Tag Archives: Medical Anthropology

Lectures

Ethnomedicinal Practices and Behavioral Changes During Deadly Disease Outbreaks: A Commentary and Lesson from Cameroon

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In mid-2014, six months after the death of patient zero, the two-year-old boy in the village of Meliandou in Guinea, there were frequent reports of Ebola spikes across Guinea and beyond other parts of West Africa. I had just defended my PhD and soon after was accepted for a postdoctoral fellowship at Rhodes University, South Africa for the following year. In …

Lectures

Paying attention: Diagnosis, values, and meaning-making in the ADHD clinic

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Attention, as you know, is the basic faculty, the mother faculty of what we commonly call intelligence. Those who play a role in education must, above all, provoke and capture that attention.
Costa Ferreira, 1920: 140

In this lecture addressed to primary school teachers, the founder of the Portuguese school of medical pedagogy, Costa Ferreira, called “attention” the mother of …

Lectures

Staying (at Home) with Brain Fog: “Un-witting” Patient Activism

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Scene 1: It’s Sunday afternoon, around one o’clock, and a group of a dozen or so people log onto a video call from their apartments. Occasionally someone’s cat will walk into the frame, obscuring the camera, or a deliveryman will ring the buzzer, interrupting the flow of conversation. But mostly, what we see of each other are scenes of domestic …

Lectures

Chemical Sensitivity

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Sitting at a table in his home in Snowflake, Arizona, Steen reads a book encased in a clear, plastic box. The front of the box is fitted with two holes to which latex gloves have been attached. Steen inserts his hands into these gloves and demonstrates how he turns the book’s pages using wooden pencils inside the box. When asked …

Lectures

Epistemic and Temporal Disjunctions: (Re)Mapping “Suicide Risk” Epigenetics Through Birth Cohorts

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The McGill Group for Suicide Studies (MGSS) has garnered significant attention for its epigenetic models of suicide risk. These models suggest that early life adversity may set people on pathways of neurobiological vulnerability and, ultimately, suicide risk, which are correlated with distinctive epigenetic traits. While the core of this epigenetic and neuroscientific research is carried out on the donated brains …

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Working Definitions: Making and Unmaking “Medical Anthropology” around the World

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Somatosphere Special Series – Call for Contributions

Editors: Professor Paschal Kum Awah (Chair, Anthropology, University of Yaoundé I) and Elizabeth Durham (PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Princeton University)

Anthropology’s interest in health, illness, prevention, and treatment is longstanding and increasingly robust. In this era of medical development, epidemics and pandemics, and debates in both the oft-called “Global North” and “Global South” over …