Medical Anthropology Quarterly[JOURNAL]
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200 papers
Beyond safety net value(s): Tourist hotel rooms for people experiencing homelessness.
Schoenfeld NC
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Nov · PMID 41220141 · Publisher ↗
This article examines the shape of care and value through an ethnographic study of an intensive, temporary housing intervention for people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, California, during the COVID-19 pande...
This article examines the shape of care and value through an ethnographic study of an intensive, temporary housing intervention for people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, California, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on a new anthropological theory of value, the results highlight the slipperiness between surveillance and care, and how value may be produced or diminished in specific, embodied ways through respite, space, privacy, and dignity. This article troubles the concept of the social "safety net," suggesting instead that high-quality and even costly initial public investments for the poor generate public value.
Home sweet harm: Confinement and tranquilidad in post-asylum Peru.
Villa-Palomino J
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Nov · PMID 41220128 · Publisher ↗
This article examines how Peru's Community Mental Health (CMH) model contributes to the exclusion and home confinement of mentally ill individuals. Based on the experience of a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia and her...
This article examines how Peru's Community Mental Health (CMH) model contributes to the exclusion and home confinement of mentally ill individuals. Based on the experience of a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia and her mother, I show how CMH's emphasis on community-based care often fails in practice, as neighbors respond to people with mental illness through stigma and violence. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lima, Peru, I argue that home confinement is produced both by the CMH model and by residents' notions of the "proper" place for the mentally ill. By analyzing public perceptions of home confinement and the unfulfilled promises of CMH, I demonstrate how home confinement becomes both a protective strategy and a form of constraint. Challenging the assumption that there is a community to return to, I propose tranquilidad (being calm/unbothered) as an unintended outcome achieved through reduced exposure and withdrawal from community life.
Building walls around the safety net: Bureaucratic exclusion and cross-border health care utilization among pregnant women on the US-Mexico border.
Olmos RP, Heckert C
Med Anthropol Q · 2026 Jun · PMID 41217053 · Publisher ↗
Drawing from ethnographic work with women utilizing publicly funded prenatal care in El Paso, Texas, this paper considers how bureaucratic mechanisms lead to systematic exclusion of US citizens and legal permanent reside...
Drawing from ethnographic work with women utilizing publicly funded prenatal care in El Paso, Texas, this paper considers how bureaucratic mechanisms lead to systematic exclusion of US citizens and legal permanent residents from health services for which they would appear to qualify under Texas's Medicaid for Pregnant Women. This bureaucratic exclusion contributes to cross-border utilization of health services, with the Mexican health sector functioning as a safety net for an inadequate public health system in the United States. This article considers how immigration and health care bureaucracy intersect to exclude pregnant people from publicly funded health services, even when a person appears to be legally entitled to benefits. This exclusion contributes to the normalization of cross-border utilization of health services among those with a certain degree of transnational cultural capital. Attending to transnational cultural capital is revealing of the ways individuals exert agency in the context of constrained access.
Carework as resistance: How incarcerated women care for each other to survive carcerality amid a global pandemic.
Melton E, Riddle L, James JE
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Nov · PMID 41216949 · Full text
The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis in prisons and jails, with some of the largest outbreaks in the United States happening inside carceral facilities. In the absence of structural interventions to protect them, people in...
The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis in prisons and jails, with some of the largest outbreaks in the United States happening inside carceral facilities. In the absence of structural interventions to protect them, people inside prisons engaged in various forms of carework to support one another and to draw attention to the horrific conditions. We conducted interviews and focus groups with people who were incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic; healthcare workers in prisons and jails; and advocates and organizers supporting people in carceral settings. Interviews were triangulated with field notes from ethnographic observations of medical and legal advocacy efforts during the pandemic. We argue that the carework performed by people incarcerated is a key form of invisibilized labor and resistance within carceral settings. We describe how this labor is both relied on for prisons to function, particularly during a public health emergency, and an under-recognized element of abolitionist organizing in women's prisons.
Breathing through the rage: Maternal refusal as ethnographic method.
Ameeriar L
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Nov · PMID 41216788 · Publisher ↗
This article theorizes maternal rage as an ethnographic method and affective archive, drawing on interviews with birthing people of color navigating medical neglect, obstetric violence, and postpartum abandonment. Rather...
