Browsing by Subject "medical anthropology"

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    Reworking Efficacy: The Social Life of Medicine in Northern Togo
    (2013-04-23) Middleton, Alexandra
    When considering the local, indigenous, “traditional” healing practices of non-Western societies, Euro-Americans often ask whether or not they are efficacious – “do they work?” Posed from a biomedical paradigm, the concept of work adheres to a narrow definition. This thesis seeks to expand constrained prevailing views of medical efficacy, challenging conception of the “work” medical systems perform. Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the village of Kuwdé, Northern Togo, I apply the question of work to the Kabre local medical system. I consider how the purposeful distribution of remedies among houses in Kuwdé orients the individual body to community, clan, and history through health and disease. I draw upon theories of embodiment, relationality, and power to show that a medical system does social, relational, and political work as well as physiological work. In doing so, I aim to move from a conception of health solely as biological-pathway-to-biological-impact, to situating health in its social and relational dimensions. I then engage with the field of global health, arguing that an expanded notion of efficacy and work may, in turn, improve the delivery of biomedical care. It is my hope that this project cultivates awareness of how definitions of efficacy frame the lived experience and practice of medicine.
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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.