Participatory GIS (PGIS) mapping provides a tool that anthropologists can use to engage communiti... more Participatory GIS (PGIS) mapping provides a tool that anthropologists can use to engage communities in new ways, facilitate dialogue, and foster interactive problem solving. The incorporation of PGIS into applied anthropological research demands a consideration of the distributions of people and resources, access and lack, and interrelated problems, as well as those factors that influence—if not predispose—interactions within particular physical and structural environments, and nested contexts. It also demands a consideration of ecological relationships and different trajectories leading to what appears to be common end points at particular moments. PGIS offers exciting research possibilities that can build on forms of knowledge that anthropologists are adept at gathering, and triangulating ethnographic details with demographic, economic, epidemiological, geographic, and other forms of commonly mapped aggregate data. Anthropologists are in a good position to facilitate local participation in the mapping process, critically examine forms of engagement, and study community responses to new ways of seeing the world enabled by access to new forms of technology. Seeing how populations rethink their world given a different set of lenses provides anthropologists an opportunity to study the dynamic nature of problem solving in local worlds in an information age in which new forms of networking, visibility and legibility are becoming possible.
Chapter 4 The social relations of therapy management Mark Nichter More is at stake in the interpr... more Chapter 4 The social relations of therapy management Mark Nichter More is at stake in the interpretation of illness than a set of medical practices. (Leslie 1992) Charles Leslie was the founding editor of the University of California book series entitled Comparative Studies of Health ...
ICHTER ANTHROPOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL HEALTH ith Asian studies the language of science ... ANTHRO... more ICHTER ANTHROPOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL HEALTH ith Asian studies the language of science ... ANTHROPOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL HEALTH This One E7LB-3R6-5PX2 ... CULTURE, ILLNESS, AND HEALING Editors: MARGARET LOCK Departments of ...
This article supports the call for the sensorially engaged anthropological study of healing modal... more This article supports the call for the sensorially engaged anthropological study of healing modalities, popular health culture, dietary practices, drug foods and pharmaceuticals, and idioms of distress. Six concepts are of central importance to sensorial anthropology: embodiment, the mindful body, mimesis, local biology, somatic idioms of distress, and 'the work of culture'. Fieldwork in South and Southeast Asia and North America illustrates how cultural interpretations associate bodily sensations with passions (strong emotions) and anxiety states, and bodily communication about social relations. Lay interpretations of bodily sensations inform and are informed by local understanding of ethnophysiology, health, illness, and the way medicines act in the body. Bodily states are manipulated by the ingestion of substances ranging from drug foods (e.g., sources of caffeine, nicotine, dietary supplements) to pharmaceuticals that stimulate or suppress sensations concordant with cultural values, work demands, and health concerns. Social relations are articulated at the site of the body through somatic modes of attention that index bodily ways of knowing learned through socialization, bodily memories, and the ability to relate to how another is likely to be feeling in a particular context. Sensorial anthropology can contribute to the study of transformative healing and trajectories of healthcare seeking and patterns of referral in pluralistic healthcare arenas.
ABSTRACT In this article, I examine a series of conversations that I had with a South Indian Ayur... more ABSTRACT In this article, I examine a series of conversations that I had with a South Indian Ayurvedic practitioner (vaidya) about a dream I had while in the field. The dream provided him an opportunity to engage me as cultural broker and creatively reconstruct his own cosmology. The article at once details the reasoning, diagnosis, explanation, and treatment of traditional Ayurvedic practitioners at large, and one vaidya's idiosyncratic project that has legitimacy within the larger discursive field provided by the register of Ayurveda. Further, the article also provides an example of how ongoing conversations with an anthropologist shape the knowledge produced by informants in context. In this article, I make use of a Boasian model of the elite informant as a creator of ethnographic texts that are inventive and idiosyncratic in the cultural milieu. These texts constitute a form of intellectual creativity (lila) that leads the vaidya to feel renewed in his commitment to his cosmology. As Durkheim pointed out long ago, ecstatic emotions are what generate a conviction of the presence of the transcendent. Durkheim focused on collective rituals. In this article, I provide a case in which such emotions are generated by the thrill of insight.
