It is 11 am in Vancouver. Danya sits at a desk beside a large window that looks out onto tree tops and electrical wires. Rain pools in the gutters and on sidewalks, and everything is shades of grey and green. In Winnipeg, it is 1 pm. Rob is behind his laptop and surrounded by stacks of papers and books. He …
The American Anthropological Association website identifies four subfields of anthropology (archaeology, biological, cultural, linguistic) and reserves a separate section for “applied and practicing anthropology.” In our collective experience, we have found this division between ostensibly “academic” and “applied” anthropology problematic, as it limits the possibilities of a broadly conceptualized and enacted medical anthropology that is more continuous than categorical. We …
Figure 1: Janelle’s chair, with writing and knitting projects underwayThe conversation began on a summer day in a 13th Century chateau, with a moat, on the outskirts of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Janelle Taylor was leading a writing workshop with Jeremy Greene and Rachel Prentice, as part of a larger event for the ERC-funded project Making Clinical …
As members of Somatosphere’s Editorial Collaborative, we have been following the unfolding crisis surrounding Hau with profound concern (Agro 2018, Flaherty 2018). As others have noted, this crisis has revealed multiple structural issues that deserve intense engagement beyond the specifics of the individual case: open-access (OA), digital scholarship and publication, yes, but also academic power, precarity, and vulnerability; …
Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa
Paul Wenzel Geissler, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, and Noémi Tousignant, editors
Intellect Ltd./University of Chicago Press, 2016, 256 pages, 500 color plates
The first reaction to an encounter with Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa is likely to be …
Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastructure and Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital
by Alice Street
Duke University Press, 2014, 204 pages
Social anthropologist Alice Street’s first book is a sensitive ethnography of personhood and recognition in Madang Hospital, an under-resourced provincial hospital in Papua New Guinea. The book shows how doctors, nurses, and patients endeavor to make …