This essay is about paying respect. In 2018, after my first summer of preliminary fieldwork in the Artibonite region of Haiti, I returned disappointed and disillusioned. With the intention of studying local health related issues in the port city of Saint-Marc, the projects that were seemingly possible for me were ones I wanted to avoid. As a typical graduate student, …
Tag Archives: the state
From women to women: building the state response to the Zika epidemic in Brazil
For English, click here.
De mulher para mulher: construindo a resposta do estado à epidemia de Zika no Brasil
‘Minha vida era uma antes e outra depois da Zika’, disse Dra. Celina Turchi em uma conferência em Recife. Ela liderava o grupo que comprovou a relação causal entre o vírus da Zika e o aumento dos casos de microcefalia …
Scholarly Stretching and Meta-Ethnography in the Medico-Legal Borderlands
We met some years back at a scholarly conference where we were both presenting papers on a common theme: health care in the service of the law. We bonded over our shared academic interest in Stefan Timmermans and Jonathan Gabe’s (2002) “medico-legal borderlands” framework. As we came to realize, our research agendas were both conceptually situated within ‘borderland’ spaces. We …
Omar Dewachi’s Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq
Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq
Stanford University Press, 2017. 239 pp.
Every year, tens of thousands of Iraqi patients leave their country seeking healthcare, and Iraqi physicians move abroad seeking asylum and work. Omar Dewachi writes elsewhere about this crisis and the “therapeutic geographies”* it sets in motion, but in his book Ungovernable …
Stakes of Life: Science, states, policies, publics and ‘the first thousand days’
Welcome back to the “First Thousand Days of Life” Somatosphere series. Here we continue to explore the ways that a global health initiative driven by new findings in epigenetics and neuroscience and by a reframing of theories about health and disease in terms of developmental origins shape ideas about (global) health and population futures, invigorate campaigns, and take …
Cristiana Giordano’s Migrants in Translation
Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy
University of California Press, 2014, 288 pages.
Exploring the political entailments of rehabilitating “victims of human trafficking” in Italy, Migrants in Translation speaks to the often puzzling disjuncture between recent anthropological and public discourses concerning migrant care and integration: while anthropology’s critiques have led, …