Browsing by Author "Solomon, H"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Affective Journeys: The Emotional Structuring of Medical Tourism in India
    (Anthropology & Medicine, 2011) Solomon, H
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    Epidemiology in Motion: Traumatic Brain Injuries in Mumbai
    (South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies, 2021-01-01) Solomon, H
    This paper is an ethnographic account of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) based on a study of a public hospital trauma ward in urban India. It explores the contexts, causes and consequences of TBIs in order to make several broader claims. Across two case studies, I argue that epidemiological transitions towards non-infectious disease regimens must be understood as problems of somatic movement. The implication is that bodies make transitions through actual and imagined changes in bodily movements that define how persons become patients, how traumatic injury pulls on clinical resources, and how differences in gender, sexuality, class and caste affect the social dynamics of brain injury in urban settings at every turn.
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    Shifting Gears: Triage and Traffic in Urban India.
    (Medical anthropology quarterly, 2017-09) Solomon, H
    While studies of triage in clinical medical literature tend to focus on the knowledge required to carry out sorting, this article details the spatial features of triage. It is based on participation observation of traffic-related injuries in a Mumbai hospital casualty ward. It pays close attention to movement, specifically to adjustments, which include moving bodies, changes in treatment priority, and interruptions in care. The article draws on several ethnographic cases of injury and its aftermath that gather and separate patients, kin, and bystanders, all while a triage medical authority is charged with sorting them out. I argue that attention must be paid to differences in movement, which can be overlooked if medical decision-making is taken to be a static verdict. The explanatory significance of this distinction between adjustment and adjudication is a more nuanced understanding of triage as an iterative, spatial process.
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    Stable condition: Traumatic injury, coma, and vital traffic in a Mumbai hospital ward
    (American Anthropologist, 2023-06-01) Solomon, H
    Based on five years of research in a public-hospital trauma ward in Mumbai, this article examines the fraught case study of comatose states that result from traffic-accident injuries. It focuses on a relationship between two brothers, one injured in a motorcycle accident and in a coma, and the other caring for him. The article asks: How do people navigate life-and-death situations through both stillness and motion? Addressing this question requires recasting traumatic injury from a wound that lodges in a single body to an intersubjective problem of discontinuous and relational traffic. In moments of transfer to the hospital, prognosis about vital signs, and reflections on death, the embodiment of and care for traumatic injury materializes through uneven relationships of intermittent motion. The article develops the analytic of vital traffic to describe these relationships and analyzes the temporal and spatial discontinuities that shape and undermine stability after injury occurs. Differences in vital traffic matter to patients, families, providers, and to the very possibility of survival. The implication of this finding is a better understanding of the sociality of injury and its care. Beyond the case of medicine, attention to vital traffic can illuminate the flux of ethnography itself.
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    Taste Tests: Pizza and the Gastropolitical Laboratory in Mumbai
    (Ethnos, 2014-01-01) Solomon, H
    This article is about experiments in taste. Focused on the cultural politics of pizza in Mumbai, it highlights the visceral work required to naturalize consumer choice as a catalyst of social futures in contemporary India. It emerges out of interviews and observations among food marketers and among customers and workers in a pizza restaurant. Guided by the concept of 'experimentality' elaborated in medical anthropology and science and technology studies, the article reframes definitions of food in experimental terms through two ethnographic registers. The first narrative focuses on the marketing of pizza, and explains how marketers turned their restaurants into laboratories of cosmopolitan cultivation. The second narrative shows how laboring bodies become enrolled in that laboratory, as young adults recruited from low-income neighborhoods come to work at a pizza restaurant. Such experiments blur the lines between evidence and enjoyment, and ultimately add up to a revaluation of public eating itself. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.
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    "The taste no chef can give": Processing street food in Mumbai
    (Cultural Anthropology, 2015-01-01) Solomon, H
    © by the American Anthropological Association.This article examines a Mumbai street food called the vada pav. I describe how a local political party branded its own version of the food, elaborate how streetside vendors make and sell the food, and then show how corporate franchises inspired by McDonald's rendered the vada pav "safe" and "clean" through mechanized processing. In contrast to treating the street as an empty container inside which food is placed, this article elaborates how the street is critical for changing a food from one version to another. I argue that the street lies at the heart of what I will describe as attempts at food processing. Food processing isolates raw ingredients; it singles them out to transform a food into something else. My aim is to expand what processing might entail across sites of vernacular politics and intensified corporatization. Differences in possible transformations allow for guesses about how one thing transforms into another. The particular relationship of the vada pav to the street shapes what kind of guesswork is necessary to understand processing's political and social effects. The street marks efforts to transform the vada pav, and, accordingly, ideologies and acts of processing must move beyond a focus on location to accommodate how the street generates possibilities for urban life.
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    Unreliable eating: Patterns of food adulteration in urban India
    (BioSocieties, 2015-01-01) Solomon, H
    © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.This article is about food safety and food adulteration in urban India. Situated at the relational interface of foods and their contaminants, it considers ways of thinking and acting at the porous boundaries between bodies and environments. The article details how people attempt to detect where food and its adulteration begins and ends, through ethnographic reflection on several events of adulteration in Mumbai and a context of changing food safety policies in India. The article develops the concept of reliability as a lens onto food politics different than one delimited strictly in terms of consumerism. Reliability refracts the politics of difference at work in times of toxic food environments, in contemporary India and elsewhere, wherein tensions between poison and nourishment take on renewed charges. This framework recasts a choice-focused approach to thinking about food safety by centralizing how living with harm - rather than ridding the world of it, element by element - is what is at stake.