Encountering PrEP
I became interested in PrEP as an object of anthropological research on the L train between 1st and 3rd Avenues in Manhattan. It was the summer of 2014 and the global AIDS industry was humming with renewed biomedical triumphalism, hailing ‘the end of AIDS’ some argued PrEP and other scientific advances had made attainable (Kenworthy, Thomann, …
Introduction
Power is in the air we breathe, and no matter where we are there are always individuals with more power over others. In “An anthropology of structural violence” Paul Farmer (2004) famously described the ways systems of power operate to produce structural inequalities and forms of violence inherent within. Farmer defines structural violence as “the experience of people who …
Epilepsy is a chronic illness and disability characterized by recurrent, unpredictable seizures. Epileptic seizures are transient events during which people lose control over all or parts of body-mind function. This can result in the rhythmic twisting of a person’s wrist, sudden inexplicable feelings of joy, or involuntary spasms of the whole body. Since antiquity, epilepsy has occupied healers, philosophers, physicians, …
Introduction
…“I‘d been trying to get PrEP through my physician at the time, and …I had to print up all these studies and all the prescription information because my doctor was like, ‘Well, you don’t have HIV.’ And I’m like, ‘I know. That’s the point. I don’t want to get it.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, [Truvada] is not for that.’
This Somatosphere forum features essays written in the wake of a debate held at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. The debate was organized around the following motion: “Lacking empirical traction and heuristic power, the distinction between life and nonlife is one that anthropology needs to discard.” We hope …
‘Do no harm’ is the first principle in both research ethics and bioethics, conveying an inherent ambiguity in the biomedical imperative to create healthier and longer human lives. As such, both medical intervention and research have always straddled the delicate border between care and violence, exposing how doing good can be easily transformed into or confused with doing harm. This …