This article theorizes maternal rage as an ethnographic method and affective archive, drawing on interviews with birthing people of color navigating medical neglect, obstetric violence, and postpartum abandonment. Rather than treating rage as an excess or failure of care, I frame it as a form of witnessing and refusal, a bodily record of harm and survival. Situating these accounts within feminist anthropology, critical medical anthropology, and affect theory, I show how maternal rage exposes structural inequalities in reproductive care while resisting the institutional silencing of pain. The article argues for an expanded ethnographic practice attuned to affective residues, unruly testimony, and the nonlinear temporality of grief.
"They Look At Us Like Parasites": The Corporeal Stigmatization and Pathologization of Deportees in Tijuana, Mexico.
Martinez C
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Oct · PMID 41165209 · Publisher ↗
This article examines the embodied and institutional forms of marginalization experienced by Mexican deportees in Tijuana. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in clinics and social service organizations, it explo...
This article examines the embodied and institutional forms of marginalization experienced by Mexican deportees in Tijuana. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in clinics and social service organizations, it explores how deportees are corporeally stigmatized, denied legal recognition, and pathologized as addicts in need of coercive rehabilitation. Deportees are subjected to carceral and medicalized interventions that blur the boundaries between care and punishment. The article calls for greater attention to how deportation regimes operate transnationally to manage and discipline displaced populations through a convergence of biopolitical and necropolitical practices.
The Promise and Perils of Online Abortion in Brazil.
Marks A
Med Anthropol Q · 2026 Mar · PMID 41165129 · Publisher ↗
This article examines the experiences of Brazilian women as they navigate digital abortion-aid spaces. It sheds light on the role that social media plays in connecting abortion seekers with abortion-pill sellers. As in o...
This article examines the experiences of Brazilian women as they navigate digital abortion-aid spaces. It sheds light on the role that social media plays in connecting abortion seekers with abortion-pill sellers. As in other unregulated spaces where unofficial caregiving thrives, activist-caregivers seek legitimacy in Brazil's abortion black market by showcasing their knowledge and by providing emotional support to their clients throughout their procedures. At the same time, women seeking abortions often fall prey to scammers, profit-seekers, and sellers lacking training and compassion. In this online, anonymized context, making clear-cut distinctions between the real and the fake, the aid and the scammer, proved difficult for my interlocutors. Nonetheless, these online spaces offer deep hope in that they extend the possibility of abortion care to vulnerable Brazilian women who are otherwise deprived of reproductive agency.
In the shadow of HIV: Fear, rumor, and stigma among young women living with HIV in COVID-19 pandemic in Western Kenya.
Yusuf MF, Onyango-Ouma W, Prince RJ … +1 more , Geissler PW
Med Anthropol Q · 2026 Mar · PMID 41124378 · Publisher ↗
Drawing on ethnographic research in Dudi village in Western Kenya, this article explores how the lingering legacies of the 1990s HIV/AIDS epidemic shaped local perceptions of, and responses to, the COVID-19 pandemic and...
Drawing on ethnographic research in Dudi village in Western Kenya, this article explores how the lingering legacies of the 1990s HIV/AIDS epidemic shaped local perceptions of, and responses to, the COVID-19 pandemic and related vaccine controversies. Focusing on the lives of young women living with HIV, the article traces how their experiences of navigating HIV care, stigma, and gendered expectations intersected with anxieties around COVID-19 vaccination. These narratives are embedded within a broader historical and social landscape marked by grief, moral judgement, and structural exclusion. Past experiences with HIV are shown to inform contemporary fears around vaccination, reigniting multi-layered forms of stigma and casting women's bodies as sites of risk, suspicion, and control. By situating these responses within the long shadow of the AIDS epidemic, the article highlights how disease, memory, and gendered moralities continue to shape health experiences and interventions in deeply unequal ways.
Scientific Ritual: The Institutional Review Boards for Human Clinical Trials in Israel.
Eyal H
Med Anthropol Q · 2026 Mar · PMID 41115181 · Full text
This ethnographic study analyzes Israeli Institutional Review Boards (IRBs') main practices and discourses. I describe IRB operations as bureaucratic rituals derived from idealized scientific values, with physician-scien...
