Over the last decade, indigenous Marind communities in the rural district of Merauke, West Papua, have seen vast swaths of their forests and savannas razed to make way for monocrop oil palm plantations. These developments are promoted by the Indonesian government as part of efforts to achieve national self-sufficiency in basic commodities, including palm oil, sugar, and rice. On the …
Category Archives: Features
How Medicare For All Challenges our Ideas of Black Deservingness
The contemporary debate over healthcare in the United States revolves around an unstated but somewhat widely understood notion of what people deserve. The question of “deservingness” is particularly important when we hone in on the demographics of the American populace and think critically about who is currently underserved by the current medical system in the U.S., and who stands …
Banking on Human Milk Exchange Relations
Recognizing the work people perform to help others is an important part of any definition of a social good. In the case of donor human milk, there is a particular need to recognize the unnamed mothers who literally donate of themselves to make this invaluable health provision possible. These women are drawn from all across the UK and, as they …
Book Forum: Tomas Matza’s Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia
This article is part of the series: Book forum
In Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia (Duke University Press, 2018), Tomas Matza traces the landscape of “psy” disciplines, practices, and institutions across postsocialist Saint Petersburg. Writing with a distinctive conceptual subtlety and care, Matza pushes beyond a range of well-established interpretations to examine the multiple ways in which psychotherapy has provided tools for people to understand …
Book Forum: Crystal (Cal) Biruk’s Cooking Data, Ramah McKay’s Medicine in the Meantime, and Noémi Tousignant’s Edges of Exposure
This article is part of the series: Book forum
In this book forum, we review three ethnographies of critical global health – Crystal (Cal) Biruk’s Cooking Data, Ramah McKay’s Medicine in the Meantime, and Noémi Tousignant’s Edges of Exposure – and ask the authors to reflect on the nature of labor, the public-private, and race in critical global health, as well as the future of the field. …
Veracity: A Triptych
Angela was angry—even now, when I listen to the audio recording, I can hear the bitterness in her voice. We sat in the conference room of the public library near her home, where we had met for a formal interview, and she detailed the reasons for her anger, starting right in even before I had turned on the recorder, such …