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Drawing upon the empirical scholarship and research expertise of contributors from all settled continents and from diverse life settings and economies, Viral Loads illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and responses to it, lay bare and load onto people’s lived realities in countries around the world. A crosscutting theme pertains to how social unevenness and gross economic disparities are shaping global and local responses to the pandemic, and illustrate the effects of both the virus and efforts to contain it in ways that amplify these inequalities. At the same time, the contributions highlight the nature of contemporary social life, including virtual communication, the nature of communit...
Introduction : jingzi weiji : sperm crisis -- The birth of art in China -- Improving population quality -- Exposed biologies -- Mobilizing sperm donors -- Making quality auditable -- Borrowing sperm -- Conclusion : routinization
This book explores how conditions for childbearing are changing in the 21st century under the impact of new biomedical technologies. Selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) - technologies that aim to prevent or promote the birth of particular kinds of children – are increasingly widespread across the globe. Wahlberg and Gammeltoft bring together a collection of essays providing unique ethnographic insights on how SRTs are made available within different cultural, socio-economic and regulatory settings and how people perceive and make use of these new possibilities as they envision and try to form their future lives. Topics covered include sex-selective abortions, termination of pregnancies following detection of fetal anomalies during prenatal screening, the development of preimplantation genetic diagnosis techniques as well as the screening of potential gamete donors by egg agencies and sperm banks. This is invaluable reading for scholars of medical anthropology, medical sociology and science and technology studies, as well as for the fields of gender studies, reproductive health and genetic disease research.
Drawing on social science perspectives, Contested Categories presents a series of empirical studies that engage with the often shifting and day-to-day realities of life sciences categories. In doing so, it shows how such categories remain contested and dynamic, and that the boundaries they create are subject to negotiation as well as re-configuration and re-stabilization processes. Organized around the themes of biological substances and objects, personhood and the genomic body and the creation and dispersion of knowledge, each of the volume’s chapters reveals the elusive nature of fixity with regard to life science categories. With contributions from an international team of scholars, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social, legal, policy and ethical implications of science and technology and the life sciences.
A diagnosis of global inequalities exploited by COVID-19 and how we might evolve. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted some lives more than others. While more than half the world's population experienced physical restrictions in the wake of the virus, Viral Loads reveals how the international response placed disparate burdens on exploited communities across the globe. Contributors from six continents situate the pandemic within a highly connected yet exceedingly unequal world marked by fragmented communities, austere economies, and unstable governments. Ambitious in its scope, Viral Loads insists that medical anthropology must be part of any future efforts to build a new post-pandemic world.
This groundbreaking book is the first collection to investigate the law, political science and ethical perspectives collectively in relation to the right and value of life. Its contributions from international roster of scholars are organized around five themes: a theoretical positioning of life and death; War, armed conflict and detention; Death as punishment; Medical parameters for ending life; and medical policies for the preservation of life. In studying this issue in its contemporary contexts of "right" and "value," the volume fills the current scholarly lacuna in the general subject of the orientations of life. It presents a much-needed examination of key issues in a broad practical and theoretical context, and holds broad appeal for scholars, researchers, and students occupied with issues of war, armed conflict, the death penalty, and various contemporary medico-legal scenarios.
Dialogues, encounters and interactions through which particular ways of knowing, understanding and thinking about the world are forged lie at the centre of anthropology. Such ‘intellectual exchange’ is also central to anthropologists’ own professional practice: from their interactions with research participants and modes of pedagogy to their engagements with each other and scholars from adjacent disciplines. This collection of essays explores how such processes might best be studied cross-culturally. Foregrounding the diverse interactions, ethical reasoning, and intellectual lives of people from across the continent of Asia, the volume develops an anthropology of intellectual exchange itself.
Critical Medical Anthropology presents inspiring work from scholars doing and engaging with ethnographic research in or from Latin America, addressing themes that are central to contemporary Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA). This includes issues of inequality, embodiment of history, indigeneity, non-communicable diseases, gendered violence, migration, substance abuse, reproductive politics and judicialisation, as these relate to health. The collection of ethnographically informed research, including original theoretical contributions, reconsiders the broader relevance of CMA perspectives for addressing current global healthcare challenges from and of Latin America. It includes work spanning four countries in Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala and Peru) as well as the trans-migratory contexts they connect and are defined by. By drawing on diverse social practices, it addresses challenges of central relevance to medical anthropology and global health, including reproduction and maternal health, sex work, rare and chronic diseases, the pharmaceutical industry and questions of agency, political economy, identity, ethnicity, and human rights.
This timely volume responds to the epic impacts of cancer as a global phenomenon. Through the fine-grained lens of ethnography, the contributors present new thinking on how social, economic, race, gender and other structural inequalities intersect, compound and complicate health inequalities. Cancer experiences and impacts are explored across eleven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Senegal, the United Kingdom and the United States. The volume engages with specific cancers from the point of primary prevention, to screening, diagnosis, treatment (or its absence), and end-of-life care. Cancer and the Politics of Care traverses new theoretical terra...
"'This is a fascinating and beautiful organized and written manuscript'-Rebecca Lester, Washington University in St. Louis.