Wiley-Online-Library: Medical Anthropology Quarterly: Table of Contents

The “Mediterranean syndrome” and racism in French healthcare

Mounia El Kotni — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:23:47 -0700

Abstract

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.

Sensing the Landscape: An Ethnography of Blindness By Karis Jade Petty, New York, NY: Routledge, 2025, 208 pp. ISBN: 978‐0‐367‐65022‐3

Greg Weinstein — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:35:13 -0700

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, EarlyView.

Betwixt playing the waiting game and waiting in vain: Temporal governance and the thin alignment of care under universal health coverage in Kenya

Edwin Ambani Ameso — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:44:55 -0700

Abstract

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.

Care without co‐presence: Crafting alternative modes of involvement in UK intensive care in times of COVID‐19

Annelieke Driessen, Lisa Hinton — Mon, 25 May 2026 22:04:17 -0700

Abstract

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.

Straddling “The Gulf Between Medicine and Law”: Medico‐legal addiction and Japanese psychiatry

Selim Gokce Atici — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:08:56 -0700

Abstract

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.

Editorial: Centering uneven reproduction in anthropology

Patricia Perrenoud — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:29:53 -0700

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, EarlyView.

Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru By Justin Perez, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025, 264 pp. Price: $27.95. ISBN: 978‐1‐4780‐3180‐2

Joseph Jay Sosa — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:50:27 -0700

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, EarlyView.

“We always heal like this”: Illness management and identity expression in Latin American migrants in Spain

Muriel Lamarque — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:49:21 -0700

Abstract

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.

Erased by law: Kinship, care, and bureaucratic exclusion at the end of life in South Korea

Seok Joo Youn — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 11:23:54 -0700

Abstract

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.

That sinkin’ feeling: Environmentally induced distress on a disappearing island

Jonna Yarrington — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:42:42 -0700

Abstract

Residents of Tangier Island, Virginia, a subsiding island in the Chesapeake Bay, embody psychosocial dimensions of environmental change. Analysis of ethnographic data shows islanders’ experiences and articulations of anxiety, panic, and despair as “that sinkin’ feeling,” resulting from the stress of living with the long-term threat of imminent displacement. Islanders generally acknowledge higher-order causes, such as economic precarity, socio-spatial and institutional losses, and demographic decline, rather than the underlying ecological changes that produce them. The reality and threat of land subsidence not only reshapes the physical island, but undermines social relations among islanders, resulting in often tragic outcomes as many attempt to escape into substance abuse and suicide. On Tangier Island, ecological changes, including those caused by anthropogenic climate changes such as sea-level rise, are the prime cause of islanders’ crisis of well-being—disappearing feelings among disappearing people on a disappearing island.

Maraña: War and disease in the jungles of Colombia By Lina Pinto‐García, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2025. 205 pp.

Sebastián Ramírez H. — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:43:49 -0700

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Volume 40, Issue 1, March 2026.

Embodied progress: A cultural account of assisted conception By Sarah Franklin, New York: Routledge. 2022. 231 pp.

Katie Waeldner — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:43:49 -0700

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Volume 40, Issue 1, March 2026.

Dust inside: Fighting and living with asbestos‐related disasters in Brazil By Agata Mazzeo, New York: Berghahn Books. 2020. 202 pp.

David Loher — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:43:49 -0700

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Volume 40, Issue 1, March 2026.

In the shadow of HIV: Fear, rumor, and stigma among young women living with HIV in COVID‐19 pandemic in Western Kenya

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:43:49 -0700

Abstract

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.

Aging affordances: Navigating expectations of dementia prevention for aging adults in Canada

Cynthia Lazzaroni, Annette Leibing — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:43:49 -0700

Abstract

Dementia prevention now focuses on individual lifestyle choices as loci of intervention in the hope of delaying or preventing cognitive impairment in aging. Drawing from interviews with dementia experts and middle-aged adults in Canada, we discuss how prevention expectations compete with adults’ experiences, showing that enacting prevention is not simple but rather fraught with tensions. Addressing the troubles of prevention, we propose aging affordances as the particular ways mid-life adults construct, make sense of, and act toward their aging process, including how they navigate expectations of prevention amidst tensions that fashion their relationships with their environment. We take the environment in a broad sense to include social and cultural systems of values and discourses, such as dementia prevention recommendations. It allows us to turn the preventive focus on its head, looking not at its normative behavioral prescriptions but at the range of possibilities mid-life adults strive for as they age.

