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Medical Anthropology
Medical anthropology is playing an increasingly important role in public health. This book provides an introduction to the basic concepts, approaches and theories used, and shows how these contribute to understanding complex health related behaviour. Public health policies and interventions are more likely to be effective if the beliefs and behaviour of people are understood and taken into account. The book examines: Concepts of culture Medical systems Patient's experience of illness and treatment The use of medicines and healing practices Public health and medical research Examples of particular health problems, such as HIV and malaria, are used to show how an anthropological approach can contribute to both a better understanding of health and illness and to more culturally compatible public health measures. Series Editors: Rosalind Plowman and Nicki Thorogood.
The Land Is Dying
Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores life in and around a Luo-speaking village in western Kenya during a time of death. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS affects every aspect of sociality and pervades villagers' debates about the past, the future and the ethics of everyday life. Central to such debates is a discussion of touch in the broad sense of concrete, material contact between persons. In mundane practices and in ritual acts, touch is considered to be key to the creation of bodily life as well as social continuity. Underlying the significance of material contact is its connection with growth – of persons and groups, animals, plants and the land – and the forward movement of life more generally. Under the pressure of illness and death, economic hardship and land scarcity, as well as bitter struggles about the relevance and application of Christianity and ‘Luo tradition’ in daily life, people find it difficult to agree about the role of touch in engendering growth, or indeed about the aims of growth itself.
Evidence, Ethos and Experiment
Medical research has been central to biomedicine in Africa for over a century, and Africa, along with other tropical areas, has been crucial to the development of medical science. At present, study populations in Africa participate in an increasing number of medical research projects and clinical trials, run by both public institutions and private companies. Global debates about the politics and ethics of this research are growing and local concerns are prompting calls for social studies of the “trial communities” produced by this scientific work. Drawing on rich, ethnographic and historiographic material, this volume represents the emergent field of anthropological inquiry that links Africanist ethnography to recent concerns with science, the state, and the culture of late capitalism in Africa.
Traces of the Future
This book presents a close look at the vestiges of twentieth-century medical work at five key sites in Africa: Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya, and Tanzania. The authors aim to understand the afterlife of scientific institutions and practices and the "aftertime" of scientific modernity and its attendant visions of progress and transformation. Straightforward scholarly work is juxtaposed here with altogether more experimental approaches to fieldwork and analysis, including interview fragments; brief, reflective essays; and a rich photographic archive. The result is an unprecedented view of the lingering traces of medical science from Africa's past.
Para-States and Medical Science
In Para-States and Medical Science, P. Wenzel Geissler and the contributors examine how medicine and public health in Africa have been transformed as a result of economic and political liberalization and globalization, intertwined with epidemiological and technological changes. The resulting fragmented medical science landscape is shaped and sustained by transnational flows of expertise and resources. NGOs, universities, pharmaceutical companies and other nonstate actors now play a significant role in medical research and treatment. But as the contributors to this volume argue, these groups have not supplanted the primacy of the nation-state in Africa. Although not necessarily stable or resp...
Global Health Research in an Unequal World
This book is a collection of fictionalised case studies of everyday ethical dilemmas and challenges, encountered in the process of conducting global health research in places where the effects of global, political and economic inequality are particularly evident. It is a training tool to fill the gap between research ethics guidelines, and their implementation 'on the ground'. The case studies, therefore, focus on 'relational' ethics: ethical actions and ideas that emerge through relations with others, rather than in regulations. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.
The Land is Dying
This series in medical anthropology publishes monographs and edited volumes on indigenous (so-called traditional) medical knowledge and practice, alternative and complementary medicine, and ethnobiological studies that relate to health and illness. The emphasis of the series is on the way indigenous epistemologies inform healing, against a background of comparison with other practices, and in recognition of the fluidity between them. --
Managing Uncertainty
The overall focus of this book is the ways humans deal with life conditions, with destiny, uncertainty and misfortune - how we try to control the risks of living through medicines, technologies and magic. When dealing with questions of health and illness rational solutions and meaningful explanations may be hard to find, and treatment efforts are often guided just as much by hope as by rational choice. Evaluating the risks of illness is just one of a number of ways in which human beings attempt to exert some sense of control over their lives. New methods of testing for ills and new developments in, for example, genetic screening and in vitro fertilisation combined with the growing demands of...
Plants, Health and Healing
Plants have cultural histories, and their culturally known applications change through time and across contexts. This pattern is seen in all types of uses that humans make of plants, from trees used for construction, through species used for perfume through to food plants. However, it is medicinal plants that have attracted considerable attention recently, whether as a justification of plant conservation efforts or through the perception that direct use of medicinal plants may offer something that is not delivered by orthodox medicine. This volume's two central aims are to demonstrate that plant knowledge is not paradigmatic positive knowledge but situational and arises in relationships, and to show that modern medicinal plant discovery can be viewed as the epitome of a long history of borrowing, stealing, and exchanging plants.
Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa
Africa has emerged as a prime arena of global health interventions that focus on particular diseases and health emergencies. These are framed increasingly in terms of international concerns about security, human rights, and humanitarian crisis. This presents a stark contrast to the 1960s and ‘70s, when many newly independent African governments pursued the vision of public health “for all,” of comprehensive health care services directed by the state with support from foreign donors. These initiatives often failed, undermined by international politics, structural adjustment, and neoliberal policies, and by African states themselves. Yet their traces remain in contemporary expectations o...
