On May 25, 2022, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed into law the strictest ban on abortion to date, a policy that prohibits the termination of any pregnancy “from the moment of fertilization.” This law endows an embryo, no matter the stage—long before it has discernible heartbeat—with the same legal status as an unborn child. Almost exactly one month later, on …
Preventing Dementia? Critical Perspectives on a New Paradigm of Preparing for Old Age
Edited by Annette Leibing and Silke Schicktanz
Berghahn Books, 2020. 268 pages
In their recently published edited volume, medical anthropologist Annette Leibing and bioethicist and STS scholar Silke Schicktanz set their focus on the “new dementia” and on related and novel approaches to dementia prevention. While the …
This article is part of the following series: Reducing Harm Responsibly
Philadelphia is the poorest of the ten largest cities in the United States and has one of the highest rates of fatal opioid-related overdoses in the state of Pennsylvania. Faced with a limited landscape of social services and community-based support, and the responsibility of keeping their defendants alive, judges and attorneys in Philadelphia have begun to use probation and incarceration …
This article is part of the following series: Working Definitions: Making and Unmaking “Medical Anthropology” around the World
“If you want to understand what a science is, you should look for the first instance not at its theories and its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it, you should look at what the practitioners of it do,” wrote Clifford Geertz (1973, p.311). To contribute to the continuous redefinition of medical anthropology, we will present …
This article is part of the following series: Working Definitions: Making and Unmaking “Medical Anthropology” around the World
The American Anthropological Association website identifies four subfields of anthropology (archaeology, biological, cultural, linguistic) and reserves a separate section for “applied and practicing anthropology.” In our collective experience, we have found this division between ostensibly “academic” and “applied” anthropology problematic, as it limits the possibilities of a broadly conceptualized and enacted medical anthropology that is more continuous than categorical. We …
This article is part of the following series: Working Definitions: Making and Unmaking “Medical Anthropology” around the World
Introduction
The tension between critical theoretical innovation and on-the-ground, practical application has animated intense debate in medical anthropology (Scheper-Hughes 1990). Epistemological and methodological conflicts cropping up at the intersection of medicine and anthropology, though central considerations for all medical anthropologists, represent an inescapable source of tension for MD/PhD clinician-ethnographers. While innovative manuscripts produced by such scholars (Wendland 2019) have illustrated …