Medical Anthropology Quarterly: Vol. 17, No. 4 (december 2003)
articles
Syndemics and Public Health: Reconceptualizing Disease in Bio-Social Context
Merill Singer, Scott Clair
The world of public health has undergone dramatic changes since the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s. The appearance and global spread in recent years of wave after wave of new and renewed infectious diseases and their entwinement with each other and with the social conditions and biopsychological consequences of disparity, discrimination, and structural violence has produced a new significant threat to public health internationally. The term syndemic has been introduced recently by medical anthropologists to label the synergistic interaction of two or more coexistent diseases and resultant excess burden of disease. This article provides the fullest examination of this new concept to date, including a review of relevant new literature and recent research finds concerning coinfection and synergistic interaction of diseases and social conditions at the biological and population levels, [syndemic, public health, coinfection, structural violence, medical anthropology]
Migratory Journeys and Tuberculosis Risk
Ming-Jung Ho
After decades of decline, tuberculosis case rates in New York City more than tripled between 1978 and 1992. While the number of cases of those born in the United States declined after 1992, the proportion of immigrant tuberculosis cases continued to increase and reached 58 percent in 1999. This article questions the biomedical explanation of immigrant tuberculosis as being imported from immigrants' countries of origin. Illness narratives of illegal Chinese immigrants with tuberculosis detailing risks associated with migratory journeys are presented. The social and cultural nature of the concept of risk, as well as the adverse implication of biomedical identification of immigrants as being at higher risk of tuberculosis, are also discussed. The author concludes that the dominant biomedical explanation of immigrant tuberculosis could be modified with the incorporation of the migratory process as a risk factor, [tuberculosis, illegal migration, Chinese immigrants, New York City, Chinatown]
Using Home Gardens to Decipher Health and Healing in the Andes
Ruthbeth Finerman, Ross Sackett
Home gardens are a pervasive component of Andean agricultural systems, but have been ignored in anthropological and agronomic research. Recent research in the indigenous community of Saraguro, Ecuador, employed a combination of in-depth interviews, free-listing, videotaped walk-throughs, and mapping to explore the role of home gardens, which are established and controlled by women. Findings reveal that, although gardens offer multiple benefits, they are overwhelmingly devoted to the cultivation of medicinal plants, operating as de facto medicine cabinets that supply women with most of the resources they need to treat family illnesses. Results also suggest that the natural history of home gardens mirrors transformations within the family, and that Saraguro women study the contents of their neighbors' gardens, using this knowledge as a foundation for deciphering the owners' economic and health status. New threats to the sustainability of home gardens threaten the foundation of Saraguro's ethnomedical system and women's authority in the home and community. [ethnobotany, gardens, Ecuador, women healers, family health]
Contextualizing the Politics of Knowledge: Physicians' Attitudes toward Medicinal Plants
Coral Wayland
This article examines how a group of public health physicians in the urban Amazon values medicinal plant knowledge. As biomedical health care providers, physicians routinely draw on scientific plant knowledge. At the same time, as residents of the Amazon and health care providers to the poor, they are aware of and sometimes participate in local systems of plant knowledge. When discussing medicinal plant use, physicians repeatedly mention three themes: science, superstition, and biopiracy. The way in which physicians construct and negotiate these themes is part of the process of maintaining and legitimating their expertise and authority. This analysis finds that context is key to understanding whether, when, and why physicians value certain bodies of knowledge. Locally, in clinics, scientific plant knowledge is constructed as superior. In a global context, however, local plant knowledge is explicitly valued. This situational valuation/devaluation of plant knowledge relates to the positions of power physicians occupy in each context, [medicinal plants, politics of knowledge, Brazil, Amazon, physicians]
book reviews
Meaning, Medicine, and the "Placebo Effect"
reviewed by A. David Napier
Life Exposed: Biological Citizenship after Chernobyl
reviewed by Michele Rivkin-Fish
Smoking and Pregnancy: The Polities of Fetal Protection
reviewed by Susan L. Erikson
Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves
reviewed by Marcia C. Inhorn
Fat Talk: What Girls and Their Parents Say about Dieting
reviewed by Lisa R. Rubin
Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk: Fertility and Danger in West Central Tanzania
reviewed by Nadine Beckman
Fluent Bodies: Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolortial Imbalance
reviewed by Murphy Halliburton
Endangered Species: Health, Illness and Death among Madagascar's People of the Forest
reviewed by Lesley A. Sharp
Birth by Design: Pregnancy, Maternity Care, and Midwifery in North America and Europe
reviewed by Elizabeth A. Bogdan-Lovis
Infertility around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies
reviewed by Sarah C. Richards
Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China
reviewed by Lynn Kwiatkowski