The Promise and Perils of Online Abortion in Brazil

Alejandra Marks — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:43:49 -0700

Abstract

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.

Enduring and the horizon of repair: French Caribbean post‐stroke rehabilitation amid health inequity

Raphaëlle Melissa Rabanes — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:43:49 -0700

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research with patients and therapists in post-stroke rehabilitation, this article explores how Guadeloupeans strive to exist on their own terms amid postcolonial health inequities, forms of marginalization and institutional disrepair. I argue that French territorial health inequities must be understood in relation to colonial health inequities and reveal the long history of socioracial stratification in the French Caribbean. I then turn to the experience of a patient to examine how she confronts the limitations of her life chances. As she and other Guadeloupean stroke survivors push back against the contours of life delineated by systemic issues, they exist in close engagement with the horizon of life, in a movement I propose to call enduring.

Living a “good death”: Caring for solitary deaths in Japan

Hiroko Kumaki — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:43:49 -0700

Abstract

How do public health metrics of “good death” shape care and everyday life? Concerns over dying alone has become prevalent worldwide. In Japan, social anxieties over solitary deaths (kodokushi) have intensified in a rapidly aging society. In response, care practices have emerged to keep people social in life and death. Through ethnographic fieldwork in a tsunami-affected town in Miyagi, I examine how post-disaster care has been reorganized in response to fears of kodokushi. Care workers improvised their activities to reconcile bureaucratic demands for “statistics of sociality” with survivors’ shifting needs and desires. These activities demonstrate the impact of standardized scripts of “good death” on the quality of life and care of those they aim to protect. At the same time, they reveal the potential for care that embraces the indeterminacy and situatedness of what constitutes a good death, allowing for diverse ways of living and dying well.

要約

本研究は、孤独死・孤立死防止をめぐる公衆衛生指標が、ケア実践と日常生活をいかに形成するのかを検討する。孤独死への懸念は世界的に高まっており、日本でも急速な高齢化に伴いその社会的不安が顕著である。本稿は、宮城県の津波被災地における人類学的調査にもとづき、災害後のケアが孤独死への懸念に沿ってどのように再編されてきたのかを明らかにする。支援員たちは、行政が求める指標と被災者の変化するニーズとのあいだで葛藤しつつ、日々の実践を柔軟に調整していた。これらの取り組みは、「望ましい死のあり方」を標準化する枠組みが生活とケアに及ぼす影響を示すとともに、その不確定性を受容し、多様な生と死のあり方を可能にするケアの潜在力を示唆する。

Working through cancer: Economic precarity and the social meaning of survival for parent‐survivors in the United States

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:43:49 -0700

Abstract

While US cancer survival rates have improved in recent years, the rising incidence of early-onset cancers means cancer is shifting younger, imposing new generational challenges for survivors and their families. This article explores the experience of a cancer diagnosis during one's re/productive years by analyzing how parents with dependent children maintain a future amid heightened economic precarity (e.g., loss of stable employment, downward mobility, and a degraded public sphere). By linking physical survival with the social conditions necessary for post-treatment quality of life, we develop a more collectivistic notion of survivorship, where parent-survivors’ efforts to stay employed during treatment serve as an extension of family caregiving in austere times. Reflecting on how the lead authors’ own experience of work and cancer emerged in interviews with 12 parent-survivors, we intervene on traditional team science methods, making space for the autoethnographic voices that underlie interpretations of illness.

Scientific Ritual: The Institutional Review Boards for Human Clinical Trials in Israel

Hedva Eyal — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:43:49 -0700

Abstract

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.

Issue Information

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:43:49 -0700

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Volume 40, Issue 1, March 2026.

Plastics and labor: The case of disposable medical plastics

Gauri Pathak — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:19:29 -0700

Abstract

Plastics are ubiquitous in the contemporary practice of medicine, where they are tied to notions of hygiene and quality of care. However, when plastics first infiltrated global medical practice, they did so because of considerations related to patient comfort and durability. It was only after developments in the sterilization of plastics and the aggressive marketing of single-use plastics that medical plastics came to be emblematic of hygiene as they are today. In this article, drawing from historical data and fieldwork in India, I argue that dependence upon disposable medical plastics is not just about infection control but also about enabling reductions in labor at the site of use. This labor is displaced into the future—as new plastic production—and downstream, onto waste management. Medical plastics thus function as a materiality of displaced labor in clinical settings. Recognizing this displacement effect is crucial to plastic control interventions within sustainable healthcare.