This ethnographic study analyzes Israeli Institutional Review Boards (IRBs') main practices and discourses. I describe IRB operations as bureaucratic rituals derived from idealized scientific values, with physician-scientist members serving as gatekeepers who perform boundary work to preserve professional independence. The findings show how temporal-spatial bureaucratic rituals separate scientists from nonscientists across different phases of the review process and limit ethical and scientific discussions within the IRBs that authorize clinical trials. The scientific discourse is constrained to administrative compliance, and ethical discourse is reduced to procedural form-checking. The work of IRBs thus redefines the relationship between bioscience and society as a hierarchical rather than a shared system, thereby preserving the myth of science as beyond external scrutiny and maintaining scientific autonomy despite IRBs' formal role as boundary organizations.
"It was tidak cocok (incompatible)": Incompatibility, Decoloniality, and Vaccine Hesitancy in Banda Aceh, Indonesia.
Romadhon DI
Med Anthropol Q · 2026 Jun · PMID 41114699 · Publisher ↗
In 2018, vaccine hesitancy marked the nationwide measles-rubella vaccination campaign in the Indonesian province of Aceh. The hesitancy, which was supported by the provincial government, stemmed from concerns over porcin...
In 2018, vaccine hesitancy marked the nationwide measles-rubella vaccination campaign in the Indonesian province of Aceh. The hesitancy, which was supported by the provincial government, stemmed from concerns over porcine contamination in the vaccine product. "Tidak cocok" (incompatible) became a pervasive statement used to rationalize the refusal to participate in the vaccination program, permeated personal narratives, public responses to a vaccine allergy case, and an official meeting to determine the vaccination campaign's future. In this article, I theorize incompatibility as a lexical item of decoloniality. Incompatibility fosters a sense of liberation, paving a pathway to refuse tools and systems considered unfit according to locally situated knowledge and historical experience. It further reclaims what has been marginalized, delegitimized, and ignored by dominant epistemic and political structures. I also suggest that many Islamic expressions arising during the vaccine hesitancy have given a distinct local flavor to the decolonial critique on vaccination. [Aceh, decoloniality, incompatibility, Indonesia, Islam, vaccine hesitancy].
"I'd rather die": Patients' will and decision-making practice in Japanese community psychiatry.
Kano Y
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Dec · PMID 40854159 · Full text
Recent mental health reforms have embraced patient autonomy and shared decision-making, where care unfolds through collaboration between clinicians and patients. However, how decision-making can improve in marginalized p...
Recent mental health reforms have embraced patient autonomy and shared decision-making, where care unfolds through collaboration between clinicians and patients. However, how decision-making can improve in marginalized psychiatric clinics remains unclear. This paper examines how social psychiatrists at a Japanese community clinic engage with patients' will-especially when it appears resistant, ambivalent, or self-destructive. At Sakura Clinic in Kanagawa, the challenge lies in navigating "strong will" (tsuyoi ishi)-instances where patients reject treatment, defy medical logic, or say, simply, "I'd rather die." Here, decision-making stretches across time, shaped by evolving attunement between patients, clinicians, and their environments. When patients make risky choices, psychiatrists face an urgent ethical question: is this will an existential stance to be respected, or the mark of structural violence to be refused?
"More Than Just the Two Percent": The reproductive politics of envisioning abortion and miscarriage in Turner syndrome.
Jones AJ
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Dec · PMID 40824939 · Publisher ↗
Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the political, legal, and medical boundaries of spontaneous, elective, and selective abortion are blurring. Based on ethnographic research on Turner Syndrome, a genetic condition...
Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the political, legal, and medical boundaries of spontaneous, elective, and selective abortion are blurring. Based on ethnographic research on Turner Syndrome, a genetic condition with a 98% miscarriage rate and uncertain abortion rates, this article examines the visual politics of reproduction and disability in the United States through the ambiguous treatment of miscarriage. Although infertile, my interlocutors with Turner syndrome emphasized how disability stereotypes, abortion unknowns, and miscarriage statistics impacted their lives. Centering our play More Than Just the Two Percent, I demonstrate how my interlocutors embodied various actors in reproductive experiences, including miscarried fetuses, to navigate the visibilities of their diagnosis and specify the value of their lives as social funds of knowledge-a process I term envisioning. Envisioning complicates notions of viability, personhood, privacy, spirituality, risk, luck, and survivorship that pro-life/pro-choice rhetorics flatten and may contribute to a more disability-oriented reproductive justice.
Epidemiology of conspiracy: Infected vaccines, infectious patients, and superspreaders for hire.
