Introduction
Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay (2018) is a masterful undertaking on the anthropology of disaster and its everydayness. An ethnographic portrayal that is prismatic in its attention, the book combines numerous elements––place, civic performance, history, political economy––to bear on the lead poisoning epidemic in Montevideo, Uruguay at the turn of the 21st…
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 …
The UNAIDS mission of “Getting to Zero” is supported by three key goals: “Zero infections. Zero deaths. Zero stigma.” By taking up this mission, the San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH) increased its dedication to ending the epidemic. DPH aims to realize these goals by expanding access to PrEP, ensuring RAPID (Rapid ART Program for HIV Diagnoses) linkage to …
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 …