What's in a Name? Psychiatric Concept Creep and the Moral Legibility of Student Suffering within the Canadian University Context

Adrianna Nicole Wiley — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:13:21 -0700

Abstract

This article explores how students experiencing mental unwellness negotiate psychiatric constructs of mental health to make their suffering morally legible within the North American University context. I argue while the psychiatric construct remains pervasive, students are ambivalent toward it as a metaphor for their distress. Students engage in bottom-up psychiatrization pragmatically to navigate relational contexts when appropriate for them, while recognizing that the impacts of top-down psychiatrization can limit institutional moral care obligations, constraining their authority to communicate their subjective experiences authentically outside psychiatric idioms. In essence, psychiatric labeling is constraining, but students often exert agency by refusing a psychiatric master status while still recognizing their need to use psychiatric labels to allow their suffering to be seen and addressed within the current cultural-historical moment of psychiatrization.

Fluctuations and remaining bonds: Challenging undynamic fetal personhood through women's experiences of early pregnancy endings in England

Susie Kilshaw — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:50:20 -0700

Abstract

Women's subjective relationship with their pregnancy is central in understanding fetal personhood, a relationship that is theirs to assemble and disassemble. A rigid perception of personhood as either present or absent is problematized, instead revealing an evolving approach. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in an NHS Trust in England the paper explores women's experiences of personhood during pregnancy, pregnancy endings, and their aftermath. It shows personhood is neither fixed, nor constant, but rather oscillates; revealing that dichotomous understandings of personhood based on a specific moment, and which are unidirectional, are flawed. Women's experiences add further evidence that personhood is not biological and is not always tied to the fetus or fetal body. Instead, it is social relations including an imagined future that confers personhood with these sometimes continuing after the pregnancy ending. Yet, social relations that bring a fetus into being may also unmake it.

Pregnant at Work: Low‐Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal InjusticeBy Elise Andaya, New York City, NY: New York University Press. 2024. 208 pp.

Kathleen Rice — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 11:28:27 -0800

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, EarlyView.

Concealed coexistence: Reproductive choice and coercion in Timor‐Leste

Laura Burke — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:29:39 -0800

Abstract

Choice is a central concept in reproductive rights. However, a discourse of choice in reproductive health can also mask precisely the act it aims to protect against: coercion. Whilst choice has been explored extensively in studies of reproductive rights and justice, understandings of coercion are fragmented and under-theorized. This article explores the relationship between coercion and choice, not as a binary but as a coexistence in which they overlay and conceal one another. Drawing on ethnographic research amongst health professionals during family planning training in Timor-Leste, this article shows how a discourse of choice obscures coercive structures and practices, whilst coercive approaches can paradoxically reveal hidden choices. I argue that this coexistence, characterized by concealment, leads to iatrogenesis—medical harm with immediate and lingering effects. By recognizing the coexistence of choice and coercion, and revealing their concealment of one another, we might limit iatrogenesis and enable greater reproductive freedom.

Caring for the institution: An ethnography of quality assurance policy in U.S. rural primary care

Chloe L. Warpinski — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 07:20:03 -0800

Abstract

Based on mixed-methods, ethnographic research in a geographically isolated rural medical center in the upper midwestern United States, this paper explores the social implications of healthcare quality assurance policies highly reliant on managerial logics, including measurement and monitoring programs. Initially observed as expressions of apathy, throughout 21 months of observation in the medical center I increasingly witnessed tensions erupt due to divergent views of quality care. While explicitly intended to improve biomedical care, clinicians were quick to describe how quality assurance policies impeded their ability to provide high-quality primary care in this rural setting. This article theorizes ongoing tensions between patient care and institutional care as a key aspect of the observed organizational discord. The article concludes with recommendations for how to operationalize institutional care in this setting to respond to clinician and staff concerns about the unique challenges of this biomedical practice environment.

