Configuring Contagion

Configuring Contagion
Author: Lotte Meinert
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2022-02-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1805399144

Expanding our understanding of contagion beyond the typical notions of infection and pandemics, this book widens the field to include the concept of biosocial epidemics. The chapters propose varied and detailed answers to questions about epidemics and their contagious potential for specific infections and non-infectious conditions. Together they explore how inseparable social and biological processes configure co-existing influences, which create epidemics, and in doing so stress the role of social inequality in these processes. The authors compellingly show that epidemics do not spread evenly in populations or through simple coincidental biological contagion: they are biosocially structured and selective, and happen under specific economic, political and environmental conditions. This volume illustrates that an understanding of biosocial factors is vital for ensuring effective strategies for the containment of epidemics.

Traumatic Pasts in Asia

Traumatic Pasts in Asia
Author: Mark S. Micale
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2021-09-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1800731841

In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere, whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases, such as World War I or the Holocaust, in which Western experiences and actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in Traumatic Pasts in Asia make just such an intervention, extending Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, exploring how these new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship.

Philosophy on Fieldwork

Philosophy on Fieldwork
Author: Nils Bubandt
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 538
Release: 2022-07-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1000182487

How do we teach analysis in anthropology and other field-based sciences? How can we engage analytically and interrogatively with philosophical ideas and concepts in our fieldwork? And how can students learn to engage critical ideas from philosophy to better understand the worlds they study? Philosophy on Fieldwork provides "show-don’t-tell" answers to these questions. In twenty-six "master class" chapters, philosophy meets anthropological critique as leading anthropologists introduce the thinking of one foundational philosopher – from a variety of Western traditions and beyond – and apply this critically to an ethnographic case. Nils Bubandt, Thomas Schwarz Wentzer and the contributors to this volume reveal how the encounter between philosophy and fieldwork is fertile ground for analytical insight to emerge. Equally, the philosophical concepts employed are critically explored for their potential to be thought "otherwise" through their frictional encounter with the worlds in the field, allowing non-Western and non-elite life experience and ontologies to "speak back" to both anthropology and philosophy. This is a unique and concrete guidebook to social analysis. It answers the critical need for a "how-to" textbook in fieldwork-based analysis as each chapter demonstrates how the ideas of a specific philosopher can be interrogatively applied to a concrete analytical case study. The straightforward pedagogy of Philosophy on Fieldwork makes this an accessible volume and a must-read for both students and seasoned fieldworkers interested in exploring the contentious middle ground between philosophy and anthropology.

Innovations in Psychological Anthropology

Innovations in Psychological Anthropology
Author: Rebecca Lester
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2024-03-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1003861865

This volume offers a bold and long-overdue intervention into the field of psychological anthropology. It asks how scholars might both constructively destabilize old frameworks borne from the field’s complex past and seed innovative new engagements in order to chart ethical, responsible, and constructive ways forward. The contributions cover such topics as white supremacy and the production of knowledge, new perspectives on the “disabled” mind, the importance of ethnographic refusal, silence in narrative, and the racialization of therapeutic methods. This timely book seeks to reinvigorate the field and lay groundwork for a new bridge between the subdiscipline and the wider anthropological community. It is an ideal text for courses in anthropology, psychology, and the wider social sciences and humanities.

Kept from All Contagion

Kept from All Contagion
Author: Kari Nixon
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2020-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438478496

Highlights connections between authors rarely studied together by exposing their shared counternarratives to germ theory's implicit suggestion of protection in isolation.

This Land Is Not For Sale

This Land Is Not For Sale
Author: Lotte Meinert
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2023-01-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800736983

Although violent conflict has declined in northern Uganda, tensions and mistrust concerning land have increased. Residents try to deal with acquisitions by investors and exclusions from forests and wildlife reserves. Land wrangles among neighbours and relatives are widespread. The growing commodification of land challenges ideals of entrustment for future generations. Using extended case studies, collaborating researchers analyze the principles and practices that shape access to land. Contributors examine the multiplicity of land claims, the nature of transactions and the management of conflicts. They show how access to land is governed through intimate relations of gender, generation and belonging.

Victorian Contagion

Victorian Contagion
Author: Chung-jen Chen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2019-08-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000691543

Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination examines the literary and cultural production of contagion in the Victorian era and the way that production participated in a moral economy of surveillance and control. In this book, I attempt to make sense of how the discursive practice of contagion governed the interactions and correlations between medical science, literary creation, and cultural imagination. Victorians dealt with the menace of contagion by theorizing a working motto in claiming the goodness and godliness in cleanliness which was theorized, realized, and radicalized both through practice and imagination. The Victorian discourse around cleanliness and contagion, including all its treatments and preventions, developed into a culture of medicalization, a perception of surveillance, a politics of health, an economy of morality, and a way of thinking. This book is an attempt to understands the literary and cultural elements which contributed to fear and anticipation of contagion, and to explain why and how these elements still matter to us today.

Self-Devouring Growth

Self-Devouring Growth
Author: Julie Livingston
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 94
Release: 2019-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1478007001

Under capitalism, economic growth is seen as the key to collective well-being. In Self-Devouring Growth Julie Livingston upends this notion, showing that while consumption-driven growth may seem to benefit a particular locale, it produces a number of unacknowledged, negative consequences that ripple throughout the wider world. Structuring the book as a parable in which the example of Botswana has lessons for the rest of the globe, Livingston shows how fundamental needs for water, food, and transportation become harnessed to what she calls self-devouring growth: an unchecked and unsustainable global pursuit of economic growth that threatens catastrophic environmental destruction. As Livingston notes, improved technology alone cannot stave off such destruction; what is required is a greater accounting of the web of relationships between humans, nonhuman beings, plants, and minerals that growth entails. Livingston contends that by failing to understand these relationships and the consequences of self-devouring growth, we may be unknowingly consuming our future.

Chinese Medicine in East Africa

Chinese Medicine in East Africa
Author: Elisabeth Hsu
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2022-07-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 180073557X

Based on fieldwork conducted between 2001-2008 in urban East Africa, this book explores who the patients, practitioners and paraprofessionals doing Chinese medicine were in this early period of renewed China-Africa relations. Rather than taking recourse to the ‘placebo effect’, the author explains through the spatialities and materialities of the medical procedures provided why - apart from purchasing the Chinese antimalarial called Artemisinin - locals would try out their ‘alternatively modern’ formulas for treating a wide range of post-colonial disorders and seek their sexual enhancement medicines.

Fragile Futures

Fragile Futures
Author: Helle Samuelsen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2024-02-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 180539259X

Caring for small children and the family in Burkina Faso is hard work. Although the health infrastructure in Burkina Faso is weak and many citizens feel neglected by the state, Fragile Futures shows that the state continues to play an important role in people’s engagements and hopes for a better future. Based on more than twenty years of research engagement with Burkina Faso, it is an ethnography of how rural citizens address ambiguities of sickness and care and try to secure a decent future for themselves and their families.