In settler colonial contexts, health interventions are often sites for contesting authority, belonging, and protection. On Lingít Aaní, colonial responses to infectious disease illustrate how vaccination and public healt...In settler colonial contexts, health interventions are often sites for contesting authority, belonging, and protection. On Lingít Aaní, colonial responses to infectious disease illustrate how vaccination and public health practices produced racial hierarchies and secured white futurity by exposing Tlingit people to biomedical extraction, risk, and surveillance. I conceptualize this dynamic as inoculating whiteness, a situated analytic for understanding how immunological interventions shielded settler bodies from biological and political threat while exposing Indigenous bodies to experimentation, surveillance, and managed vulnerability. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on colonial public health based in Sheet'ká, this article examines how inoculating whiteness operated during COVID-19 before tracing its genealogy through smallpox vaccination under Russian colonialism and BCG experimentation and tuberculosis sanatoria under U.S. governance. It argues public health has been instrumental to settler colonial governance and racialization and highlights Tlingit practices of collective care that articulate alternative frameworks for health and sovereignty.
Antibiotic use surged during COVID-19 despite it being a viral illness, heightening global concerns about antimicrobial resistance (AMR). In Türkiye - where antibiotic consumption and AMR were already high - this paradox...Antibiotic use surged during COVID-19 despite it being a viral illness, heightening global concerns about antimicrobial resistance (AMR). In Türkiye - where antibiotic consumption and AMR were already high - this paradox exposed longstanding tensions between policy and practice. Türkiye has adopted World Health Organization guidelines promoting the "rational" (akılcı) use of antibiotics, yet everyday healthcare encounters reveal how these reforms are translated, negotiated and reinterpreted. Drawing on fieldwork in Istanbul, this article shows how local expectations of antibiotics as symbols of care and professional competence shape prescription and use. Rather than aligning practice with policy, stewardship reforms are absorbed into existing moral and relational norms, reinforcing rather than transforming existing dynamics of care. Global stewardship attempts, as they filter through local systems, understandings and situated priorities, are vernacularized in ways that diverge from their original intentions - redistributing accountability without addressing the structural conditions that shape antibiotic use.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42372225
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Using gender as an analytic, I parse out how the historical gendered, classed, and racialized roots of the 12 Step Program remain present in its therapeutic model, even in global contexts beyond its original formulation....Using gender as an analytic, I parse out how the historical gendered, classed, and racialized roots of the 12 Step Program remain present in its therapeutic model, even in global contexts beyond its original formulation. These foundations continue to shape therapeutic logics and experience within the Program, in positive and negative ways. I outline several key experiential points of friction with the 12 Step Program for women in one residential drug rehabilitation center in the United States-México border zone, demonstrating the gender of this therapeutic model's framework. Clarifying the Program's gender of care helps make sense of why so many women find this therapeutic model inadequate, without discounting the very real support 12 Step Programs have provided to both women and men around the world. Attention to these frictions with structures (in this case a therapeutic model) illuminates the implicit frameworks that organize our world and direct our attention to developing novel frameworks/institutions.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42348830
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This paper analyzes two disparate experiences of buprenorphine, a medication for opioid addiction, in California. Within the context of the U.S. War on Drugs and after decades of criminalization, buprenorphine represents...This paper analyzes two disparate experiences of buprenorphine, a medication for opioid addiction, in California. Within the context of the U.S. War on Drugs and after decades of criminalization, buprenorphine represents a shift toward outpatient medical treatment of opioid addiction, but it has been unequally distributed and experienced across geographic settings and populations. Drawing on my interlocutor's description of buprenorphine's "hold," I interrogate how buprenorphine's symbolic and pharmacological power to embrace, restrain, and otherwise "hold" people arises through its social context. "Holding" is a patient-driven epistemology, working metaphorically and neurochemically, illustrating raced, classed, and gendered positionalities that simultaneously express and constrain forms of agency and resistance in ideological struggles over the meanings of care in addiction treatment. Buprenorphine's "hold," or lack thereof, can be read as a neurochemical embodiment of state violence, revealing intensities of carceral forms of "care" and possibilities for transforming addiction treatment meanings.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42340108
