For those of us in the U.S. who read the Liberal News Media, September began with a bang that reverberated loudly, if anonymously, around the Internet. Well, the bang had a source, but the source of that source requested not to be identified. A few weeks ago, The New York Times published an Op-Ed essay written by a senior official …
Author Archives: Talia Gordon
Web Roundup: Annals of Injury and Dispossession
In a 2013 essay in American Anthropologist, Andrea Muehlebach summarized the concept of “precarity” as “a shorthand for…the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails.” Indeed, the last month has seen a collection of events, acute and ongoing, that characterize the precariousness of the historical present. In the U.S., July 26 marked the court-imposed deadline …
A Conversation with Paul Brodwin
Paul Brodwin is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Adjunct Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He is the author of Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Contest for Healing Power (Cambridge U Press, 1996), editor of Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (Indiana U Press, 2000) and coeditor of Pain …
Book review – Rachel Prentice’s Bodies in Formation
Bodies in Formation: An Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery Education
Duke University Press, 2012
312 pp., US$24.95 paperback
The relationship between medicine and technology is long well established; indeed, the interconnectedness of the two worlds has shaped scientific knowledge and practice for centuries. Particularly in the realm of surgery, the inextricability of technology from medical practice …