Biomedicine in an Unstable Place

Biomedicine in an Unstable Place
Author: Alice Street
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2014-10-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822376660

Biomedicine in an Unstable Place is the story of people's struggle to make biomedicine work in a public hospital in Papua New Guinea. It is a story encompassing the history of hospital infrastructures as sites of colonial and postcolonial governance, the simultaneous production of Papua New Guinea as a site of global medical research and public health, and people's encounters with urban institutions and biomedical technologies. In Papua New Guinea, a century of state building has weakened already inadequate colonial infrastructures, and people experience the hospital as a space of institutional, medical, and ontological instability. In the hospital's clinics, biomedical practitioners struggle amid severe resource shortages to make the diseased body visible and knowable to the clinical gaze. That struggle is entangled with attempts by doctors, nurses, and patients to make themselves visible to external others—to kin, clinical experts, global scientists, politicians, and international development workers—as socially recognizable and valuable persons. Here hospital infrastructures emerge as relational technologies that are fundamentally fragile but also offer crucial opportunities for making people visible and knowable in new, unpredictable, and powerful ways.

Biomedicine in an Unstable Place

Biomedicine in an Unstable Place
Author: Alice Street
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-10-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780822357780

Biomedicine in an Unstable Place is the story of people's struggle to make biomedicine work in a public hospital in Papua New Guinea. It is a story encompassing the history of hospital infrastructures as sites of colonial and postcolonial governance, the simultaneous production of Papua New Guinea as a site of global medical research and public health, and people's encounters with urban institutions and biomedical technologies. In Papua New Guinea, a century of state building has weakened already inadequate colonial infrastructures, and people experience the hospital as a space of institutional, medical, and ontological instability. In the hospital's clinics, biomedical practitioners struggle amid severe resource shortages to make the diseased body visible and knowable to the clinical gaze. That struggle is entangled with attempts by doctors, nurses, and patients to make themselves visible to external others—to kin, clinical experts, global scientists, politicians, and international development workers—as socially recognizable and valuable persons. Here hospital infrastructures emerge as relational technologies that are fundamentally fragile but also offer crucial opportunities for making people visible and knowable in new, unpredictable, and powerful ways.

Nanoarchitectonics in Biomedicine

Nanoarchitectonics in Biomedicine
Author: Alexandru Mihai Grumezescu
Publisher: William Andrew
Total Pages: 724
Release: 2019-03-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0128172614

Nanoarchitectonics in Biomedicine describes this new area of nanoscience that has emerged as a major branch of nanoscience. The book brings together recent applications and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each process, offering international perspectives on the technologies based on these findings. It offers new insights for nanoarchitectonics, starting with the currently used methods of synthesis and characterization of such materials, along with their biomedical applications. Authored by a wide range of international scientists, this volume shows how nanoarchitectonics is being used to create more efficient medical treatment solutions. Users will find this to be an important research resource for those wanting to learn more on the emerging topic of nanoarchitectonics in biomedical science. - Explores how design aspects, smart materials and personalized materials are used in biomedicine today - Offers global perspectives on how nanoarchitectonics is used in different regions - Presents an important research resource for those wanting to learn more on the emerging topic of nanoarchitectonics in biomedical science

A Companion to the Anthropology of Death

A Companion to the Anthropology of Death
Author: Antonius C. G. M. Robben
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 676
Release: 2018-04-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1119222311

A thought-provoking examination of death, dying, and the afterlife Prominent scholars present their most recent work about mortuary rituals, grief and mourning, genocide, cyclical processes of life and death, biomedical developments, and the materiality of human corpses in this unique and illuminating book. Interrogating our most common practices surrounding death, the authors ask such questions as: How does the state wrest away control over the dead from bereaved relatives? Why do many mourners refuse to cut their emotional ties to the dead and nurture lasting bonds? Is death a final condition or can human remains acquire agency? The book is a refreshing reassessment of these issues and practices, a source of theoretical inspiration in the study of death. With contributions written by an international team of experts in their fields, A Companion to the Anthropology of Death is presented in six parts and covers such subjects as: Governing the Dead in Guatemala; After Death Communications (ADCs) in North America; Cryonic Suspension in the Secular Age; Blood and Organ Donation in China; The Fragility of Biomedicine; and more. A Companion to the Anthropology of Death is a comprehensive and accessible volume and an ideal resource for senior undergraduate and graduate students in courses such as Anthropology of Death, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology of Violence, Anthropology of the Body, and Political Anthropology. Written by leading international scholars in their fields A comprehensive survey of the most recent empirical research in the anthropology of death A fundamental critique of the early 20th century founding fathers of the anthropology of death Cross-cultural texts from tribal and industrial societies The collection is of interest to anyone concerned with the consequences of the state and massive violence on life and death

Beyond Surgery

Beyond Surgery
Author: Anita Hannig
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2017-04-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022645732X