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Documented migrant workers from Indonesia recruited for work in Malaysia need to undergo tuberculosis screenings before being issued work permits and visas. Centered on the production, circulation, and interpretation of...Documented migrant workers from Indonesia recruited for work in Malaysia need to undergo tuberculosis screenings before being issued work permits and visas. Centered on the production, circulation, and interpretation of chest X-ray images, these screenings are shaped in concrete, practical ways by the demands of border control regulations requiring them. By focusing on how these screenings are practiced in Indonesian clinics, I argue that migrant tuberculosis screenings in the Indonesia-Malaysia migration corridor enact a distinct form of tuberculosis, co-determined by its relation to border control-what I call border tuberculosis. The notion of border tuberculosis draws attention to how biomedical practices and standards are adjusted in ways that lend themselves to the selective and productive function of the border. Thus, the article shows that these biomedical screenings are not disinterested instances of data gathering, but constitutive and productive elements of the particular mode of governing borders they are embedded in.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42314061
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This paper explores the concept of reproductive justice within the UK context, focusing on the pivotal role of Abuela Doulas. It critiques the inadequate investment in grassroots activism led by Black individuals and exa...This paper explores the concept of reproductive justice within the UK context, focusing on the pivotal role of Abuela Doulas. It critiques the inadequate investment in grassroots activism led by Black individuals and examines the disparities in Black maternal health. Highlighting the work of Abuela Doulas and the emerging prominence of Black academics in this field, this essay aims to illustrate the crucial need for culturally competent care and systemic change.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42296435
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Dolores St. is an alley in Marikina City, the Philippines, where a small-scale pagawaan (shoemaking workshop) continues to stand among residential buildings and provides informal employment to its neighbors. Here, the sh...Dolores St. is an alley in Marikina City, the Philippines, where a small-scale pagawaan (shoemaking workshop) continues to stand among residential buildings and provides informal employment to its neighbors. Here, the shoemakers and other residents have a complex relationship with shoemaking, an industry embedded in their community for over a century. They are sanay (habituated) to toxic industrial glue. This paper offers perspectives into peoples' understanding and experiences of harm and health through participant observation, interviews, and focus group discussions, revealing how being sanay to the pandikit (industrial glue) is embodied and is an active process through how shoemakers sense, know, and act in response to living with chemicals.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42296422
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In this article, I examine how institutionalized older adults in Peru articulate suffering through the idiom of la nada-"nothingness"-and how this shapes desires for euthanasia. Moving from close ethnography of bodies in...In this article, I examine how institutionalized older adults in Peru articulate suffering through the idiom of la nada-"nothingness"-and how this shapes desires for euthanasia. Moving from close ethnography of bodies in space and time to structural and ethical discourses on euthanasia, I argue that calls for euthanasia arise not only from biomedical suffering or terminal illness, but also from socially produced experiences of relational erosion, confinement, and moral invisibility. Residents' refrain-"no tengo nada"-signals not only material lack but the collapse of reciprocal ties, autonomy, and recognition. Euthanasia thus becomes a moral claim that life cannot be defined by biological survival, absent dignity and belonging. The article challenges narrow bioethical frameworks and shows how end-of-life suffering is constituted through structural abandonment and social death, reframing the wish for euthanasia as a protest against life reduced to mere endurance without dignity.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42294560
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Drawing on clinical fieldwork in NHS general practice in East London, I consider the relationship between time, chronic illness, and therapeutic endeavor. Over the course of three treatment narratives, I attempt to show...Drawing on clinical fieldwork in NHS general practice in East London, I consider the relationship between time, chronic illness, and therapeutic endeavor. Over the course of three treatment narratives, I attempt to show the negative labor that I claim is implied when clinical time is used to watch and wait as somebody is "wearing out" from chronic conditions. This may be the only form of care available to clinicians in situations where medicine is limited in what it can do to intervene. It emerges in response to illnesses that must be allowed to run their course and recurring symptoms that must somehow be tolerated, tarried with, or "waited out." The aim of the paper is to try to engage the grey area between medical intervention and non-intervention, where time in the clinic is offered in the service of helping people to wear out on their own terms.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42289103
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HIV research often assumes that disclosure during research is both necessary and desirable for participants. This article challenges that assumption by proposing hermeneutic reflexivity as a practice-based mode of enquir...HIV research often assumes that disclosure during research is both necessary and desirable for participants. This article challenges that assumption by proposing hermeneutic reflexivity as a practice-based mode of enquiry that does not depend on full disclosure of HIV experiences or coherent illness narratives, but rather on co-creation. Drawing on a multimodal ethnographic project with people living with HIV in Chile, we explore how silence, ambiguity and speculation can become central to image-making and sense-making. Hermeneutic reflexivity foregrounds aesthetic sensitivity, mutual questioning and shared authorship in co-creating collaborative mise-en-scène, fostering an ethnographic context in which forms of expression emerge that would not have surfaced through conventional narrative or testimonial methods. Grounded in phenomenological approaches to situated knowledge, this method reduces the risk of re-traumatization while fostering narrative agency, offering an ethical alternative for participatory health research in contexts where full disclosure may be risky for participants.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42289100
