In the small municipal hospital in the Bolivian highland town of Machacamarca (a pseudonym), the chilly air of the Andes seeps into the building, traveling through the thin walls and tile floors. The delivery room, situated next to the surgery ward, is especially cold; the air makes the metal gurney sitting in the middle of the room icy to the …
How and with what consequences do young people push up against standardized views of “normal” and “healthy” development? To what extent can young people’s attempts to disrupt developmental norms be understood as political acts? I became intrigued by these questions while conducting long-term ethnographic research with a subset of young participants in the 1982 birth cohort study in Pelotas, Southern …
The first thing you see from the highway is a massive building. The Hospital is simply enormous. In front of the Hospital plaza is a roundabout. In the center of the roundabout, a big flag of Argentina flies high: the white and light blue stripes encase the symbol of the smiling sun, moving in the wind on some days and …
This blog post is a teaser for a longer article to be published in vol 41, issue 2 of the Journal of Anthropology and Aging in November 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented us with a unique opportunity to examine how societies perceive urgent biological risk, and how they manage population groups who may be susceptible to such risks (cf. …
Since COVID-19 has come to haunt the globe, hospitals in all their guises have featured centrally in the pandemic response. As the flagships of health systems, hospitals have rapidly become the primary locus of medical care for COVID-19. They provide staff and beds for acute medical care; they can be rapidly deployed in the form of military field hospitals, mobile …
For some time now, I have been volunteering at a local mental health clinic known as Foundry. One of the activities I have become involved in at the clinic is a weekly drop-in arts therapy group for clients. As part of my volunteer work, I have been shadowing Noriko, one of Foundry’s staff, in order to learn how to facilitate …