Reproduction is political. Citation is political. In this essay, I link the anthropological concept of reproduction (biological and social), which is closely tied to kin-making, to citation. I suggest that citation can b...Reproduction is political. Citation is political. In this essay, I link the anthropological concept of reproduction (biological and social), which is closely tied to kin-making, to citation. I suggest that citation can be viewed as "academic" reproduction and kin-making. To make this argument, I describe my professional and intellectual journey as a Black woman anthropologist based in the global South. I show how the amalgamation of the various contexts in which I was immersed brought up questions of race, nationality, colonialism, profession, and gender and influenced the direction my research took, as well as my scholarly position and engagement. In the article, I lay bare the academic stakes of the path that I have chosen. [citation, reproduction, scholarship, politics, anthropology].
Citational practices reflect values and valuation in academia. Far from being merely consciously or unconsciously political, they reflect academic "upbringing" in complex ways, and, although one may be unhappy at how the...Citational practices reflect values and valuation in academia. Far from being merely consciously or unconsciously political, they reflect academic "upbringing" in complex ways, and, although one may be unhappy at how they were raised, it still may not be clear how to live better. In this article, I highlight aspects of my upbringing in anthropology, noting how I was instructed in citational practice by senior anthropologists from biological and social anthropology. In exploring my journey from naivete to an understanding of citational politics, I describe two figures, the giant and the mule. These figures illustrate the impacts of the practices I was taught. One comes to us from the history of great white men of Europe, the other from Black feminist anthropological fiction of the United States.
Long before recent calls to decolonize anthropology, practitioners of "national anthropologies"-such as local anthropologists from/in/of the Philippines-have sought to implement a more inclusive kind of scholarship, and...Long before recent calls to decolonize anthropology, practitioners of "national anthropologies"-such as local anthropologists from/in/of the Philippines-have sought to implement a more inclusive kind of scholarship, and this has been reflected in their citational practices. Indeed, a look at the scholarly output of Philippine anthropologists would show a diverse set of citations that feature local scholarship, including those written in Filipino. As I will show in this article, however, not all citations are equal. Theoretical and methodological citations are typically drawn from Euro-American scholars while scholarship from the Global South is typically invoked as illustrative examples, as parallels, and to set context. Such citational practices, I argue, are a consequence of particular disciplinary histories and divergent priorities. They reinforce the inequalities of power and academic capital within medical anthropology, raising the need for more reflexivity not just about whom medical anthropologists cite but for what reasons.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2023 Jun · PMID 36989382
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Unspeakability is a dominant analytic lens in scholarship on gendered violence in India, but women can and do speak out. This article examines how Bengali women complain about domestic violence through peter katha, the b...Unspeakability is a dominant analytic lens in scholarship on gendered violence in India, but women can and do speak out. This article examines how Bengali women complain about domestic violence through peter katha, the belly's word. The capacious pet (belly) is the seat of tension, where abuse dwells in the body. At a clinic in Kolkata, India, women describe sensations of abdominal pain, pressure, and hunger to convey patterns and temporalities of violence. Yet complaints of belly pain go unacknowledged by local clinicians. Hygiene discourses frame poor women's bodies, not structural violence, as the problem. Peter katha is more than an idiom of distress: it is a genre of embodied complaint that illuminates violence as the accrual of harm and, in its dynamic and layered quality, moves beyond a binary of disclosure or concealment. Anthropologists may use peter katha to extend the conceptual vocabulary of gender and silence. [domestic violence, kinship, complaint, hygiene, belly, India].