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This article uses case studies to explore the nature and limits of accompagnement, the self-consciously "relational" care practiced by palliative care providers in Montagnac, a town in southern France. Medical anthropolo...This article uses case studies to explore the nature and limits of accompagnement, the self-consciously "relational" care practiced by palliative care providers in Montagnac, a town in southern France. Medical anthropologists have attended to the ways that care premised on individual choice often fails as care, particularly for marginalized patient groups presumed to be incapable of making "good" decisions. This paper asks when, where, and why self-consciously relational care like accompagnement might also fail. I argue that despite a claim to "meet patients where they are," accompagnement, like choice, requires providers to project their own assumptions about the nature and telos of human beings onto their patients. When patients fail to mirror those assumptions, "relationality" quickly turns into paternalism. This argument complicates medical anthropology's embrace of relationality as an antidote to the violence associated with choice-based models of medicine.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42289091
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The discourse surrounding surrogacy portrays pregnancy as a temporary process, depicting surrogates as neutral "carriers" whose involvement concludes at birth. This narrative minimizes gestation's biological significance...The discourse surrounding surrogacy portrays pregnancy as a temporary process, depicting surrogates as neutral "carriers" whose involvement concludes at birth. This narrative minimizes gestation's biological significance despite evidence of its lasting effects on both women and children. We interviewed 47 retired Israeli surrogates using thematic analysis to examine how they navigate biological experiences. Surrogates employ frameworks that dismiss gestational bio-ties and emphasize genetic kinship, empowering their act of giving by rendering gestation inconsequential. This framework benefits surrogates, intended parents, and the industry by allowing narratives that overlook certain bio-ties. Two instances challenge this: bodies "talking back" through biological disruptions and intended mothers confronting surrogates about lasting bio-imprints on their babies. These challenges produce "embodied dissonance"-biology clashing with social expectations-and lead to "collaborative biologies," forcing recognition of connections the dominant framework erases. This study addresses bio-ties in surrogacy, paving the way for new frameworks reflecting human reproduction's complexities.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42289087
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Using ethnographic vignettes from my doctoral research, this article contextualizes and analyses Britain's Black maternal health crisis- a crisis of reproductive racism- through a Black feminist lens. The inequities Blac...Using ethnographic vignettes from my doctoral research, this article contextualizes and analyses Britain's Black maternal health crisis- a crisis of reproductive racism- through a Black feminist lens. The inequities Black mothers face has a strong Black (and) feminist history of being analyzed in relation to the politics of anti-Black racism and misogynoir as they are upheld and sanctioned by the State and the maternity services. This article, therefore, positions Black feminist consciousness as the overarching ethical and analytical framework that contemporary researchers must (re)turn to when studying reproductive racism in Britain. In light of this argument, I draw attention to the Black feminist articulations of racism, uneven reproduction, and reproductive necropolitics (introducing the idea of "necropolitical mythopoeia"), arguing that they are robust analytical tools that can kickstart the epistemological (r)evolution that is desperately needed in the British research landscape.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42284559
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In the past decade in France, several cases of mistreatment and abuse of Black women within the healthcare system have made headlines, sparking much-needed conversations among activists, and some medical personnel, on me...In the past decade in France, several cases of mistreatment and abuse of Black women within the healthcare system have made headlines, sparking much-needed conversations among activists, and some medical personnel, on medical racism. In this article, I share insights from my work as an anthropologist, health consultant, and feminist activist in France and Mexico. I focus on one aspect of medical racism, the so-called "Mediterranean syndrome," and its impact on the reproductive care (or lack thereof) offered to Black, Arab, and other-than-White women. I also reflect on the trainings I provide to medical personnel on medical racism. These trainings reveal the complexities faced by personnel who seek change, though subject to their own bias and that of their superiors.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42228809
