It was a sunny Tuesday morning, at the beginning of March 2020. The dirt pétanque field in a Catalan coastal town was filled with English chatter about golf, gardening and the occasional Brexit reference. A new topic had infiltrated the conversation: COVID-19. As a group of British retirees living in Spain, most of the players were in their late 60’s …
Tag Archives: Class
Gun Cultures Reflect Broader Changes in American Society
Author’s Note: I originally wrote this article for my institution’s student-run literary magazine after the Parkland shooting. Our little community was engaged in passionate debate about “gun culture” and I had long wanted to write on the issue given my socialization and scholarship. This essay is an attempt to examine my own family’s social dynamics relative to larger societal shifts. …
Pharmaceutical Prosthesis and White Racial Rescue in the Prescription Opioid “Epidemic”
Introduction
A U.S. public discourse of addiction as a disabling psychiatric condition (as opposed to a moral flaw or social deviancy) was codified into Social Security policy in 1972, following its emergence in post-war clinical science and popular media (Conrad & Schneider, 1980; Duster, 1970). In recent years, this discourse has taken divergent forms in policy and media debates surrounding …
Remaking Local Biologies in an Epigenetic Time
Premise and Summary
This is a very provisional text,[1] part of a broader book-length research (forthcoming from Palgrave in 2015) on ‘political epistemology’, a construct I use to investigate the coproduction of epistemological facts and socio-political values in the history of the life-sciences (e.g.: how certain views of heredity, development, nature/nurture potentially favor certain political values and …
Elizabeth Roberts’ God’s Laboratory
God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes
University of California Press, 2012, 273 pp.
In God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes, Elizabeth Roberts examines how science and spirituality are connected in the practice of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Ecuador. This alone is a significant contribution to the anthropology of assisted reproduction, …
Invisible Interlocutors and the Savage Slot: Conversations at “Medicine on the Edge”
Michel-Rolph Trouillot was present as a kind of invisible interlocutor at the “Medicine on the Edge” workshop held at UC Santa Cruz in early May of this year. (You can read my first post about the workshop here). Trouillot may seem like an unlikely interlocutor for a room full of (mostly) medical anthropologists and STS scholars, and …