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 …
Category Archives: Lectures
Suffering, Agency, and the Value of Early and Late Life
‘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 …
“Zero infections. Zero deaths. Zero stigma.”
This article is part of the series: A 'Critically Applied' Approach to PrEP
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 …
Global mental health videos
McGill University’s Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, which hosted a conference this summer on global mental health, has started a blog and posted several video interviews with participants from the conference. These are excellent short summaries of particular issues or positions around global mental health, which could very readily be used in a teaching context. In the …
Laurence Kirmayer, “Revisioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience, and Global Mental Health”
In late October my department (Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago) hosted a talk by Laurence Kirmayer of McGill University. I’m pleased to present the full video of the lecture here. The talk, titled “Revisioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience, and Global Mental Health,” is a broad and synthetic overview of Dr. Kirmayer’s thinking on psychiatry and mental …
The Culture, Mind and Brain Conference and Tanya Luhrmann on “Hearing Voices in Accra and Chennai”
This past Friday and Saturday the Foundation for Psychocultural Research held its Fifth interdisciplinary conference on Culture, Mind and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications. I’m sad to have missed it, as it was clearly a very exciting event, bringing together key researchers from neuroscience, biocultural anthropology, cultural psychology, behavioral biology and other disciplines to discuss — in very concrete …