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This article investigates how Kenyan citizens access healthcare within the framework of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) reforms. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it reconceptualizes waiting as a politically structured ph...This article investigates how Kenyan citizens access healthcare within the framework of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) reforms. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it reconceptualizes waiting as a politically structured phenomenon rather than a simple delay. The analysis shows that UHC reforms do not eliminate waiting but instead redistribute it, resulting in new bureaucratic bottlenecks, infrastructural limitations, and unpredictable care timelines. The concept of 'thin alignment' is introduced to characterize a temporally unstable condition in which endurance and improvisational strategies coexist as patients navigate fragmented healthcare systems. Individuals depend on kinship networks, informal payments, religious practices, and social connections to make their suffering visible and actionable. By emphasizing temporality, this article illustrates how UHC reconfigures access to care and informs broader discussions on infrastructure, inequality, and the politics of care.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 Jun · PMID 42186197
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In this article we analyze how family involvement in intensive care in the United Kingdom (UK) was reconfigured through the reordering of proximity and distance during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the eff...In this article we analyze how family involvement in intensive care in the United Kingdom (UK) was reconfigured through the reordering of proximity and distance during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the effects thereof. The introduction of visiting restrictions disrupted established modes of involvement in intensive care, prompting family members, hospital staff and, when able, patients, to craft alternative modes of involvement. Drawing on narrative interviews with patients and family members, some of whom had clinical training themselves, we describe three ways in which they did so: establishing connections and communication, personalizing care at a distance, and making kin and virtual co-presence. We conclude that the ensuing subject positions afforded involvement of some kind, but also came at a cost. Our analysis furthers the conceptual understanding of care practices beyond their reliance on proximity and distance, and highlights that their choreography shapes new possibilities as well as vulnerabilities.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 May · PMID 42150153
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Increasing punitive drug regulations in Japan amplify longstanding tensions within psychiatric practice, pushing psychiatrists to balance clinical obligations with complex socio-legal demands. This article analyzes how p...Increasing punitive drug regulations in Japan amplify longstanding tensions within psychiatric practice, pushing psychiatrists to balance clinical obligations with complex socio-legal demands. This article analyzes how psychiatrists specializing in illicit substance use disorders to navigate escalating criminalization by developing diagnostic frameworks such as "carceral harm"-attributing symptoms primarily to policing and incarceration threats-and "future treatability," wherein addiction is an anticipated, incomplete phenomenon justifying ongoing medical care for patients facing imprisonment. Drawing from ethnographic research at Japan's National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry and semi-structured interviews with psychiatrists, the study demonstrates how these clinical interventions simultaneously address ethical demands for compassionate care yet risk reinforcing psychiatry's historical associations with repression. The findings reveal psychiatrists' active role in reshaping medico-legal discourses around addiction, highlighting clinical practice as a site where care and punishment intersect and reconfigure each other in reference to a medico-legal theory of illicit drug addiction.
Med Anthropol Q
· 2026 May · PMID 42119029
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The following article seeks to explore and analyze the use of lay and traditional medicines among Latin migrants in Spain, and the way in which these forms of treatment are accompanied by identity discourses and collecti...The following article seeks to explore and analyze the use of lay and traditional medicines among Latin migrants in Spain, and the way in which these forms of treatment are accompanied by identity discourses and collective representations. The narratives and descriptions presented in this text are the result of ethnographic research on transnational health/illness/care processes, therapeutic itineraries and the overseas reproduction of folk practices from Latin America. In a pluralistic scenario loaded with barriers and structural difficulties, actions of self-care and home-based remedies facilitate problem solving, but also seem to act as a form of affiliation, resistance, negotiation of marginalized identities and an adjustment to people's new social space.
This article examines how institutional frameworks in South Korea erase nonlegal caregiving relationships within hospice care environments. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork, the study delineates how pati...This article examines how institutional frameworks in South Korea erase nonlegal caregiving relationships within hospice care environments. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork, the study delineates how patients are categorized as "unclaimed" despite the presence of long-term companions or cohabitants who provide intimate end-of-life care. It further explores how these exclusions extend beyond dying, shaping postmortem decision-making and the institutional recognition of grief. Legal frameworks rooted in the hojeok (family registry) dictate who is authorized to grieve, make decisions, or be acknowledged as kin. Through two cases, the article demonstrates how bureaucratic classifications function as moral technologies that erase relational labor and constrain affective ties. Engaging feminist care ethics and anthropological theories of relatedness, it argues that unclaimed death is not the absence of kinship but the result of its legal misrecognition. By tracing everyday mechanisms of exclusion, the study calls for rethinking recognition, care, and kinship at end-of-life.