Eleonor Antelius conclude that the notion of narrative should be reconsidered objectively and methodologically while studying people with communicative disability.

Anthony R. Henderson and May M.L. Lam et al. both examine the concept of recovery from mental illness inseparate articles in the International Journal of Social Psychology, while Elke Driller et al. studied the relationship between emotional exhaustion in hospitals versus the amount of social capital of clinicians within a hospital setting.

Don’t forget to check out Social Theory and Medicine, which presents a series of interesting articles that examine how health status and well-being are affected by societal change, and the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, which features a wide range of spectacular articles.