Anthropology of Biomedicine

A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities brings together articles from the key theoretical approaches in the field of medical anthropology as well as related science and technology studies. The editors' comprehensive introductions evaluate the historical lineages of these approaches and their value in addressing critical problems associated with contemporary forms of illness experience and health care. Presents a key selection of both classic and new agenda-setting articles in medical ...

Hospitals are designed as spaces of improvement. Yet an accumulation of infrastructural projects can lead over time to the emergence of a layered landscape made up of multiple incongruous planned spaces. This article focuses on Madang General Hospital in Papua New Guinea as one example of such a landscape. Here, deteriorating colonial buildings jostle against new gleaming constructions built with donor funds. The layered effect of the postcolonial landscape draws attention to enduring racial and class inequalities; the colonial past is rendered present in the buildings of the future. Drawing on recent work on affect in anthropology and cultural geography I argue that this landscape impresses affects of hope and disappointment on the people who inhabit it and shapes ambivalent attachments to national and state futures. This double movement of improvement and decay is analysed as a process of ruination that is intrinsic to modern spaces of improvement.

The physicalistic and mechanistic view of Western biomedicine provides a convenient escape route from explanations of phenomena like the placebo effect, “sham” or “inert” treatments having the faculty to rally the healing process by causing objective changes in physiological functioning. Because anthropology is dialectical and comparative in its approach, it establishes a biocultural dialogue in its interpretations. Anthropologists speculate that what is overlooked are the systems of beliefs and expectations of patients. Local cultures present traditional ideas of what sickness is and of what to expect, reinforced by processes of socialization and communication. In portraying placebos as ultimately “culturogenic”, products of culturally-derived expectations that interact directly with individual physiology, anthropology has provided what is a refreshing narrative for the understanding of medical phenomena such as the placebo effect.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

This essay is concerned with processes of transformation of ‘citizenship’ towards its acquisition due to a biological condition, rather than due to nationality. First, I will explore Nguyen’s notion of ‘therapeutic citizenship’ in relation to ‘biological citizenship’ (Petryna 2005, 2010; Rose and Novas 2005), ‘pharmaceutical citizenship’ (Ecks 2005). Second, I will discuss science and biomedical technology as entangled in economic, socio-political processes and in modes of knowledge production. Ethnographic examples will be provided by the works of: Nguyen on AIDS industry in Burkina Faso, Petryna on Chernobyl- exposed population, Ecks on antidepressant market in India.

In the contemporary United States, matters of life and health have become key political concerns. Important to this politics of life is the desire to overcome racial inequalities in health; from heart disease to diabetes, the populations most afflicted by a range of illnesses are racialized minorities. The solutions generally proposed to the problem of racial health disparities have been social and environmental in nature, but in the wake of the mapping of the human genome, genetic thinking has come to have considerable influence on how such inequalities are problematized. Racial Prescriptions explores the politics of dealing with health inequities through targeting pharmaceuticals at specific racial groups based on the idea that they are genetically different. Drawing on the introduction of BiDil to treat heart failure among African Americans, this book contends that while racialized pharmaceuticals are ostensibly about fostering life, they also raise thorny questions concerning the biologization of race, the reproduction of inequality, and the economic exploitation of the racial body.

Engaging the concept of biopower in an examination of race, genetics and pharmaceuticals, Racial Prescriptions will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in medicine, health, bioscience, inequality and racial politics.

Durante pesquisa de campo de doutorado, acompanhei o trabalho de algumas médicas brancas em suas atividades de condução de protocolos de pesquisa clínica. Minha presença nos consultórios foi condicionada ao uso de um jaleco branco, peça que, por vezes, colocou-me em posição de explicar aos pacientes que não era uma estagiária de medicina e, por outras, tornou explícitos os limites de confusões supostamente automáticas entre mim e uma profissional da medicina. Por meio de uma análise de situações de racismo genderificado que vivi durante o trabalho de campo enquanto vestia um jaleco, reflito sobre o campo da medicina como espaço marcado pela branquidade e, estendendo tal crítica à antropologia, argumento que a reflexão ética sobre a pesquisa de campo deve levar em conta, necessariamente, as hierarquizações raciais e de gênero que compõem as interações com interlocutores de pesquisa-em especial, as experimentadas por pesquisadoras negras em contextos nos quais a branquidade é normalizada.

