Jašarević’s beautifully evocative, itinerant ethnography weaves along and sutures together trajectories that, at first, might appear to stand at a distance, their collocations seeming accidents of wandering. On the one end of Health and Wealth there are the open air, small scale markets, typical of post-war, post-socialist Bosnia and many other post-socialist spaces, where a multitude of commodities, from banal …
The concept of placebo is predicated on the opposition between active and inert, deploying this opposition to assert that an action or substance with no inherent active principle can have a paradoxical effect “as if” it were active.1 My thesis is that there is no such thing as the inert in human affairs, relationships, or experience. Think of the …
The WHO Release of their World Report on Disability
On September 12th and 13th, the World Health Organization and World Bank hosted a two-day symposium on the outskirts of DC to discuss the U.S. launch of their new joint World Report on Disability. The two day panel discussion should be posting soon on the University at Buffalo’s Center for …
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| Narcologist Vyacheslav Davidov (Photo: Gregory Warner) |
A couple of months ago I got an email from Gregory Warner, the health reporter for NPR’s Marketplace, who told me that he wanted to discuss my work. Gregory had just returned from Moscow, where he had visited a clinic which treated alcoholism with what seemed to be some very strange techniques. …
There are few subject areas in anthropology untouched by the seminal thought of the late Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss. Though he published only two or three essays concerned expressly with medical subject matter, his theorization in those places of the role of myth and shamanistic authority in symbolic/magical healing opened up questions with lasting significance. I would like to briefly review …
One of the main stories in health research last week concerned the results of a survey, published in BMJ, according to which around 50% of US physicians regularly prescribe “placebo treatments.” The survey was carried out by a team including researchers at the University of Chicago, the NIH’s Department of Bioethics and Harvard Medical School. One of the authors, …