Med Anthropol Q
· 2023 Jun · PMID 36989348
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China and India have become major producers of antibiotics, and the world has become highly dependent on them. Since 2000, the competition among Chinese and Indian manufacturers on key antibiotic ingredients has become i...China and India have become major producers of antibiotics, and the world has become highly dependent on them. Since 2000, the competition among Chinese and Indian manufacturers on key antibiotic ingredients has become increasingly intense in a series of trade disputes involving anti-dumping investigations. Analyzing these trade disputes, we find that they provide a space of communication and contestation where seemingly objective facts about pharmaceutical ingredients are transformed into debatable subjects, which are used and sometimes manipulated by stakeholders of conflicting interests. The disputes reveal entangled configurations and multilayered stakes in the China-India pharmaceutical nexus that often defy polarized national interests. Stakeholders must juggle multiple factors, including public health interests, nationalist sentiments, and corporate profit, in negotiating the national identities and the physical and chemical properties of "standard" pharmaceutical ingredients. The disputes also highlight the coexistence of collaboration and competition among Chinese and Indian stakeholders in global pharmaceutical supply chains. [antibiotics, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), pharmaceutical nexus, dumping, trade disputes, China-India].
Medical anthropologists have long wrestled with the problematic mind/body opposition that plagues both biomedicine and Euro-American epistemologies. However, medical anthropology as a field has been surprisingly reticent...Medical anthropologists have long wrestled with the problematic mind/body opposition that plagues both biomedicine and Euro-American epistemologies. However, medical anthropology as a field has been surprisingly reticent to engage with visual media forms and creative expression, whether film, comics, or animation, even as these media have been shown to augment the bodily and emotional impact on the viewers as compared to solely text-based media. This essay is an attempt to rethink how medical anthropologists can engage more with visual media, taking as an example two comic memoirs created by physicians about their medical training: "Healing Alone" (2019) and "Dailies of a Junior Doc" (2021). These webcomics effectively convey strong emotional and bodily experiences tied to medical education, and are powerful examples of how comics can be leveraged to reexamine assumptions about who can be doctors, how medical training molds them, and what sustains their practice. [medical training, webcomics, visual media, Cartesianism].
Med Anthropol Q
· 2023 Mar · PMID 36469657
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Global health metrics come into being in complex circumstances. Through ethnography that focuses closely on the forces driving uneven obstetric case reporting in a government hospital in northern Pakistan, this article c...Global health metrics come into being in complex circumstances. Through ethnography that focuses closely on the forces driving uneven obstetric case reporting in a government hospital in northern Pakistan, this article challenges the integrity of the health care system documentation on which the state and non-state interventions and evaluations rely. Incomplete and skipped case records not only resulted from the time constraints posed by work on a busy maternity ward. They also helped vulnerable frontline providers disguise and avoid accountability for the aftermaths of the medical mismanagement and maltreatment made more likely by infrastructural scarcity and disarray. Yet the provider-side protections these tactics afforded came at patients' expense because they rendered error, wrongdoing, and iatrogenesis as invisible and unactionable. The sum of these reporting practices was "hospital paperworlds": defensively authored and aspirational datasets that conveyed desired rather than achieved outcomes, decontextualized risks and harms, and were too-rarely triangulated for their correlational significances or deficiencies. [hospital ethnography, obstetrics, case reporting, metrics, Pakistan].
Buchbinder M, Mishtal J, Singer EO
… +1 more, Wendland CL
Med Anthropol Q
· 2022 Dec · PMID 36433774
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This statement summarizes key findings from anthropological and related scholarship on the harmful consequences of inadequate abortion access, leading the Society for Medical Anthropology to register profound concern abo...This statement summarizes key findings from anthropological and related scholarship on the harmful consequences of inadequate abortion access, leading the Society for Medical Anthropology to register profound concern about the recent Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson. After circulation to SMA members for input, a finalized version passed a membership vote by an overwhelming margin. This statement complements one produced by the Council for Anthropology and Reproduction, available here.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2023 Mar · PMID 36367145
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Emerging evidence suggests that the COVD-19 pandemic is eroding childbirth rights. Drawing on narratives of women who gave birth in Canada during the pandemic, this article exposes a paradox in that policies aimed at lim...Emerging evidence suggests that the COVD-19 pandemic is eroding childbirth rights. Drawing on narratives of women who gave birth in Canada during the pandemic, this article exposes a paradox in that policies aimed at limiting interpersonal contact implicitly acknowledge the connection between health, well-being, and the social context of people's lives, yet they frame this relationality as a liability to be eliminated. They do this despite the many benefits that social support is known to confer for pregnancy and childbirth. I suggest that obstetric violence theory could be expanded to include the perinatal health care system's failure to consider the well-being of pregnant and birthing persons as necessarily interdependent with that of close others. Conscientiously and routinely making the safeguarding of these relationships a priority in perinatal health care planning may strengthen existing health care systems against certain forms of obstetric violence. [childbirth, COVID-19, obstetric violence, relational personhood, Canada].
Med Anthropol Q
· 2023 Mar · PMID 36367138
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Using a Black feminist embodied approach, this article analyzes the ways in which people in Santiago de Cuba draw on their own embodied practices, sensory experiences, and popular knowledge to determine what forms of ing...Using a Black feminist embodied approach, this article analyzes the ways in which people in Santiago de Cuba draw on their own embodied practices, sensory experiences, and popular knowledge to determine what forms of ingestion (food, drink, etc.) are good for the body. Influenced by historical ideals of food consumption and colonial entanglements, Cubans use a combination of knowledge gleaned from biomedicine, official nutrition guidelines, and humoral medicine, which are not always in agreement, to ensure that they are taking care of their bodies appropriately. In addition to these external sources, they also continuously assess their own embodied responses to ingestion (e.g., pain, illness, headaches, or other bodily sensations) to determine which foods and drinks should be consumed. Practices of healthy ingestion may also vary between people and circumstance, which people learn over time and from one another, layering on another interpersonal dimension of embodied knowledge. [Cuba, food, embodiment, health, ingestion].
Med Anthropol Q
· 2022 Dec · PMID 36250638
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Black geographies, Black feminist anthropology, and related fields have provided substantial evidence attesting to the effects of racially violent spatial practices such as dispossession, racial segregation, mass incarce...Black geographies, Black feminist anthropology, and related fields have provided substantial evidence attesting to the effects of racially violent spatial practices such as dispossession, racial segregation, mass incarceration, and redlining for the health outcomes and life chances of Black communities and other racialized groups, and conversely, the political and healing potential of placemaking projects. We foreground theory from Black geographies and Black feminist work on care to examine care/giving cartographies at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. We present findings from semi-structured interviews conducted virtually in 2021 that combined care/giving narratives and counter-mapping with 20 African American residents of Tucson, Arizona, as part of a longer-term community-based placemaking project. Interview data underscore the spatial and discursive pervasiveness of anti-Blackness, including within biomedical spaces of care, and negative effects on health. We argue that narratives centering care/giving alongside practices of counter-mapping are indictments of the institutional structures abetting anti-Black racism as a structuring, spatial logic. [anti-Black racism, COVID-19, caregiving, counter-mapping].
Med Anthropol Q
· 2022 Dec · PMID 36121921
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Based on longitudinal research conducted with 21 Mexican immigrants between 2018 and 2021, this article examines the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic posed to undocumented immigrants in the United States attempting to pr...Based on longitudinal research conducted with 21 Mexican immigrants between 2018 and 2021, this article examines the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic posed to undocumented immigrants in the United States attempting to provide care for aging parents in Mexico. As the United States excluded undocumented immigrants from pandemic support, the pandemic undermined their ability to provide health care for their parents even as the Mexican public health care system crumbled. Meanwhile, as the pandemic hastened their parents' demise, it thwarted immigrants' ability to time returns to see their parents before they died. While scholars have amply documented how spatial disparities exacerbated the impact of the pandemic among marginalized groups, few have examined the temporal disruptions caused by the pandemic. This article suggests that the pandemic provoked particular distress by desynchronizing the temporalities of family life across borders and preventing immigrants' abilities to coordinate care for their parents in time. [COVID-19, transnational families, eldercare, death, time].