On a sunny, stifling afternoon, my friend, an Ayurvedic doctor, ushers me into a scantily furnished examining room of his clinic in central Kerala, South India. There, a small, stout woman sits on a chair. Her name is Mercy.1 She is wearing a salwar kameez, an outfit comprising of a long shirt, baggy pants and a scarf, rather …
Author Archives: Tanja Ahlin
Bianca Brijnath’s “Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India”
Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India
by Bianca Brijnath
Berghahn Books, 2014, 240 pages
Bianca Brijnath’s book, Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India, offers a long-awaited, fresh insight into the lives and experiences of people with dementia and their caregivers in middle-class, middle-aged, educated Delhi-based families. Using the lens of critical …
Ontology as an analytical approach to concerns of medical anthropology
What might arise from an encounter between medical anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) as they investigate the common subject of health and (bio)medicine? One answer could be found at the panel Repositioning health, illness and the body: the challenge of new theoretical approaches to medical anthropology, organized by Simon Cohn and Rebecca Lynch at ASA[1] decennial …