The current paper is based on an empirical research conducted in a Punjabi village of Pakistan. It discusses the Health related indigenous practices of the people of the village in which both preventive and curative aspects have been covered and discussed in detail along with the particular practices that were still under use by the village community. The main thrust of research was to study indigenous knowledge system and its traditional wisdom attached with the traditional medicine which is called alternative medicine now a days. The study brings forth the worth of traditional medicine, its utilities and consumption practiced by the local and indigenous populations. The long ignorance of Cultural Factors regarding Health and Healing systems in Pakistan urges the need to understand indigenous mind and perceptions due to low performance at health index. This paper makes it possible to read out the health related beliefs and practices and moreover the low pricing and affordability of local and traditional medical practices. Local medical practices are deeply rooted into curative side due to which people have more faith in the centuries old repertoire.

The philosophy of “evidence-based medicine”—basing medical decisions on evidence from randomized controlled trials and other forms of aggregate data rather than on clinical experience or expert opinion—has swept U.S. medical practice in recent years. Obstetricians justify recent increases in the use of cesarean section, and dramatic decreases in vaginal birth following previous cesarean, as evidence-based obstetrical practice. Analysis of pivotal “evidence” supporting cesarean demonstrates that the data are a product of its social milieu: The mother's body disappears from analytical view; images of fetal safety are marketing tools; technology magically wards off the unpredictability and danger of birth. These changes in practice have profound implications for maternal and child health. A feminist project within obstetrics is both feasible and urgently needed as one locus of resistance.

Between 1984 and 1996, public health authorities in Israel maintained a secret policy of discarding blood donations made by Ethiopian-Israeli citizens and immigrants. Officials later attempted to justify this policy on the grounds that immigrants from Ethiopia were subject to high rates of infectious disease (especially HIV). In 1996, this led to an explosive and violent confrontation between Ethiopian-Israeli protestors and agents of the state, including police and public health authorities. This essay explores the cultural and political context of that confrontation, including the discourse of political violence which it occasioned. The conflict between Ethiopian-Israelis and the state was located within a wider set of political contexts, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was linked to it through a shared trope of “spilled blood” common to both. Cultural analyses which ignore this dynamic political context are in danger of seriously misrepresenting the meaning of the “Blood Affair” to its participants. At the same time, this essay also engages a critical analysis of the public health policies which led to the crisis. Public health and nationalist discourse reinforced one another at the expense of Ethiopian immigrants in general, and so-called “Feres Mura” Ethiopians in particular.

This paper deals with rape adjudication in the American and Indian contexts, and analyses anomalies while unpacking consent, and understanding credibility of the victim.

The first three chapters deal with American adjudication, and the final chapters draws parallels and lessons from the Indian setting. In the first chapter, I lay the groundwork with a case study of Emma Sulkowicz's rape at Stanford University which I will continue to revisit throughout the first three chapters. I also establish that sexual assault is ubiquitous in American college campuses, and how a whole generation of young, American women are being denied access to justice. The second chapter lays, and weighs the different options available for recourse to a sexual assault victim in the American system, and why the criminal justice system may not be the best answer. The third chapter seeks to understand the genealogy of treatment of consent. It also establishes the legal system’s inordinate reliance on forensic evidence that only reveals physiological violence, and thus, erases psychological harm from the narrative. I question whether admissibility of Rape Trauma Syndrome is the answer to this marginalisation by the biomedical system. In the final chapter, I discuss how and why corroboration of the victim’s testimony in the Indian context holds minimal importance in a rape trial. I explain how honour and chastity come to be central tenets in, and are unique to the Indian context. I touch upon the Nirbhaya rape case, and why it catapulted into popular imagination, and discuss why the demands sought by protestors were of a legal nature.

