This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
This essay is about paying respect. In 2018, after my first summer of preliminary fieldwork in the Artibonite region of Haiti, I returned disappointed and disillusioned. With the intention of studying local health related issues in the port city of Saint-Marc, the projects that were seemingly possible for me were ones I wanted to avoid. As a typical graduate student, …
This article is part of the following series: Disability from the South: Toward a Lexicon
It was the afternoon of December 31st. Dinner had been served in the bedrooms of the rehabilitation clinic, but Ms. Dats decided that hers could wait: She had been in Guadeloupe for a month already, but hadn’t sat outside much. That night, she’d rather watch the sky and chat for a bit. At home, she used an electric wheelchair and …
Adéline chided me for going all the way to town to buy a “natural” mosquito spray that—while hardly effective—I continued to slather on my body every time we jogged the wooded paths of the Forêt Vatable in Martinique. She had gotten used to my declining to borrow her Pyramid brand “Repel 100,” a 100% deet formulation that she swore by, …
Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba
Duke University Press, 2012
288 pgs., US $24.95 (paperback)
Reviewed by Amy Cooper (University of Chicago)
In Revolutionary Medicine, P. Sean Brotherton presents a rich ethnographic analysis of health and medicine in Cuba since the late 1990s, examining state medical institutions, the everyday practices of doctors, …