Medical Anthropology Quarterly (MAQ)
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International Journal for the Analysis of Health
Vol. 23, No. 1: March 2009
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Special Issue: Introduction to Nordic Medical Anthropology: Benedicte Ingstad & Aud Talle, guest editors
articles
Health Identities and Subjectivities: The Ethnographic Challenge
Susan Reynolds Whyte
- The formation of identity and subjectivity in relation to health is a fundamental issue in social science. This overview distinguishes two different approaches to the workings of power in shaping senses of self and other. Politics of identity scholars focus on social movements and organizations concerned with discrimination, recognition, and social justice. The biopower approach examines discourse and technology as they influence subjectivity and new forms of sociality. Recent work in medical anthropology, especially on chronic problems, illustrates the two approaches and also points to the significance of detailed comparative ethnography for problematizing them. By analyzing the political and economic bases of health, and by embedding health conditions in the other concerns of daily life, comparative ethnography ensures differentiation and nuance. It helps us to grasp the uneven effects of social conditions on the possibilities for the formation of health identities and subjectivities.
Power, Trust, and Risk: Some Reflections on an Absent Issue
Harald Grimen
- In modern discussions among health professionals there is a strange lack of discussions of power. This is most notably true for the discussions about proper physician–patient relations and the discussions about trust. This article explores some of the consequences of this absence. It is argued that the absence of the issue of power hampers a serious and open moral discussion of important institutional forms in the health care system. It is also argued that some of the proposals for how to organize physician–patient interaction are rather unrealistic, mainly because the issue of power is neglected. Finally, the article develops some ideas about how power ought to be approached in modern health care.
Emotional Experts: Parents' Views on End-of-Life Decisions for Preterm Infants in Iceland
Jónína Einarsdóttir
- In this article, I examine how parents of infants with birth weight of 1,000 grams or less in Iceland relate to the questions whether and when treatment for a preterm infant may be withdrawn, and who should make such a decision. Almost all the parents agreed there are categories of infants who should be allowed to die and parents should have a say in such a decision. Inability to take part in human communication was most commonly mentioned as a valid criterion for withdrawal of treatment. There was more disagreement about parents' right to unilaterally demand withdrawal. Ethical dilemmas and their resolutions are embedded in social context where images of suffering and disability and establishment of medical facts are central. Parents claimed their right to participate in treatment decisions as emotional experts; the child was theirs and they had to live with the outcome. Their hope in cure was based on faith in medical science and high confidence in the staff of the NICU. Parents also stressed the infant's will to live and referred to alternative knowledge, for instance, derived from "evidence based" spiritism or an interpretation of a dream.
Grips and Ties: Agency, Uncertainty, and the Problem of Suffering in North Karelia
Marja-Liisa Honkasalo
- In medical anthropological research, the question of suffering has been a topic of salient interest mostly from two theoretical viewpoints: those of endurance and of agency. The concept "suffering" derives its origins from two etymological roots, those of suffering–souffrance–sofferanza and of misery–misère–miseria. According to the first approach, that of "endurance" and founded largely on Judeo–Christian theology, suffering is regarded as an existential experience at the borders of human meaning making. The question then is: how to endure, how to suffer? The latter view, that of "agency," follows the Enlightenment, and later the Marxist view on mundane suffering, misery, and the modern question of how to avoid or diminish it. This article follows the lines of the second approach, but my aim is also to try to build a theoretical bridge between the two. I ask whether agency would be understood as a culturally shared and interpreted modes of enduring, and if so, which conceptual definition of agency applies in this context? I theorize the relationship between suffering and agency using Ernesto de Martino's notion la crisi della presenza. In line with Pierre Bourdieu, I think that in people's lives, there may be sufferings in a plural form, as a variety of sufferings. The article is based on a one-year long fieldwork in Finnish North Karelia.
book reviews
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Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement by Phil Brown
Melissa Checker -
Mental Health among Taiwanese Americans: Gender, Immigration, and Transnational Struggles by Chien-Juh Gu
Rebecca Seligman -
Dancing for Health: Conquering and Preventing Stress by Judith Lynne Hanna
Luci Fernandez -
Skin: A Natural History by Nina G. Jablonski
Bernhard Fink -
The Health of Populations: General Theories and Particular Realities by Stephen J. Kunitz
Craig Janes -
Iron in the Soul: Displacement, Livelihood and Health in Cyprus by Peter Loizos
Lisa Modenos -
Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity by Karen Nakamura
Jan-Kåre Breivik -
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology edited by J. Valsiner and A. Rosa
Rebecca J. Lester -
Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society by Holly Wardlow
Mary Bicke