Atuk T
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Dec · PMID 40824843 · Publisher ↗
This article traces the viral life of HIV conspiracies in Turkey, not as peripheral noise but as central to the ways public health crises are interpreted, contested, and experienced. By offering "epidemiology of conspira...
This article traces the viral life of HIV conspiracies in Turkey, not as peripheral noise but as central to the ways public health crises are interpreted, contested, and experienced. By offering "epidemiology of conspiracy" both as a metaphor and an analytic, the article treats disease conspiracies not as epistemological failures, but as vernacular tools of meaning making-fragile yet forceful ways of navigating biopolitical abandonment, institutional opacity, and medical precarity. The paper examines three distinct conspiratorial narratives-ranging from infected vaccines to murderous patients to superspreaders hired by Big Pharma-and argues that these stories, while often dismissed as illogical or paranoid, are saturated with socio-political meaning and historical memory. Ultimately, the paper calls for a reparative, rather than dismissive, reading of conspiracy in medical anthropology, especially when studying epidemics in places where data is scarce, speech is policed, and stigma circulates with viral efficiency.
Evidence-based medicine and private clinics in Russia: Unlikely co-production of good care and profit-making.
Denisova M, Zvonareva O, Horstman K
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Sep · PMID 40720369 · Full text
Critical social science research demonstrates that evidence-based medicine (EBM) emerged through its proponents' deliberate efforts to defend EBM's knowledge production methods as credible and independent of commercial i...
Critical social science research demonstrates that evidence-based medicine (EBM) emerged through its proponents' deliberate efforts to defend EBM's knowledge production methods as credible and independent of commercial interests. In the present study, we expand this discussion by showing how EBM is co-produced with profit-making within the context of private clinics in Russia. Drawing on the ethnography of three private clinics in Russia, we explore how they strategically articulate EBM ideals to demarcate the boundaries between good and bad medical practices. We identified four forms of boundary work that private clinics perform to define their epistemic culture as different from those applying poor quality evidence, providing harmful prescriptions, over-relying on clinical experience, and practicing a top-down approach in patient relations. We discuss how, in the Russian healthcare context, EBM, instead of becoming the opposite of commerce, has become interwoven with and even dependent on private healthcare.
Rumor as ethical vernacular: Ebola and the womb in eastern Congo.
James M
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Sep · PMID 40692490 · Full text
The position of pregnant women in clinical research remains a topic of international ethical debate. Yet, the reflections of actual and potential trial participants, including pregnant women themselves, often remain abse...
The position of pregnant women in clinical research remains a topic of international ethical debate. Yet, the reflections of actual and potential trial participants, including pregnant women themselves, often remain absent. Following a policy reversal in 2019, pregnant women were eligible to participate in a second Ebola vaccine trial during an epidemic in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This article follows how this decision was perceived in Goma, a city in the DRC, the meanings and functions of the rumors that emerged about reproductive health, and how these rumors influenced pregnant women's experience of the trial. I argue that the womb became a site to discuss broader biopolitical anxieties about collective survival, but that rumors also became a vehicle for ethical debate amid uncertainty. Ethical debates about medical research continue locally through other ethical vernaculars- like rumors- and center on contested ideas of acceptable risk, shaped by collective historical experiences.
Contextualizing adherence: Iron supplementation treatment among Peruvian caretakers and their anemic children.
Dorsey AF
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Dec · PMID 40622775 · Publisher ↗
This article describes an ethnographic study of adherence to iron supplementation protocols in 50 anemic preschoolers and their caregivers living in a peri-urban district in Lima, Peru. I use aspects of the syndemic appr...
This article describes an ethnographic study of adherence to iron supplementation protocols in 50 anemic preschoolers and their caregivers living in a peri-urban district in Lima, Peru. I use aspects of the syndemic approach to highlight the challenges caregivers face in following the recommended treatment and burden of treatment theory to develop a deeper understanding of adherence in a community with persistent childhood anemia. Interpreting adherence as an ideology also helps illuminate how health professionals' claims about patient behavior reflect social inequalities. Thematic analysis of qualitative data identified three major challenges to iron supplementation adherence-time constraints, acute health concerns, and child agency. These themes show how socioeconomic conditions and emotional burdens impact caregivers' ability to follow the prescribed treatment. Despite these challenges, the relatively high rate of adherence contests assumptions that lack of adherence is the primary explanation for persistent anemia rates among preschoolers living in this community.