I have drawn heavily from feminist jurisprudence, sociology of law, access to justice literature, feminist criminology, health anthropology, to an extent, post-colonialism, and social theory on gender, nationalism and Hindutva. This paper came about as an investigation into why law remains so resistant to feminist critique, and how legal knowledge, especially in post-colonial societies where it is the only legitimising discourse, disqualifies and marginalises other epistemologies.

This article examines ideologies of the speaking subject in the psychotherapeutic theory and practice of the American psychotherapeutic innovator Carl Rogers. I consider both Rogerss explicit theorizing about and the interactional expression of Rogerian concepts such as nondirective therapy and real or authentic selfhood. These ideologies are analyzed as crucially targeting the relative denotational explicitness and the calibrational qualities of the expression of Goffmanian commitment. Beyond this immediate goal, the analysis aims to explore the wider historical significance of Rogerian therapy and to offer a semiotically sophisticated account of the relationship between ideology and commitment.

This paper argue that the failure of the doctors Neil and Peggy in Anne Fadiman's book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down to be more culturally sensitive to their Hmong patients was caused by structural issues in the American biomedical system. To prove this point, this paper will first present a background to Lia’s case, then discuss possibilities for assigning blame to Neil and Peggy, then show evidence for the structural issues in American biomedicine, before finally concluding.

6th International Conference on Education (EDU 2021) will provide an excellent international forum for sharing knowledge and results in theory, methodology and applications impacts and challenges of education. The conference documents practical and theoretical results which make a fundamental contribution for the development of Educational research. The goal of this conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on Educational advancements and establishing new collaborations in these areas. Original research papers, state-of-the-art reviews are invited for publication in all areas of Education.

Quali sono le linee di ricerca e di intervento umanistiche nell’ambito della biomedicina? Perché sono importanti per la formazione del medico e del personale paramedico? Quali le loro utilità nella pratica quotidiana del clinico e del ricercatore?
Queste sono alcune delle domande cui si tenterà di fornire una risposta attraverso tavole rotonde che si focalizzeranno sugli aspetti etici, storici, socio-antropologici e filosofici.

ABSTRACT  At an understaffed and underresourced urban African training hospital, Malawian medical students learn to be doctors while foreign medical students, visiting Malawi as clinical tourists on short-term electives, learn about “global health.” Scientific ideas circulate fast there; clinical tourists circulate readily from outside to Malawi but not the reverse; medical technologies circulate slowly, erratically, and sometimes not at all. Medicine's uneven globalization is on full display. I extend scholarship on moral imaginations and medical imaginaries to propose that students map these wards variously as places in which—or from which—they seek a better medicine. Clinical tourists, enacting their own moral maps, also become representatives of medicine “out there”: points on the maps of others. Ethnographic data show that for Malawians, clinical tourists are colleagues, foils against whom they construct ideas about a superior and distinctly Malawian medicine and visions of possible alternative futures for themselves. [biomedicine, tourism, Africa, imaginaries]ZUSAMMENFASSUNG  In einem unterbesetzten, unterfinanzierten afrikanischen Lehrkrankenhaus werden malawische Medizinstudenten zu Ärzten ausgebildet. Auch ausländische Medizinstudenten studieren dort; sie besuchen Malawi als “klinische Touristen” für kurzfristige Aufenthalte, bei denen sie Wahlfächer belegen und etwas über “globale Gesundheit” lernen. Wissenschaftliche Ideen zirkulieren dort schnell. Medizinische Technologien verbreiten sich langsam, unregelmäßig, und manchmal überhaupt nicht: die ungleiche Globalisierung der Medizin ist unübersehbar. Ich erweitere die Literatur über moralische und medizinische Imaginationen und argumentiere, dass die Studenten sich diese Krankenhausabteilungen auf “moralischen Karten” vorstellen, entweder als Orte wo—oder von wo aus—sie eine “bessere Medizin” anstreben. Klinische Touristen (die ihren eigenen moralischen Karten folgen) repräsentieren außerdem die Medizin “da draußen”: Sie werden zu Punkten auf den “moralischen Karten” Anderer. Für malawische Medizinstudenten sind diese ausländischen klinischen Touristen Kollegen, ein Hintergrund, vor dem sie Ideen einer überlegenen und spezifisch malawischen Medizin und alternative Zukunftsvisionen für sich selbst konstruieren.RÉSUMÉ  Dans un hôpital d'enseignement africain, en sous-effectif et manquant de ressources, les étudiants malawiens apprennent àêtre médecins alors que les étudiants étrangers, «touristes cliniques » en visite au Malawi, s'informent sur la «santé publique mondiale ». Les idées scientifiques circulent rapidement; les touristes circulent facilement de l’étranger au Malawi mais pas vice-versa; quand les technologies médicales circulent, c'est lentement. La mondialisation inégale de la médecine est exposée. J'accrois la recherche sur les imaginations morales et imaginaires médicaux, argumentant que les étudiants dépeignent cette expérience comme étant un lieu où, et par l'intermédiaire duquel, ils recherchent une médecine meilleure. Les touristes affichent leur schème moral et représentent également la médecine de «là-bas »: des repères pour les autres. Les données ethnographiques démontrent que pour les Malawiens, les touristes sont des collègues à travers qui ils construisent les concepts d'une médecine malawienne supérieure et d'un avenir différent.