An “incisive and immensely insightful study” of African women, Western medicine, and how to deliver care to those who need it (Jean Comaroff, Harvard University). Over the past few decades, maternal childbirth injuries have become a potent symbol of Western biomedical intervention in Africa, affecting over one million women across the global south. Western-funded hospitals have sprung up, offering surgical sutures that ostensibly allow women who suffer from obstetric fistula to return to their communities in full health. Journalists, NGO staff, celebrities, and some physicians have crafted a stock narrative around this injury, depicting afflicted women as victims of a backward culture who have their fortunes dramatically reversed by Western aid. With Beyond Surgery, medical anthropologist Anita Hannig unsettles this picture for the first time and reveals the complicated truth behind the idea of biomedical intervention as quick-fix salvation. Through her in-depth ethnography of two repair and rehabilitation centers operating in Ethiopia, Hannig takes the reader deep into a world inside hospital walls, where women recount stories of loss and belonging, shame and delight. As she chronicles the lived experiences of fistula patients in clinical treatment, Hannig explores the danger of labeling “culture” the culprit, showing how this common argument ignores the larger problem of insufficient medical access in rural Africa. Beyond Surgery portrays the complex social outcomes of surgery in an effort to deepen our understanding of medical missions in Africa, expose cultural biases, and clear the path toward more effective ways of delivering care to those who need it most.

Compliance

Compliance
Author: Will Rollason
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2023-12-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 180539410X

Exploring compliance from an anthropological perspective, this book offers a varied and international selection of chapters covering taxation, corporate governance, medicine, development, carbon offsetting, irregular migration and the building trade. Compliance emerges as more than the opposite of resistance: instead, it appears as a valuable heuristic approach for understanding collective life, as these means by which actors strive to accommodate themselves to others. This perspective transcends conventional distinctions between power and resistance, and offers to open up new avenues of anthropological enquiry.

Contingent Citizens

Contingent Citizens
Author: Elizabeth Hull
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2020-05-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000181146

Contingent Citizens examines the ambiguous state of South Africa’s public sector workers and the implications for contemporary understandings of citizenship. It takes us inside an ethnography of the professional ethic of nurses in a rural hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, shaped by a deep history of mission medicine and changing forms of new public management. Liberal democratic principles of ‘transparency’, ‘decentralization’ and ‘rights’, though promising freedom from control, often generate fear and insecurity instead. But despite the pressures they face, Elizabeth Hull shows that nurses draw on a range of practices from international migration to new religious movements, to assert new forms of citizenship. Focusing an anthropological lens on ‘professionalism’, Hull explores the major fault lines of South Africa’s fragmented social landscape – class, gender, race, and religion – to make an important contribution to the study of class formation and citizenship. This prize-winning monograph will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, development studies, sociology and global public health.

Eliciting Care

Eliciting Care
Author: Bo Kyeong Seo
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2020-06-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 029932690X

In 2001, Thailand introduced universal health care reforms that have become some of the most celebrated in the world, providing almost its entire population with health protection coverage. However, this remarkable implementation of health policy is not without its weaknesses. Drawing on two years of fieldwork at a district hospital in northern Thailand, Bo Kyeong Seo examines how people in marginal and dependent social positions negotiate the process of obtaining care. Using the broader concept of elicitation, Seo analyzes the social encounters and forces that shape caregivers. These dynamics challenge dichotomies of subjugation and resistance, consent and coercion, and dependence and autonomy. The intimate and moving stories at the core of Eliciting Care from patients and providers draw attention to a broader, critically important phenomenon at the hospital level. Seo's poignant ethnography engages with feminist theory on the ethics of care, and in so doing, makes a significant contribution to emerging work in the field of health policy and politics.

Special Treatment

Special Treatment
Author: Anna Ruddock
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1503628264

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) is iconic in the landscape of Indian healthcare. Established in the early years of independence, this enormous public teaching hospital rapidly gained fame for the high-quality treatment it offered at a nominal cost; at present, an average of ten thousand patients pass through the outpatient department each day. With its notorious medical program acceptance rate of less than 0.01%, AIIMS also sits at the apex of Indian medical education. To be trained as a doctor here is to be considered the best. In what way does this enduring reputation of excellence shape the institution's ethos? How does elite medical education sustain India's social hierarchies and the health inequalities entrenched within? In the first-ever ethnography of AIIMS, Anna Ruddock considers prestige as a byproduct of norms attached to ambition, aspiration, caste, and class in modern India, and illustrates how the institution's reputation affects its students' present experiences and future career choices. Ruddock untangles the threads of intellectual exceptionalism, social and power stratification, and health inequality that are woven into the health care taught and provided at AIIMS, asking what is lost when medicine is used not as a social equalizer but as a means to cultivate and maintain prestige.

Making Diabetes

Making Diabetes
Author: Arlena Siobhan Liggins
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2020-01-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839448972

Diabetes is regarded as one of the most challenging global health issues of the 21st century. Especially countries with weak health infrastructure are struggling to deal with the increased demands this chronic disease entails. Tracing the effects of a diagnostic device, the glucometer, this book examines how it contributes to the making of diabetes in contemporary Uganda. Arlena S. Liggins demonstrates that depending on who uses the glucometer, the outcomes may go far beyond diagnosis. The book draws a complex picture of hopes and misplaced expectations, of trust and mistrust in a technology to which access in the first place is all but a given.