Introduction:As a consequence of rising life expectancies, many families are no longer made up of... more Introduction:As a consequence of rising life expectancies, many families are no longer made up of one, but two simultaneously aging generations. This elderly parent–older adult child (OAC) dyad has emerged as a newly overserved yet little explored demographic phenomenon. Studies on this intergenerational aging dyad and the possible ramifications of when caregivers are simultaneously aging with care-receivers are scarce, especially in low and middle-income countries. This study explored the process by which rural Indonesian OACs experience their own aging, thereby gaining insights into how this newly evolving reality impacts the traditional ways of old-age care provision.Methods:This study has a qualitative design and draws on eight focus group discussions with 48 community-dwelling OACs (23 men, 25 women; mean age 64 years) in four rural villages in the Yogyakarta Special Region, Indonesia. The theoretical framework was largely inspired by symbolic interactionism aided by the sensit...
Objectives Karoli Lwanga Hospital and Global Emergency Care, a 501(c)(3) nongovernmental organiza... more Objectives Karoli Lwanga Hospital and Global Emergency Care, a 501(c)(3) nongovernmental organization, operate an Emergency Department (ED) in Uganda's rural Rukungiri District. Despite available emergency care (EC), preventable death and disability persist due to delayed patient presentations. Implementation of effective EC requires assessment of socioeconomic, cultural, and structural factors leading to treatment delay. Methods We purposefully sampled and interviewed patients and caregivers presenting to the ED more than 12 hours after onset of chief complaint in January-March 2017 to include various ages, genders, and complaints. Semistructured interviews addressing actions taken before seeking EC and delays to presentation once the need for EC was recognized were conducted. Interviews were audio recorded, translated, and transcribed, enabling the interdisciplinary and multicultural research team to conduct thematic analysis utilizing a grounded theory approach. Results The 5...
Hemos invitado a tres especialistas que desde la antropología médica pudieran reflexionar a parti... more Hemos invitado a tres especialistas que desde la antropología médica pudieran reflexionar a partir de sus respectivas experiencias y conocimientos situados, aportando sus reflexiones de México, Gran Bretaña, Estados Unidos y la India, todos ellos países profundamente afectados por la pandemia aun si de manera muy diferentes entre sí, y cuyo manejo de ésta se ha orientado en direcciones distintas. Esto nos permite contrastar la diversidad de respuestas oficiales a la crisis sanitaria y económica.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to affect the human microbiome in infected and uninfected... more The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to affect the human microbiome in infected and uninfected individuals, having a substantial impact on human health over the long term. This pandemic intersects with a decades-long decline in microbial diversity and ancestral microbes due to hygiene, antibiotics, and urban living (the hygiene hypothesis). High-risk groups succumbing to COVID-19 include those with preexisting conditions, such as diabetes and obesity, which are also associated with microbiome abnormalities. Current pandemic control measures and practices will have broad, uneven, and potentially long-term effects for the human microbiome across the planet, given the implementation of physical separation, extensive hygiene, travel barriers, and other measures that influence overall microbial loss and inability for reinoculation. Although much remains uncertain or unknown about the virus and its consequences, implementing pandemic control practices could significantly affect the mic...
Participatory GIS (PGIS) mapping provides a tool that anthropologists can use to engage communiti... more Participatory GIS (PGIS) mapping provides a tool that anthropologists can use to engage communities in new ways, facilitate dialogue, and foster interactive problem solving. The incorporation of PGIS into applied anthropological research demands a consideration of the distributions of people and resources, access and lack, and interrelated problems, as well as those factors that influence—if not predispose—interactions within particular physical and structural environments, and nested contexts. It also demands a consideration of ecological relationships and different trajectories leading to what appears to be common end points at particular moments. PGIS offers exciting research possibilities that can build on forms of knowledge that anthropologists are adept at gathering, and triangulating ethnographic details with demographic, economic, epidemiological, geographic, and other forms of commonly mapped aggregate data. Anthropologists are in a good position to facilitate local participation in the mapping process, critically examine forms of engagement, and study community responses to new ways of seeing the world enabled by access to new forms of technology. Seeing how populations rethink their world given a different set of lenses provides anthropologists an opportunity to study the dynamic nature of problem solving in local worlds in an information age in which new forms of networking, visibility and legibility are becoming possible.