No rush: The relational time ethic and faith-based medical clinics in the United States.
Schwarz C
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Sep · PMID 40549936 · Publisher ↗
Based on ethnographic interviews with healthcare professionals from faith-based, Christian clinics in the United States, I develop the concept of the "relational time ethic." This ethic refers to the ways that healthcare...
Based on ethnographic interviews with healthcare professionals from faith-based, Christian clinics in the United States, I develop the concept of the "relational time ethic." This ethic refers to the ways that healthcare professionals seek to build relations with patients as persons and to demonstrate their valuing of lives through time expansion. In advancing this ethic, healthcare professionals are in part reflecting on their own well-being but are primarily making moral claims about the high quality of their care and critiquing a bureaucratic time model for healthcare delivery. The on-the-ground intricacies of the relational time ethic further anthropological understandings of the religious justifications for care and critique in biomedicine and bring attention to the ways that time comes to be constructed as an ethical practice in and of itself.
Lead as pharmakon: IQ, violence, and the racialization of a toxic element.
Graeter ST
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Dec · PMID 40534477 · Publisher ↗
By tracking lead toxicology and politics from the United States to Peru, this article shows how contemporary discourses of human lead exposure have become complexly racialized. Despite its nearly global ban from gasoline...
By tracking lead toxicology and politics from the United States to Peru, this article shows how contemporary discourses of human lead exposure have become complexly racialized. Despite its nearly global ban from gasoline and paint, lead poisoning remains a systemic health problem in marginalized communities throughout the world. Viewed as a "social pharmakon," lead's ongoing "cures" outweigh current social valuations of its systemic physiological harm in racially devalued communities. While scientific research linking lead to decreased IQ and increased violent behavior has attempted to animate broader public interest in the inequitable spread of lead exposure, it does so by reanimating racist tropes of biogeographic inferiority. Rather than dehumanizing lead-exposed individuals and communities, narratives of lead intoxication must integrate its immediate social and material harms in specific locales and as a symptom of systemic racial injustice at a global scale.
Euthanasia as a safeguard for living: Anticipation and incurable cancer in a Colombian context.
Sanz C
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Sep · PMID 40530739 · Full text
This article builds on years of ethnographic conversations I sustained with my father, 89, who lives in Colombia. Soon after getting diagnosed with an incurable Multiple Myeloma-a cancer known for unleashing prolonged an...
This article builds on years of ethnographic conversations I sustained with my father, 89, who lives in Colombia. Soon after getting diagnosed with an incurable Multiple Myeloma-a cancer known for unleashing prolonged and painful agonies-he withdrew from oncology treatments and secured access to euthanasia (assisted-dying) on his own, bypassing medico-insurance guidelines created to regulate this medical practice and prevent abuses. Eight years after withdrawing treatments, my dad is still alive. His case shines a light on how securing access to euthanasia may have had unintended therapeutic effects on existential fears, pain perception, and quality of life on his way to dying. My storytelling also seeks to discuss the ethical and legal dimensions of assisted-dying in Colombia, especially for patients who do not consider life as biological deterioration, and who are caught between aggressive treatments and painful agonies, on the one side, and burdensome medico-insurance bureaucracy, on the other.
Anxious Projections: Mass Hysteria and the Problem of Interpretation.
Seale-Feldman A
Med Anthropol Q · 2025 Dec · PMID 40491342 · Full text
Stories of "mass hysteria" among teenage girls have often graced the headlines of Nepal's local and national newspapers, creating a public spectacle of a strange and mysterious form of affliction. Treatments include both...
Stories of "mass hysteria" among teenage girls have often graced the headlines of Nepal's local and national newspapers, creating a public spectacle of a strange and mysterious form of affliction. Treatments include both shamanic rituals and psychosocial interventions, a new therapeutic modality that has gained prominence over the past two decades following the rise of global mental health. This article shows how the discourse around the collective affliction of teenage girls reveals a number of anxieties at the heart of Nepali society regarding the moral rupture of community, the status of shamanic knowledge, and gender and the management of emotion. I argue that due to the ambiguity of cause, the dramatic public display of symptoms, and the absence of the experiencing subject of affliction, cases of "mass hysteria" offer a blank screen onto which the broader collective anxieties of a society in flux are projected and debated.
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