El presente artículo aborda la emergencia y desarrollo en Argentina a fines de la década de 1990 de una serie prácticas médicas desplegadas alrededor de las iniciativas de construcción corporal de las personas trans. Analiza los argumentos que profesionales pioneros en el desarrollo de dichas prácticas esgrimieron para desarrollar tratamientos e intervenciones que se encontraban prohibidas por Ley y eran rechazadas socialmente. Se propone identificar puntos de contacto y de discontinuidad con otros discursos que en Argentina históricamente hicieron foco en la regulación de los cuerpos y sexualidades no normativas, tales como la criminología, el higienismo y la medicina legal.
Tanto los discursos del higienismo y la criminología como los de la medicina legal y los de los profesionales pioneros procesaron los pedidos de tratamientos de construcción corporal desde un prisma moral. Establecieron definiciones particulares sobre lo bueno, lo deseable, lo inapropiado y lo riesgoso para las personas en relación con sus cuerpos y las posibilidades de transformación de los mismos ofrecidas por las tecnologías médicas, acorde a los valores vigentes en torno al género y la sexualidad en el momento en el que fueron producidos.

computer come macroscopio. Big data e approccio computazionale per comprendere i cambiamenti sociali e culturali. [The computer as a macroscope. Big data and computational approaches to understand social and cultural changes], Milano, Franco Angeli, 2015, pp. 148 by Tommaso Venturini S. Consigliere (ed.)

Healthism is a sociological concept that has circulated widely outside of academia, while is it rather neglected by social sciences. This article intends to propose its genealogy in order to revitalize this term and to propose it as an analytical framework able to grasp some of contemporary tendencies marked by the centrality of individuals. After an historical excursus of healthism, which began as a spin-off of the well-known term " medicalization " , the article proceeds by exploring the legacy of this notion for contemporary analysis of the expanding sector of illness prevention and prediction as well as health/wellness promotion and optimization. In particular, it focuses on the establishment of lifestyles and risk factors as the vector of medical devices, practices, and concepts in society. Instead of looking at these changes in spatial terms, as either an expansion or a shrinking of medical discourse, healthism provides an analytical framework attentive to the relationship with medical power, technologies and data inherent in emerging medical subjectivities. Une généalogie du « santéisme » : Subjectivités et santé entre autonomie individuelle et contrôle disciplinaire Résumé Concept sociologique qui circule largement en dehors du milieu universitaire, le « santéisme » est pourtant plutôt négligé par le débat contemporain au sein des sciences sociales. Cet article vise à proposer sa généalogie afin de revitaliser ce concept et de le relancer en tant que cadre analytique capable

In Racial Prescriptions, Jonathan Xavier Inda offers a critical and timely analysis of the making of BiDil, the first (and only) drug that was marketed exclusively to African Americans. Sibille Merz speaks to him about the re-articulation of racial politics under neoliberalism, the legacies of scientific racism and the molecularization of biopolitics in the genomic age.