Chapter 4 The social relations of therapy management Mark Nichter More is at stake in the interpr... more Chapter 4 The social relations of therapy management Mark Nichter More is at stake in the interpretation of illness than a set of medical practices. (Leslie 1992) Charles Leslie was the founding editor of the University of California book series entitled Comparative Studies of Health ...
ICHTER ANTHROPOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL HEALTH ith Asian studies the language of science ... ANTHRO... more ICHTER ANTHROPOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL HEALTH ith Asian studies the language of science ... ANTHROPOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL HEALTH This One E7LB-3R6-5PX2 ... CULTURE, ILLNESS, AND HEALING Editors: MARGARET LOCK Departments of ...
This article supports the call for the sensorially engaged anthropological study of healing modal... more This article supports the call for the sensorially engaged anthropological study of healing modalities, popular health culture, dietary practices, drug foods and pharmaceuticals, and idioms of distress. Six concepts are of central importance to sensorial anthropology: embodiment, the mindful body, mimesis, local biology, somatic idioms of distress, and 'the work of culture'. Fieldwork in South and Southeast Asia and North America illustrates how cultural interpretations associate bodily sensations with passions (strong emotions) and anxiety states, and bodily communication about social relations. Lay interpretations of bodily sensations inform and are informed by local understanding of ethnophysiology, health, illness, and the way medicines act in the body. Bodily states are manipulated by the ingestion of substances ranging from drug foods (e.g., sources of caffeine, nicotine, dietary supplements) to pharmaceuticals that stimulate or suppress sensations concordant with cultural values, work demands, and health concerns. Social relations are articulated at the site of the body through somatic modes of attention that index bodily ways of knowing learned through socialization, bodily memories, and the ability to relate to how another is likely to be feeling in a particular context. Sensorial anthropology can contribute to the study of transformative healing and trajectories of healthcare seeking and patterns of referral in pluralistic healthcare arenas.
ABSTRACT In this article, I examine a series of conversations that I had with a South Indian Ayur... more ABSTRACT In this article, I examine a series of conversations that I had with a South Indian Ayurvedic practitioner (vaidya) about a dream I had while in the field. The dream provided him an opportunity to engage me as cultural broker and creatively reconstruct his own cosmology. The article at once details the reasoning, diagnosis, explanation, and treatment of traditional Ayurvedic practitioners at large, and one vaidya's idiosyncratic project that has legitimacy within the larger discursive field provided by the register of Ayurveda. Further, the article also provides an example of how ongoing conversations with an anthropologist shape the knowledge produced by informants in context. In this article, I make use of a Boasian model of the elite informant as a creator of ethnographic texts that are inventive and idiosyncratic in the cultural milieu. These texts constitute a form of intellectual creativity (lila) that leads the vaidya to feel renewed in his commitment to his cosmology. As Durkheim pointed out long ago, ecstatic emotions are what generate a conviction of the presence of the transcendent. Durkheim focused on collective rituals. In this article, I provide a case in which such emotions are generated by the thrill of insight.
Introduction:As a consequence of rising life expectancies, many families are no longer made up of... more Introduction:As a consequence of rising life expectancies, many families are no longer made up of one, but two simultaneously aging generations. This elderly parent–older adult child (OAC) dyad has emerged as a newly overserved yet little explored demographic phenomenon. Studies on this intergenerational aging dyad and the possible ramifications of when caregivers are simultaneously aging with care-receivers are scarce, especially in low and middle-income countries. This study explored the process by which rural Indonesian OACs experience their own aging, thereby gaining insights into how this newly evolving reality impacts the traditional ways of old-age care provision.Methods:This study has a qualitative design and draws on eight focus group discussions with 48 community-dwelling OACs (23 men, 25 women; mean age 64 years) in four rural villages in the Yogyakarta Special Region, Indonesia. The theoretical framework was largely inspired by symbolic interactionism aided by the sensit...
