As if it were not challenging enough during the “normal emergencies” [1] of the United States-led War on Drugs, research and advocacy for sane drug policies becomes even more complicated during a global pandemic.
COVID-19 has exposed the deep and enduring health and social inequities that mark our biopolitical moment, and the punitive ways that we govern people who use …
Field hospital constructed in Gothenburg, Sweden in March 2020. Photo: Helén Sjöland.While reading Giorgio Agamben’s (2020) anthropological note on the “danger” of habituation of Italians to bare life under a state of exception invoked in the name of an allegedly “manufactured” crisis, what comes to our minds – also within the broader context of the pandemic and its …
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 …
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 …
The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
Duke University Press, 2017. 296 pages.
Jasbir Puar’s second book, The Right to Maim, examines the relationship between life, debility, and death. On a spectrum between life and death, according to Puar, there is the production of the “living dead, death worlds, necropolitics, slow death, and life itself”—this is …
Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 224 pages.
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When Michelle Obama launched the “Let’s Move” campaign in 2010, it triggered a backlash by conservatives anxious about the so called “nanny state” interfering unduly in the private sphere. The campaign was a national initiative “dedicated …
