Medical Anthropology Quarterly (MAQ)
International Journal for the Analysis of Health
Vol. 22, No. 4: December 2008
articles
Vital Queries in Medical Anthropology: Still Goaded by the "Person" (editors introduction)
Mark Luborsky & Andrea Sankar
On Recognition, Caring, and Dementia
Janelle S. Taylor (article) and Lawrence Cohen (post-article commentary)
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The onset of dementia raises troubling questions. Does the person with dementia still recognize you? If someone cannot recognize you, can they still care about you? This essay takes such questions as the entry point for a broader inquiry into recognition, its linkages to care, and how claims to social and political "recognition" are linked to, or premised on, the demonstrated capacity to "recognize" people and things. In the words and actions of her severely impaired mother, the author finds guidance toward a better, more compassionate question to ask about dementia: how can we best strive to "keep the cares together"?
Paternity for Sale: Anxieties over "Demographic Theft" and Undocumented Migrant Reproduction in Germany
Heide Castaneda
- Women's experiences of migration, and their relationship to a host country, vary significantly from those of migrant men simply because pregnancy is a possibility. The concept of "demographic theft" highlights popular anxieties regarding high fertility among foreigners, including undocumented migrants. This article examines pregnant undocumented women's experiences with the health care system and relationship to the state in Germany. It also provides a discussion of how a restrictive immigration climate, particular models of citizenship, and liberal family laws have resulted in unique practices surrounding paternity claims. It is based on long-term ethnographic data to highlight contradictions and ambiguities in the policy environment and utilizes the notion of stratified reproduction to bring new evidence regarding mothers' deportability and practices of paternity.
Cancer Rehabilitation in Denmark: The Growth of a New Narrative
Helle Ploug Hansen & Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen
- A fundamental assumption behind cancer rehabilitation in many Western societies is that cancer survivors can return to normal life by learning to deal with the consequences of their illness and their treatment. This assumption is supported by increasing political attention to cancer rehabilitation and a growth in residential cancer-rehabilitation initiatives in Denmark ( Danish Cancer Society 1999 ; Government of Denmark 2003 ). On the basis of their ethnographic fieldwork in residential-cancer rehabilitation courses, the authors examine the new rehabilitation discourse. They argue that this discourse has challenged the dominant illness narrative, "sick–helped–cured," producing a new narrative, "sick–helped–as if cured," and that this new narrative is produced and reproduced through technologies of power and of the self
Stigma Despite Recovery: Strategies for Living in the Aftermath of Psychosis
Janis H. Jenkins & Elizabeth A. Carpenter-Song
- In this article, we identify an array of creative strategies used by persons diagnosed with schizophrenia-related illness to deflect and resist social stigma, and address the lived experience of deploying these strategies in the intersubjective context of everyday life. The data are derived from anthropological interviews and ethnographic observations of ninety persons who received treatment at community mental health facilities in an urban North American locale. Nearly all were keenly aware of stigma that permeated their lives. Their predicament is contradictory: on the one hand, they have recovered relative to previous states of psychosis; on the other hand, their subjectivity is saturated by intense awareness of social stigma that seems intractable in relation to temporal or functional criteria. Ironically, these lives can be characterized as fraught with stigma despite recovery. The strategies generated to resist the impact of stigma highlight the fact that persons with these illnesses are often not only exceedingly socially aware but also strategically skilled in response to social assaults on their personhood and survival. We examine these strategies in terms of (1) the social characteristics of each afflicted person, (2) the situational characteristics of managing stigma, (3) the cultural context of recovery, and (4) the illness-specific characteristics of schizophrenia
What Can Critical Medical Anthropology Contribute to Global Health? A Health Systems Perspective
James Pfeiffer & Mark Nichter (for the Critical Anthropology of Global Health Special Interest Group)
Medical Anthropology against War
Marcia C. Inhorn
book reviews
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The Person in Dementia: A Study of Nursing Home Care in the United States by Athena McLean
Review by Betsy Pohlman
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Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients by Monica Konrad
Review by Jennifer Speirs