Anthropologists studying voluntary-anonymous systems of blood donation have noted the ways in which they facilitate imaginings of national relatedness and integration. This paper focuses on family replacement systems in Papua New Guinea, where blood donated by a patient's relative replaces the units taken from the bank, in order to examine what kinds of relational imaginings are possible when blood is transacted between people who know one another. Patients in Madang Hospital are led to believe that it is their responsibility to obtain blood donations from their relatives within a kinship obligation system. However, articulations of kinship exchange with a biomedical blood economy are not as straightforward as hospital workers suggest. Instead the hospital emerges as a crucial, but hidden, mediator in these transactions. Doctors conceal from patients the fact that blood group incompatibilities mean blood intended for a specific person may be redirected elsewhere. The obviation of this 'biomedical technology' thus enables the hospital to harness patients' 'relational technologies' of gift exchange to feed the institution's blood economy. In contrast to anthropologists' common focus on blood donation, here attention is drawn to the role of recipients in negotiating different regimes of extraction.

Although biological life and human social complexity are fundamentally interdependent, biological and social researchers continue to perceive each other from across divides of theoretical, methodological, and institutional skepticism. This paper considers conversational boundary work between qualitative and quantitative scientists as an institutionalized rhetorical performance which throttles their cooperation, even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic when it is most urgently needed. As an example, I look at the way familiar epistemological conflicts emerged out of collaboration between myself and a bioscientist during the spring of 2020, when co-participating in the Massive Microscopic Sensemaking Project, a 21-day international auto-ethnographic writing experiment.

Beginning in 2015, Brazil witnessed the births of thousands of children with neurological abnormalities linked to the Zika virus. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018 with parents of children with congenital Zika syndrome in Salvador da Bahia, this article attends to how one of Brazil's most overused obstetric technologies—cesarean section—was mobilized to mitigate the uncertainties of Zika's reproductive consequences. I argue that during the epidemic, C‐section constituted a form of what I call interventive care, in which others interceded on behalf of pregnant women to secure surgical delivery. In dialogue with scholarship problematizing autonomy in reproductive decision making, I show how my Bahian interlocutors understood such intercessions, and the C‐sections themselves, as forms of appropriate, concerned care. I suggest, furthermore, that interventive care highlights the ways in which reproductive decisions are distributed among people rather than autonomous, particularly in contexts of heightened uncertainty.

The article is concerned with biomedical technologies and the entrepreneurial ways through which these vital technologies come to life. Focusing on stem cell ‘clinical trials’ conducted in hospitals in Việt Nam, it traces the processes through which tentative experiments and uncertain results are being translated into commercial ventures. It pays particular attention to the complex institutional settings and collaborative engagements through which biomedical enterprise and markets come to be instituted. Of particular concern are network partnerships involving public bodies, policymakers and private business interests that facilitate the process of turning clinical experiments into vetted therapies for the healthcare marketplace. The article contributes to anthropological reflections on emerging bioscience economic formations that are widely termed as ‘bioeconomies’. It does so, by reorienting the analytical gaze away from understandings of economic value as inherently rooted in biological substances that hold a future promise of cure, towards ongoing processes of assembling biomedical entrepreneurial networks and turning biotechnical matters into commodities.

The spectre of exclusionary medical service provision, restricted clinic access and physician targeting in sectarian-divided Iraq underscores the crucial and timely need for qualitative research into the inter-relationship between conflict, identity and health. In response, this paper provides a critical ethnography of obstetric service provision and patient access during Shia-Sunni hostilities in Gilgit Town, capital of Pakistan's Northern Areas (2005). I analyse how services were embedded in and constrained by sectarian affiliation in ways that detrimentally impacted Sunni women patients and hospital staff, resulting in profoundly diminished clinic access, reduced physician coverage and a higher observed incidence of maternal morbidity and mortality. The paper first situates obstetric medicine at the interstices of contested sectarian terrain and competing historical projects of sectarian identity. Gilgiti Sunnis' high clinical reliance is argued to be a response to and consequence of, inter-sectarian dissonance and the ascendance of biomedicine during three decades of regional development. In 2005, conflict-incurred service deprivations and the enactment and strategic use of sectarian identity in clinical settings were associated with differential treatment and patient-perceived adverse health outcomes, leading Sunnis to generate alternative sect-specific health services. Obstetric morbidity and mortality during sectarian conflict are analyzed as distinctive manifestations of the wide range of direct harms routinely associated with violence and political strife.