Obstetric racism in Europe: Linguistic racism, exoticization, and uneven reproduction in the Netherlands

Rodante van der Waal, Alana Helberg‐Proctor, Dána‐Ain Davis, Bahareh Goodarzi — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0800

Abstract

In this article, we conceptualize how Davis’ two concepts of uneven reproduction and obstetric racism—both rooted in the US context—are effectuated in the Netherlands. We consider uneven reproduction to consist of bio- and necropolitics, namely the management and regulation of a population's bodies, life and death. Through bio- and necropolitics, certain life is optimized by investments, and other life is negated by disinvestments in reproductive care in daily care work through obstetric racism. We develop an understanding of obstetric racism in the Netherlands by analyzing how it operates as a form of uneven reproduction, by providing theoretical depth to the concept of obstetric racism in the context of Europe. Based on data analysis from interviews and focus group conversations on obstetric violence with midwives, doulas, midwives-in-training, and mothers who gave birth within the last 10 years, we link the concept of uneven reproduction to daily practices of obstetric racism in the Netherlands. We find that obstetrics operates on the basis of linguistic racism and othering through exoticization, specifically for women racialized as Black through the racial stereotype of being “natural birthers,” while other marginalized racialized women are seen as “bad birthers.”

Extracting vitalities: Cuts in Indigenous women's bodies‐territories (Brazil)

Maria Paula Prates — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 21:45:02 -0800

Abstract

In this article, I explore the connections between the medicalization of childbirth and environmental devastation through Guarani-Mbyá understandings of life and the living. I argue that the cuts made to Guarani-Mbyá women's vaginas (episiotomies) in Brazilian hospitals are experienced and situated on the same cosmopolitical level as the cuts made in their ancestral territories by fences that demarcate soybean plantations and cattle ranches. What I call an extractivism of vitalities occurs precisely through both bodies and territories. In exploring this issue, I highlight connections obvious to Indigenous women: Their bodies and territories are inherently linked by vital forces that are shared and modulated through different qualities of relations involving humans and other-than-human beings.

Violence in harm reduction: Exploring the social, political, and emotional conditions of harm reduction work

Guillaume Dumont, Marie Jauffret‐Roustide — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 11:29:31 -0800

Abstract

Harm reduction professionals strive to reduce the health, social, and legal consequences associated with drug use in contexts permeated by violence. Building on fieldwork in Paris and Barcelona, we examine how they make sense of this violence. In Paris, the discussion of violence primarily hinges on the narratives of suffering from people who use drugs and the obstacles posed by the political context. In Barcelona, the narrative emphasizes precariousness and deficiencies in organizational violence management, which intensifies perceptions of violence. Moving beyond polarized understandings of violence, we argue that violence is socially constructed as an inherent aspect of the culture of harm reduction work. This process involves mechanisms of naturalization, delegitimization, and normalization, shaping work experiences and the construction of the professional self. Although violence manifests in similar forms and manifestations across settings, experiences of that violence differ based on how it perpetuates power dynamics and inequalities within the workplace.

Medical pluralism and kincentric care in Indigenous Australia: Yanyuwa experiences of illness and the importance of keeping company

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:25:44 -0800

Abstract

For over four decades we have collaborated as a team of anthropologists and Indigenous Elders of the Yanyuwa language group. The Yanyuwa are the Indigenous owners of lands and waters in Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria. While medicalized healthcare has not been our specific research focus, wellness and ill health have been recurring themes. Death has been tragically prevalent. So too has been a sense of liveliness among households in the remote township of Borroloola. This paper explores ethnographic moments that speak to how Yanyuwa experience illness, as a bodily, relational, and communal possibility. Building out from these, we reflect on how people in this community seek to survive, in part, through kincentric relationality: the art of keeping company. Reflecting on culturally nuanced responses to illness supports anthropological engagements with connections that heal and those that pose a threat, offering some insights to progress efforts in medical pluralism and kincentric care.

Searching for safety: Working conditions and policing in a US emergency department

Fabián Luis C. Fernández — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 12:46:10 -0800

Abstract

In the United States, emergency departments aren't supposed to turn anyone away. They are the safety-net of the safety-net providing life-saving care. Yet, what happens to healthcare when conditions are so strained that patients and staff lash out at each other? What happens when the safety net becomes a carceral net? I argue that social and economic pressures placed on emergency medicine generate conflict between patients and nurses who increasingly rely on the restriction of resources, use of restraints, and police in healthcare.

Care‐full negotiation of hospital discharge and end‐of‐life care in an Indonesian palliative care unit

Hanum Atikasari — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 13:19:57 -0800

Abstract

How do palliative care professionals negotiate end-of-life care with family members when prognosis and dying are not openly discussed? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an Indonesian palliative care unit, I argue that palliative care professionals employ implicit, ambiguous and culturally sensitive communication to carefully negotiate hospital discharge and discuss end-of-life care. I focus on listening to what is said and what remains unspoken in the embodied communicative practices about end-of-life care in family meetings to discuss hospital discharge. I show how palliative care professionals carefully navigate tensions between the hospital's need to discharge patients, family expectations of a cure, and the palliative care value of supporting patients and families. They do so by keeping the possibility of receiving treatment open while simultaneously using implicit language to suggest that end of life may be near.

Extraordinary measures of sibling worldmaking

Pamela Block, Helen Ries, Dima Kassem — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 11:23:41 -0800

Abstract

In this ethnographic research project involving disabled and non/disabled siblings in Canada, we have found that during major life-changing transitions, such as the death of a parent, siblings face many challenges, including structural and systemic inequalities, struggles with and within various service systems, and difficulties with emotions and mental health. In response to these challenges, siblings undertake “extraordinary measures” through co-creative “sibling disability worldmaking” to imagine livable futures. During times of major transition, worldmaking is a strategy siblings use to navigate these upheavals and attempt to co-create livable lives despite a lack of systemic support.

Searching for therapeutic connections: Ukrainian refugee women with HIV in the EU

Dafna Rachok — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 10:19:05 -0800

Abstract

This article addresses healthcare experiences of Ukrainian refugee women with HIV in the EU. It shows that refugee expectations of healthcare starkly contrasted with their lived experiences. To explain this mismatch, I introduce the idea of therapeutic connections. Building upon the concepts of biosociality and the Imaginary West, I show that refugees’ pursuit of HIV treatment in their host countries was about seeking both medicine and therapeutic connections with clinicians and other patients. Unable to find similar tight-knit communities (e.g., sex workers or women who use drugs) in their host countries and to forge relationships with clinicians that would go beyond patient-doctor encounters, many refugees decided to mobilize their therapeutic connections to Ukrainian vulnerable communities and clinicians to receive medicine and satisfy the need for belonging. In other cases, the mismatch between the expectations and experiences of healthcare led refugees to return home, even when it was not safe yet.

The psychiatric fix

Jeremy Levenson — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 20:27:57 -0800

Abstract

This article draws on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles’ (LA) jail mental health facility to describe the interrelated crises of rising numbers of people declared incompetent to stand trial and the recurrent failure of managing madness in jail. It draws on the concept of a “spatial fix,” which refers to provisional solutions that displace, without resolving, systemic problems while, in fact, creating new ones. Within LA's carceral system, psychiatry has offered one such “fix”: institutional and extra-institutional actors have mobilized the personnel, discourses, and technologies of psychiatry to manage the carceral system's apparent excesses. However, such a mobilization of psychiatry deepens, rather than resolves, these crises, while ideologically and spatially securing the wider carceral social order. This psychiatric fix, thus, has important implications for understanding how psychiatric power sustains, reproduces, and extends the shape-shifting US carceral state.

“Nowhere else to go”: Slow abandonment and (en)closures of long‐term care in Los Angeles

Maxwell A. Hellmann — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 11:39:04 -0800

Abstract

Residential long-term care facilities, known in California as “board and care” homes, have been closing rapidly in the last decade. Proponents assert these provide vital forms of housing and care to the poor and must be saved, while critics contend they perpetuate the institutionalization of people with disabilities and should be abolished. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork in Los Angeles, I demonstrate that board and cares offer residents much-needed shelter and sustenance while also trapping them in worsening conditions amid ongoing “slow abandonment” by the state. Residents are confined by neoliberal state policy and political-economic forces that leave them with “nowhere else to go,” and articulate critiques of their predicament that far exceed reformist solutions intended to salvage this peculiar, struggling institution. Seen through the lens of slow abandonment, meaningfully addressing residents’ concerns requires an abolitionist project of building life-affirming structures of support.

