The American Anthropological Association website identifies four subfields of anthropology (archaeology, biological, cultural, linguistic) and reserves a separate section for “applied and practicing anthropology.” In our collective experience, we have found this division between ostensibly “academic” and “applied” anthropology problematic, as it limits the possibilities of a broadly conceptualized and enacted medical anthropology that is more continuous than categorical. We …
Author Archives: Ellen Rubinstein
This article is part of the series: Working Definitions: Making and Unmaking “Medical Anthropology” around the World
Laura L. Heinemann’s Transplanting Care
Transplanting Care: Shifting Commitments in Health and Care in the U.S.
Rutgers University Press, 186 pp.
Heinemann’s work eschews the dramatic moment of transplant surgery in favor of detailing the transplant process as it occurs across space and time, always intertwined within the rhythms and realities of everyday life. Based on 24 nonconsecutive months of fieldwork …
Neely Laurenzo Myers’ Recovery’s Edge: An Ethnography of Mental Health Care and Moral Agency
Recovery’s Edge: An Ethnography of Mental Health Care and Moral Agency
Vanderbilt University Press, 2015, 192 pages
“RECOVERY! GET IT, GET OVER IT, OR GET OUT!!!” –Vera
Neely Myers’s beautifully written ethnography is a detailed look at one organization’s attempt to follow the Bush Administration’s 2004 unfunded mandate to make mental health care services …