Browsing by Subject "movement"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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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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    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.