Objectives Karoli Lwanga Hospital and Global Emergency Care, a 501(c)(3) nongovernmental organiza... more Objectives Karoli Lwanga Hospital and Global Emergency Care, a 501(c)(3) nongovernmental organization, operate an Emergency Department (ED) in Uganda's rural Rukungiri District. Despite available emergency care (EC), preventable death and disability persist due to delayed patient presentations. Implementation of effective EC requires assessment of socioeconomic, cultural, and structural factors leading to treatment delay. Methods We purposefully sampled and interviewed patients and caregivers presenting to the ED more than 12 hours after onset of chief complaint in January-March 2017 to include various ages, genders, and complaints. Semistructured interviews addressing actions taken before seeking EC and delays to presentation once the need for EC was recognized were conducted. Interviews were audio recorded, translated, and transcribed, enabling the interdisciplinary and multicultural research team to conduct thematic analysis utilizing a grounded theory approach. Results The 5...
Hemos invitado a tres especialistas que desde la antropología médica pudieran reflexionar a parti... more Hemos invitado a tres especialistas que desde la antropología médica pudieran reflexionar a partir de sus respectivas experiencias y conocimientos situados, aportando sus reflexiones de México, Gran Bretaña, Estados Unidos y la India, todos ellos países profundamente afectados por la pandemia aun si de manera muy diferentes entre sí, y cuyo manejo de ésta se ha orientado en direcciones distintas. Esto nos permite contrastar la diversidad de respuestas oficiales a la crisis sanitaria y económica.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to affect the human microbiome in infected and uninfected... more The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to affect the human microbiome in infected and uninfected individuals, having a substantial impact on human health over the long term. This pandemic intersects with a decades-long decline in microbial diversity and ancestral microbes due to hygiene, antibiotics, and urban living (the hygiene hypothesis). High-risk groups succumbing to COVID-19 include those with preexisting conditions, such as diabetes and obesity, which are also associated with microbiome abnormalities. Current pandemic control measures and practices will have broad, uneven, and potentially long-term effects for the human microbiome across the planet, given the implementation of physical separation, extensive hygiene, travel barriers, and other measures that influence overall microbial loss and inability for reinoculation. Although much remains uncertain or unknown about the virus and its consequences, implementing pandemic control practices could significantly affect the mic...
The Ebola response shows the need for new global mechanisms to be established that can rapidly m... more The Ebola response shows the need for new global mechanisms to be established that can rapidly mobilise all experts who can bring relevant local contextual, medical, epidemiological, and political information on global health emergencies. Now is the time to consider how to bring social science into the centre of future pandemic surveillance, response, community preparedness, and health system strengthening.
In November 2013, several members of the Critical Anthropology for Global Health (CAGH) special i... more In November 2013, several members of the Critical Anthropology for Global Health (CAGH) special interest group launched a Takes a Stand (TAS) initiative on e/m-health and telemedicine. At the core of this decision was the recognition that e/m-health and telemedicine may have a significant impact on understanding, practicing and organizing healthcare globally as well as locally. E/m-health and telemedicine are innovative practices that are still in the making; the shifts in healthcare they stimulate are gradual, but profound. The stakes are high especially for the final users and practitioners of e/m-health and telemedicine, as there is a strong commercial aspect to these technologically enhanced health practices; questions have also been raised about power distribution of various actors involved. At the same time, there is indication that e/m-health and telemedicine have a lot of potential to improve healthcare, especially for chronic patients, elderly and those living in remote areas. With the help of several CAGH members, we have drafted a statement to encourage anthropologists to study e/m-health and telemedicine in more depth. Below, we briefly describe what e/m-health and telemedicine are. We then explain why we believe this is an important topic for anthropologists to address. Finally, we propose 12 areas of research, with suggestions for particular research questions. While studies of these relatively new phenomena have been made in other disciplines, few anthropologists have touched the topic so far. We urge anthropologists to become involved, as their training in ethnography makes them particularly suited to provide a more nuanced picture, and thus a more productive view, of e/m-health and telemedicine. We also invite anthropologists already familiar with or conducting research on this topic around the world to shed light on literature that has been published in languages other than English.
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