God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes
University of California Press, 2012, 273 pp.
In God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes, Elizabeth Roberts examines how science and spirituality are connected in the practice of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Ecuador. This alone is a significant contribution to the anthropology of assisted reproduction, …
Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba
Duke University Press, 2012
288 pgs., US $24.95 (paperback)
Reviewed by Amy Cooper (University of Chicago)
In Revolutionary Medicine, P. Sean Brotherton presents a rich ethnographic analysis of health and medicine in Cuba since the late 1990s, examining state medical institutions, the everyday practices of doctors, …
The most recent edition of Medical Anthropology features work by Somatosphere contributor Stephanie Lloyd and Nicolas Moreau that explores the meanings of symptom reduction and ‘normalcy’ for people treated for anxiety disorders. They situate patients’ frustrated expectations for an ‘ideal self’ within a broader cultural context in which the desire to achieve an ever-elusive ‘ideal self’ is widespread. Bianca …
American Ethnologist
This issue features an article by Kabir Tambar who analyzes the cultivation of devotional emotion and moral experience among members of a Muslim community in Turkey (485). There are also book reviews of When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects by Adriana Petryna, Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of …