In the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, Andrea Pieroni and Maria Elena Giusti conducted a medical ethnobotanical study of the Occitan communities in Italy, titled “Alpine ethnobotany in Italy: traditional knowledge of gastronomic and medicinal plants among the Occitans of the upper Varaita valley, Piedmont“.

Istav Praet examines shamanic-curing-as-metamorphosis in Northern Ecuador in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in an article titled “Shamanism and ritual in South America: an inquiry into Amerindian shape-shifting“.

In Cultural Anthropology, Julie Livingston looks to Botswana’s middle and aspirational classes in order to examine the conceptualization of risk, investment, and self-determination. She concludes her essay by examining these concepts within the contexts of a cancer ward. Jean M. Langford analyzes the reciprocity between the living and the dead in “Gifts Intercepted: Biopolitics and Spirit Debt“.

In this month’s issue of the International Journal of Social Psychiatry, we find many pertinent studies of mental health, including its relationship with migrants in non-Western contexts and social networks in inpatient and day care settings.

Among many relevant articles, Rhona O’Connell and Soo Downe conducted a metasynthesis of midwifery and Hans Hadders examines the interplay between perceptions of death and life sustaining medical technologies in this month’s issue of Health.