This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Amidst almost unstoppable contagion, many have hung their hopes on heat and humidity as a potential defence against contracting Covid-19. In the early months of the pandemic studies of SARS-CoV-2 suggested that the virus is transmitted less efficiently in higher temperatures or at higher rates of humidity, leading to encouraging newspaper headlines around the world, from London to Jakarta. …
“Are you free tomorrow?”
“Sure, what’s going on?”
“It’s a big day for Gramps! I’m taking him to the doctor. I guess someone from the ward office said he ought to be checked for dementia.”
I could tell Ken was trying to make a joke about this ‘big day,’ but as he started slowly walking past me, he leaned his …
My research in Việt Nam addresses how medicine, health, and disease function as political and cultural signifiers as well as telegraphing – in the form of epidemiological data and public health outcomes – important features of the socioeconomic order. While health and disease are highly politicized everywhere in the world, these issues take on intriguing significance in socialist and formerly …
Recovery’s Edge: An Ethnography of Mental Health Care and Moral Agency
Vanderbilt University Press, 2015, 192 pages
“RECOVERY! GET IT, GET OVER IT, OR GET OUT!!!” –Vera
Neely Myers’s beautifully written ethnography is a detailed look at one organization’s attempt to follow the Bush Administration’s 2004 unfunded mandate to make mental health care services …
Duke University Press, 2015, 328 pages
addicted.pregnant.poor is the sort of ethnography you start reading and don’t put down again until it’s finished. From its opening pages—where Knight recounts the story of trying to get into the hotel room of Ramona, her extremely high, heavily pregnant and possibly comatose informant—to the last, this is a …
Northeast Brazil is at the centre of attention as the spreading of the Zika virus was recently declared a public health emergency of international concern. Over the last three months, over 4,000 cases of new-borns with microcephaly have been reported in Brazil, compared to only 147 in the whole year of 2014. Eighty-six percent of these cases are found in …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology 