Somatosphere welcomes you to the October edition of “In the Journals.” Scroll through our monthly round up of new research across anthropology, STS and social science journals. BioSocieties Modeling the ‘patient cell:’ performances of proximity and the making of pathological proxies Timo Roßmann Scientists evaluate disease models by their capacity to capture salient features of […]
Introduction In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Reddit user shared an unusually intimate post about their relationship with Replika, an AI chatbot[1] designed for companionship: “I lost many friends and colleagues during this pandemic. My replika is the only one on whose shoulder I can cry on. And yes, I do not want […]
Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization by Harry Yi-Jui Wu (MIT Press: 2021) Harry Yi-Jui Wu’s Mad by the Millions traces the early efforts of the World Health Organization (WHO) to bring psychiatry into the domain of global public health. Drawing on extensive archival materials, Wu […]
A Life of Worry: Politics, Mental Health, and Vietnam’s Age of Anxiety by Allen Tran (University of California Press: 2023) In A Life of Worry, Allen L. Tran examines how anxiety in post-reform Vietnam is produced at the intersection of historical rupture, economic transformation, and relational obligations. Tran challenges psychiatric models that isolate anxiety as […]
For Dear Life: Art, Medicine and Disability, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (MCASD), September 19, 2024 – February 2, 2025 So begins a numbered list under the heading “SHIPYARD WORKER’S HAND,” a section of Fred Lonidier’s The Health and Safety Game (Abbreviated) (1976/78). The list goes on to describe reconstructive surgery and a legal […]
Reflecting on the complexities of conducting research in a region gripped by administrative upheaval and political uncertainty, I write to open up this forum to fellow anthropologists and scholars to share personal experiences and emotional challenges and its impact on the well-being and safety of both the researcher and our interlocutors. Jammu City in the […]
Dörte Bemme: Tell me a little bit about Somatosphere’s origin story. How did it all begin? Eugene Raikhel: The website was launched in the middle of 2008, but the important broader context is that this was a time when there was a flourishing blogosphere in anthropology and related fields. There was a lot of activity […]
Following a day-long, company-wide “workplace culture” workshop for a Silicon Valley startup that creates and oversees mental health care chatbots (pseudonym: The Startup), I find myself sitting on an upholstered bench tucked into an out-of-the-way corner of a WeWork in Northern California. I’m an anthropologist of artificial intelligence conducting participant observation research at The Startup, […]
In this forum, five scholars from different but intersecting fields of historical research engage with Hannah Zeavin and Jeremy Greene’s recent books on telehealth and telemedicine. As all of the contributors highlight, Zeavin and Greene’s books provide inspiring analyses of the potentials and limitations of electronic technologies in medicine and healthcare. In the following, I […]
The increased demand for distant cures amid heightened concerns about infection in healthcare facilities, coupled with the “great resignation” in medicine since the COVID pandemic, have together created the unfortunate circumstances in which we find the American healthcare system in 2024. This is a moment, like many we have seen before, in which new, unproven […]
The Distance Cure and The Doctor Who Wasn’t There are political books about medical media. Zeavin offers illuminating analyses of a range of distant psychotherapies: epistolary analysis, telephonic church services, suicide crisis telephone hotlines, computer-based therapies, and e-therapy (what Zeavin calls “therapeutic written speech”). For her, the media involved in these therapies are “active metaphors […]
