How do people routinely exposed to past and present hazards created by facilities such as an oil refinery, a fracking site, an incinerator, or a smelting plant, think and feel about the risks posed to their surroundings and their health? A now more than two decades-long “relational turn” in the social sciences has taught us that the true source of …
Editor’s note: in the following author discussion, the authors of the books reviewed in this forum respond to a series of questions and, in the indented text, to one another’s responses as well.
1. One of the themes that emerges across these three books is the importance of labor within global health orders in Africa. The forms that work takes …
I cannot thank the readers enough for their thoughtful and thought-provoking commentaries on The Twilight of Cutting. The beauty and creative rigor of their engagements is inspiring and humbling. Together, the commentaries raise important questions about the objects and endpoints of anthropological analysis, the modes of feminist critique, the political potential of feminist anthropological sensibility, and the challenges of …
I]t may be useful to wonder which of the idealisms that make our hearts beat faster will seem wrong-headed to people a hundred years from now.
– Doris Lessing, African Laughter
As a subject engulfed in high-stakes controversy, female genital cutting presents daunting challenges to a researcher as attuned to subtlety and complexity as Saida Hodžić is. Even its …
This article is part of the following series: Medico-Legal Borderlands
Medico-legal borderlands?
What is this nebulous sounding compound concept, “medico-legal borderlands”? How has it been used by social scientists whose ethnographic studies scratch at itches in the intersecting areas of human health and illness and the organization and production of health care systems?
Through a collection of four essays curated for this Somatosphere series, we invite readers to join us …
This article is part of the following series: Notes on guns and violence
The following is taken from the forthcoming book, The Police Against Itself: Reassembling French Liberalism “After the Social,” an ethnography of French police administrative reform, the vicissitudes of public life, and the ethical tensions which animate both, especially around questions of violence. This section, an interlude entitled “Time, Regained,” offers a rumination on a particular tapestry of violence and belonging …
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