The scale and severity of the coronavirus pandemic is a shock to health systems. It is a shock to economies and governments. It is also a shock to the life sciences, which were meant to anticipate a pandemic of this magnitude, but failed to do so. The “life sciences” in question are virology, epidemiology, biomedicine and pharmacology. But the social, …
While conducting research in India during the summer of 2019 for my book on cochlear implantation, I kept on coming across an interesting object: a small cardboard office supply holder shaped like a yellow and black ambulance on which it is written on the side, top, and back in block capital letters: “HEARING LOSS IS AN EMERGENCY” and “ACT NOW” …
Sugar and Tension: Diabetes in Modern India
Rutgers University Press, 2019. 202 pages.
Sugar and Tension is a must-read for anyone interested in how social constructions of gender influence the physical and mental health of individuals living with diabetes. Lesley Jo Weaver, a biocultural medical anthropologist with degrees in global health and in medical anthropology, presents case …
Introduction
Power is in the air we breathe, and no matter where we are there are always individuals with more power over others. In “An anthropology of structural violence” Paul Farmer (2004) famously described the ways systems of power operate to produce structural inequalities and forms of violence inherent within. Farmer defines structural violence as “the experience of people who …
Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909. (Open Access).
Cambridge University Press, 2017. 332 pages.
Malaria has long garnered no shortage of interest among global health experts and the medical anthropologists periodically at their sides. The sustained concern owes in one part to the fact that malaria remains a major threat, and in …
On a sunny, stifling afternoon, my friend, an Ayurvedic doctor, ushers me into a scantily furnished examining room of his clinic in central Kerala, South India. There, a small, stout woman sits on a chair. Her name is Mercy.1 She is wearing a salwar kameez, an outfit comprising of a long shirt, baggy pants and a scarf, rather …