Medical Anthropology Quarterly: Vol. 17, No. 1 (march 2003)
Editorial
Medical Anthropology and Global Health
Pamela I. Erickson
Articles
Why Am I Not Disabled? Making State Subjects,
Making Statistics in Post-Mao China
Matthew Kohrman
In this article I examine how and why disability was defined and statistically quantified by China’s party-state in the late 1980s. I describe the unfolding of a particular epidemiological undertaking – China’s 1987 National Sample Survey of Disabled Persons – as well as the ways the survey was an extension of what Ian Hacking has called modernity’s “avalanche of numbers.” I argue that, to a large degree, what fueled and shaped the 1987 survey’s codification and quantification of disability was how Chinese officials were incited to shape their own identities as they negotiated an array of social, political, and ethnical forces, which were at once national and transnational in orientation. [disability, China, epidemiology, biopower, identity]
'I Speak a Different Dialect': Teen Explanatory
Models of Difference and Disability
Tamara C. Daley and Thomas S. Weisner
What do teens with disabilities believe about their conditions, and what do they understand to be the causes, correlates, and consequences of disability? We elicited a cultural explanatory model (EM) of disability from a longitudinal sample of 23 European American adolescents with varied cognitive disabilities and delay. We asked teens how hey were similar to or different from others; the name of this difference; its causes, severity, course, effects, associated problems and benefits; and need for treatment. IQ and type of disability strongly affected quality of responses only from the lower functioning teens. A majority of teens had a reasonably rich and coherent EM, blending typical and disability themes of cultural knowledge and identity. The EM is a window into social context (schools, services, parents, and peers) as well as personal experience. Eliciting explanatory models from teens with disabilities is not only possible but also can enhance understanding of identity, family influence, and appropriate services. [disability; explanatory models; adolescence; culture]
Invoking Vali: Painful Technologies of Modern
Birth in South India
Cecelia Van Holen
As reproduction becomes increasingly biomedicalized throughout the globe, reproductive technologies are used in unique ways and imbued with different meanings. This article explores why lower-class women in south India in the 1990s were demanding to have childbirth labors induced with oxytocin drugs while rejecting anesthesia. Cultural constructions of women’s reproductive power are evoked and reworked in discourses of modernity that explain this preference. Discourses of relationships among gender, pain, and modernity relate to political-economic constraints on hospitals to perpetuate this practice. [modernity; reproductive technologies; gender; India]
The Medicalization of 'Nature' in the 'Artificial
Body': Surrogate Motherhood in Israel
Elly Teman
In this article, I draw on anthropological and feminist scholarship on the body and the nature/culture divide as a framework for understanding the place of surrogate mothers in a conceptual ideology that connects motherhood with nature. I explore links between the medicalization of childbirth in Israel and the personal agency of surrogate mothers as relayed through interviews. Taking the patriarchal context of the Israeli surrogacy law of 1996 into consideration, I underscore surrogates’ imaginative use of medical metaphors as tools for the subversion of surrogacy’s threatening social connotations. By redefining the surrogate boy as “artificial” and locating “nature” in the commissioning mother’s body, surrogates adopt medical rhetoric to transform surrogacy from a transgressive act into an alternative route toward achieving normative Israeli national reproductive goals. [surrogate motherhood, medicalization, nature, body, agency, Israel]
Chracterizing Latino Anglers' Environmental Risk
Perceptions, Sport Fish Consumption, and Advisory
Awareness
Gregory P. Beehler, Bridget M. McGuinness,
and John E. Vena
Sport fish advisories for the Great Lakes states suggest limiting consumption of fish taken from the kales and their tributaries because of chemical contamination. It appears, however, that minority anglers are less aware of the advisories and also consume greater amounts of sport fish than white anglers. We conducted focus groups in Western New York with Latino anglers and partners of anglers to explore these patterns. Analysis revealed that older anglers believed local waters were of good quality and that it was safe to consume fish taken from them. They based their evaluation of both water and fish primarily on visual inspection. In contrast, younger Latinos believed that area waters were highly polluted because of dumping of waste from local industries. They fished away from urban areas in an effort to find cleaner, more swiftly moving waters. They considered consuming sport fish from urban areas highly risky, given their occasional illness experiences following meals of what they thought were polluted fish. For all Latino anglers, however, state-sponsored advisories were minimally effective because of their limited distribution and complex wording. Results point to differences in lay and scientific models of pollution and a need to bridge this gap in future risk-communication strategies. [Latinos; risk perception; risk communication; sport fish advisories]
review essay
Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness
in Rural Ireland (Nancy Scheper-Hughes)
Kim Hopper
book reviews
Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices,
Interpretations. (Etienne van de Walle and Elisha
P. Renne)
Reviewed by Janet Hoskins
Contraception across Cultures: Technologies,
Choices, Constraints. (Andrew Russell, Elisa
J.
Sobo, and Mary S. Thompson)
Reviewed by Paul Valentine
Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life
and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernández.
(Simon Varey, Rafael Chabran, and Dora B. Weiner);
The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco
Hernández
Reviewd by Byron Hamann
Studing Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist
in the World of Artificial Intelligence. (Diana
E. Forsythe)
Reviewed by David Jacobson
Fertility and Social Interaction: An Economic
Perspective. (Hans-Peter Kohler)
Reviewed by Paul
Valentine
List of Reviewers, Nov. 2, 2001 - Nov. 1, 2002