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Capturing the intricacies of health practice within the fascinating context of Andean social history, cultural tradition, community and folklore, this is a remarkable and intimate chronicle of Andean culture and everyday life.
This book outlines a "new ethnopsychiatry," one that considers popular or folk ethnomedicines and professional psychiatric systems in the same discourse, effacing the traditional distinction between psychiatry and ethnopsychiatry. The essays in this volume are from a diverse, interdisciplinary group representing history, psychology, sociology, and medicine, as well as anthropology. The author view both ethnomedical practices and illness as local cultural constructions. They consider ideologies and institutions from both professional and popular ethnopsychiatric systems in America, Western Europe, South Africa, the Caribbean, Japan, and India. The book demonstrates that professional and popul...
How stigma derails well-intentioned public health efforts, creating suffering and worsening inequalities. 2020 Winner, Society for Anthropological Sciences Carol R. Ember Book Prize,Shortlisted for the British Sociological Association's Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize Stigma is a dehumanizing process, where shaming and blaming are embedded in our beliefs about who does and does not have value within society. In Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting, medical anthropologists Alexandra Brewis and Amber Wutich explore a darker side of public health: that well-intentioned public health campaigns can create new and damaging stigma, even when they are otherwise successful. Brewi...
An ethnographic account of the South African AIDS movement and activists From the historical roots of AIDS activism in the struggle for African liberation to the everyday work of community education in Khayelitsha, Sustaining Life tells the story of how the rights-based South African AIDS movement successfully transformed public health institutions, enabled access to HIV/AIDS treatment, and sustained the lives of people living with the disease. Typical accounts of the South African epidemic have focused on the political conflict surrounding it, Theodore Powers observes, but have yet to examine the process by which the national HIV/AIDS treatment program achieved near-universal access. In Sus...
Racial experiences vary widely in everyday life and in different social contexts. They range from damaging to fulfilling, spanning discrimination, unquestioned assumptions, and political solidarity. Drawing on years of cross-cultural ethnographic research, Gabriel Alejandro Torres Colón develops an innovative theory to grasp racial experiences in their full sociocultural complexity, with vital implications for both social science and antiracist politics. This book demonstrates how people draw from their experiences to fashion “styles for flourishing”—embodied strategies for survival in racialized societies that can both reproduce and contest racial orders. In performing their styles, ...
Scholarship on Maya healing traditions has focused primarily on the roles of midwives, shamans, herbalists, and diviners. Bonesetters, on the other hand, have been largely excluded from conversations about traditional health practitioners and community health resources. Maya Bonesetters is the first book-length study of bonesetting in Guatemala and situates the manual healing tradition within the current cultural context—one in which a changing medical landscape potentially threatens bonesetters’ work yet presents an opportunity to strengthen its relevance. Drawing on extensive field research in highland Guatemala, Servando Z. Hinojosa introduces readers to a seldom documented, though no...
This highly original book argues for increased recognition of pregnancy, birthing and childrearing as social activities demanding simultaneously physical, intellectual, emotional and moral work from those who undertake them.Written from the perspective of a feminist philosopher, the book draws on the work of and seeks to increase dialogue between philosophers and childcare professionals, disability theorists, nurses and sociologists.
This book observes the idea of race as a false representation for the cause of disease. Race-based medicine, an emerging field in pharmacology, aims to create a specialty market based on racial groups. Within this market, the drug BiDil set a precedent in this area of medicine targeting African Americans as its first racial group. Consequently, selecting African Americans as a “starter group” led to ethical questions regarding the motive behind race-based medicine within the context of the larger treatment of blacks in American medical history. This book therefore links medicine and American eugenics, examines race-based medicine’s influence on the perception of the black body, traces the influence of BiDil’s approval on the resurgence of race-based medicine, and assesses the black church’s response to race-based medicine using black liberation theology as a means to social justice.
Examining the long-lasting effects of European colonization on Mexican populations The Biocultural Consequences of Contact in Mexico explores how Mexican populations have been shaped both culturally and biologically by the arrival of Spanish conquistadors and the years following the defeat of the Aztec empire in 1521. Contributors to this volume draw on a diverse set of methods from archaeology, bioarchaeology, genetics, and history to examine the response to European colonization, providing evidence for the resilience of the Mexican people in the face of tumultuous change. Essays focus on Central Mexico, Yucatan, and Oaxaca, providing a cross-regional perspective, and they highlight Mexican...
Drawing on over fifty years of research and data collected by field-school students, Hawkins argues that two factors--cultural collapse and systematic social and economic exclusion--explain the recent religious transformation of Maya Guatemala and the style and emotional intensity through which that transformation is expressed.