Revue d'anthropologie des connaissances 15-3 | 2021 Un tournant microbien ? Évolutions et involutions dans la biomédecine Thérapie phagique et traitement des infections bactériennes antibiorésistantes Evolutions and involutions in biomedicine. Phage therapy and the treatment of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections Evoluciones e involuciones en biomedicine. Fagoterapia y tratamiento de infecciones bacterianas resistentes a los antibióticos

This article reports a case of success in postgraduate teaching aimed at applied research in the field of biomedicine that resulted in the patent registration of the Linear Ergometer, a device aimed at the recovery, preservation and development of musculoskeletal structures of people in post-surgical recovery, injured or amputated patients, patients with neurological dysfunctions, as well as people with functional deficits. The Linear Ergometer comprises a linear device fixed to an adjustable tray on a shifter whose travel limiter is adjustable and fixed by a simple handle. In the travel limiter are fixed the elements that generate the necessary automatic movements for people that do not spontaneously produce them. The Linear Ergometer was registered with the National Institute of Industrial Property of Brazil under the patent number BR 1020160087503.

Competing Orders of Medical care in Ethiopia. From Traditional Healers to Pharmaceutical Companies, Lexington Books, 2019.
Competing Orders of Medical Care in Ethiopia traces the development of pharmaceutical products and medical remedies in the health sector.
It analyzes the production and distribution of medications and examines how
local politics, financial resources, social relations, and neoliberal beliefs can make some treatments more widespread and accepted than others.

In November 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed a peace agreement to end a 52-year war. In the context of the peace deal implementation, I ethnographically traced entanglements of biomedicine, public health and the armed conflict across shifting temporalities and realities of war and peace. Through an exploration of past, present and future (dis)entanglements of war and leishmaniasis – a vector-borne disease known by many in Colombia as “the subversive disease” or the “guerrilla disease” – this article traces a discourse that frames health problems, like leishmaniasis, only as scientific or technological challenges. Drawing on STS critiques of future-oriented timelines in technoscience and the concept of pharmaceuticalization, I argue that the expectations embedded in technoscientific innovation problematically limit the possibilities of disentangling leishmaniasis and war in post-conflict Colombia. In contrast, ethnographically exploring how health policies and biomedicine have nurtured violence and exclusion helps us destabilize the warfare-loaded meaning and experience of leishmaniasis. This approach enables us to move beyond imaginaries of technoscientific peacemaking, which I define as the excessive trust endowed to technoscience to (re)build a peaceful future, especially when we are faced with failures in understanding the involvement of technoscience in the production and perpetuation of violence.

Anthropological and STS scholars of biomedical work have traditionally explored contexts where inconsistencies and lacunas in diagnostic knowledge production are fundamentally problematic for medical practitioners and have consequently focused on the social and political processes by which such epistemic uncertainties are resolved. This article draws on ethnographic material from a Papua New Guinean hospital where diagnostic uncertainty is not rendered problematic and where the open-endedness of the diagnostic process gives rise to new forms of medical expertise and practice. The paper focuses on the medical record as an artefact of not-knowing that both documents and performs uncertainty as a valuable resource. It shows that medical records can operate as either technologies of 'opening' that multiply opportunities for pragmatic action within a hospital space or as technologies of 'closure' that move people and documents between spaces. Practices of not-knowing and knowing are therefore shown to be interdependent and interchangeable 'moments' of bureaucratic-biomedical work.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a social clinic of solidarity on the outskirts of Athens, the article explores how modes and values of care are constantly reconfigured at the intersection of an ever-expanding grassroots voluntary medical sector, the state and the household in a moment of severe economic distress. It traces the changing relations of care across these three realms where diverse modes of care have traditionally unfolded. In suggesting that pharmaceuticals have become increasingly crucial to social, economic and political relations amongst citizens who can no longer afford health care, I show how in the Athenian context, the circulation, sharing and exchanging of pharmaceuticals reinforce collective social bonds and argue that domestic modes of care (frontida) have increasingly been informed by biomedical modes of care (iatriki perithalpsi) stemming from the intermittent availability and unavailability of pharmaceutical drugs.