Home sweet harm: Confinement and tranquilidad in post‐asylum Peru

Julio Villa‐Palomino — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:05:40 -0800

Abstract

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.

Beyond safety net value(s): Tourist hotel rooms for people experiencing homelessness

Naomi C. Schoenfeld — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:05:39 -0800

Abstract

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.

Building walls around the safety net: Bureaucratic exclusion and cross‐border health care utilization among pregnant women on the US‐Mexico border

Rosario P. Olmos, Carina Heckert — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 05:03:11 -0800

Abstract

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

Esther Melton, Leslie Riddle, Jennifer Elyse James — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 03:49:03 -0800

Abstract

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

Lalaie Ameeriar — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 02:38:10 -0800

Abstract

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

Carlos Martinez — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 04:42:01 -0700

Abstract

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.

Zoonotic anxieties: The cultural politics of Nepal's quest for pandemic preparedness

Max D. López Toledano, Hari Basnet, Anna Durrance‐Bagale, Natasha Howard — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 11:28:06 -0700

Abstract

Based on fieldwork conducted in Nepal (2022–2024) and by paying attention to how local and transnational notions of epidemiological risk are deployed, this ethnography introduces the concept of “zoonotic anxieties” to make sense of the multi-species relational ethos that contemporary global health regimes propose. Namely, at the intersection of “health security,” “pandemic preparedness,” and “One Health,” multispecies interactions are becoming subject to a resignification where cultural, racial, and geopolitical anxieties are deposited, expressed as fears over the potentially apocalyptic emergence of zoonotic disease. Nepal is produced through this lens as an epidemiologically risky terrain, receiving funds from international agencies to enhance its “disease surveillance” capacity with the underlying hope that, by identifying infectious diseases early, a foretold global disaster can be contained. These investments, however, have had little impact, producing conflicts between the country's claim to medical modernity and the shortcomings of its disease surveillance ambitions.

Abstract (Nepali)

सन् २०२२ देखि २०२४ सम्म नेपालमा गरिएको स्थलगत अध्ययन र स्थानीय तथा अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय स्तरमा महामारीसम्बन्धी जोखिमको अवधारणालाई कसरी प्रयोग गरिन्छ भन्ने विश्लेषणका आधारमा, यस अध्ययनले ‘जूनोटिक चिन्ता’ भन्ने अवधारणालाई अघि सारेको छ। यसले समकालीन विश्व स्वास्थ्य प्रणालीहरूले प्रस्ताव गर्ने बहु-प्रजातीय सम्बन्धबारेको सोचलाई बुझ्न सहयोग गर्छ। विशेषगरी ‘स्वास्थ्य सुरक्षा’, ‘महामारी तयारी’ र ‘एक स्वास्थ्य’ को अन्तरसम्बन्धमा बहु-प्रजाति अन्तरक्रियाहरूलाई नयाँ अर्थ दिइएको छ, जहाँ सांस्कृतिक, जातीय र भू-राजनीतिक चिन्ताहरू संचित भएर जूनोटिक रोगको सम्भावित विनाशकारी उदयप्रतिको भयका रूपमा व्यक्त गरिन्छ । यस दृष्टिकोणले नेपाललाई महामारीजन्य जोखिमयुक्त भूभागका रूपमा चित्रित गरेको छ, यसले अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय निकायहरूबाट रोग निगरानी क्षमताको विकासका लागि सहयोग पाउँछ। यसको आधारभूत अपेक्षा भनेको संक्रामक रोगहरूलाई चाँडै पहिचान गरेर सम्भावित विश्वव्यापी प्रकोपलाई नियन्त्रण गर्नु हो। यद्यपि, यसको खासै प्रभाव परेको छैन, जसले गर्दा देशको चिकित्सीय आधुनिकताको दाबी र यसको रोग निगरानी महत्वाकांक्षाका कमजोरीहरू बीच द्वन्द्व सिर्जना गरेको छ।

“It was tidak cocok (incompatible)”: Incompatibility, Decoloniality, and Vaccine Hesitancy in Banda Aceh, Indonesia

Dimas Iqbal Romadhon — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 07:28:29 -0700

Abstract

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]