Blood transfusions belong to standard and commonly utilised biomedical procedures. Jehovah's Witnesses’ transfusion refusals are often referred to in bioethical and medical textbooks. Members of this globally active religious organisation do not, however, challenge biomedical diagnosis and treatment as such. A result of both their trust in and their interpretation of the Bible, they question only this medical treatment. In spite of the global presence of this religious community and its uniformly practised teachings, including those pertaining to blood, experiences and choices of Jehovah's Witness patients have been understudied. Drawing on a nine-month fieldwork with Jehovah's Witnesses and physicians in Germany (mainly in Berlin) between 2010 and 2012, the paper addresses treatment choices made by Witness patients and their relationship with physicians. In light of the long tradition of ‘medical heterodoxy’ established in German culture and society, Germany constitutes an ideal point of departure for such a study. By utilising the concept of ‘medical landscape’ it is argued that Jehovah's Witnesses in my field site find themselves at the intersection of different medical landscapes: in the ‘immediate’ surroundings of the German healthcare system that is open to different ‘treatment modalities’, and that of the United States, which favours biomedicine. The paper also argues that Jehovah's Witnesses’ position towards blood transfusions can further be used as a lens to shed light on the German (bio)medical landscape itself.

Biomedicine was introduced in Nepal by Christian Missionaries en route to Tibet and China. When Nepal entered the democratic era in the early 60s, a considerable influx of biomedicine was brought into Nepal by the modernizing state as part of the promise of national development. After the 60s, biomedicine expanded in Nepal mainly through private sector involvement. This had consequences in the health-care domain in Nepal including the commodification of health-care services and increasing medicalization. The practice and expansion of biomedicine is also closely associated with its social and cultural mediation. This article focuses to examine how the macro process of health development shaped the medical practices, especially the healing trajectories and cross-border medical travel of Maithili Brahmin women from Nepal's Tarai. This article shows that the three prominent avenues of health-care services, namely, medicalization, commodification, and cross-border medical travel predominant in the study area, are thriving and intertwined in such a way that they are reciprocally strengthening each other. This article is based on primary ethnographic data generated from field research conducted in a social cluster among the women from Nepal's Tarai.

Este trabajo indaga los sentidos de la práctica de yoga prenatal en un grupo de nueve mujeres embarazadas, enmarcándose en el campo de la antropología de la salud. La investigación empírica realizada tuvo un año y medio de duración y se desarrolló entre 2016 y 2018.  La medicalización de los partos emerge como momento emblemático del control médico sobre los cuerpos, siendo duramente cuestionada y rechazada desde el discurso durante las prácticas de yoga, pero aceptada durante el seguimiento del embarazo y con mayor contundencia en el momento del parto en las instituciones sanitarias.  Esta investigación muestra cómo es construido el camino desde el cuestionamiento y el rechazo de la medicalización del parto hasta la aceptación de la intervención sobre el propio cuerpo.

In this paper I address the question of whether the existing ethical regulations of clinical research ensure protection and well-being of human subjects. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered in Berlin, Germany, I show that German institutions which are meant to ensure the ethical validity of clinical research cannot address posed issues. It appears that these institutions (Berlin Ethik-Kommission in particular) only evaluate research protocols and do not consider the broad spectrum of processes and interactions involved in clinical research. The experience of professional human subjects, as well as the consideration of the every-day life in a clinic, shows that there is much more to clinical trials. The argument of this paper is that the inability of institutions to address protection of human subjects originates from the bureaucratic logic of their organization. Drawing on Bauman’s (1992) argument that the bureaucratic machine is characterized by separation between morality and purpose, with the example of Berlin Ethik-Kommission, I argue that the bureaucratic machine cannot be sensitive to morality and ethics, even if these are its main purposes.