Medical Anthropology Quarterly: International Journal for the Analysis of Health
Medical Anthropology Quarterly: International Journal for the Analysis of Health publishes research and theory in the field of medical anthropology. This field is broadly taken to include all inquiries into health, disease, illness, and sickness in human individuals and populations that are undertaken from the holistic and cross-cultural perspective distinctive of anthropology as a discipline -- that is, with an awareness of species' biological, cultural, linguistic, and historical uniformity and variation. It encompasses studies of ethnomedicine, epidemiology, maternal and child health, population, nutrition, human development in relation to health and disease, health-care providers and services, public health, health policy, and the language and speech of health and health care. The purpose of the journal is to stimulate debate on and development of ideas and methods in medical anthropology and to explore the relationships of medical anthropology to both health practice and the parent discipline of anthropology.
AnthroSource has MAQ and its predecessor, Medical Anthropology Newsletter. Coverage extends from 1972 through 2007.
MAQ and Medical Anthropology Newsletter are also indexed online at JSTOR. Coverage extends from 1983 to 1995.
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Medical Anthropology Quarterly Vol. 22, No. 2: June 2008
articles
The Coproduction of Moral Discourse in U.S. Community Psychiatry
Paul Brodwin
Anthropologists often criticize the discipline of bioethics because its remote, abstract theories fail to capture how front-line clinicians experience and resolve moral uncertainty. The critique overlooks, however, the ways that everyday, emergent moral discourse is influenced—over time and through several mediations—by formal ethical notions. High-order ethical pronouncements become sedimented into the conditions of work, illustrated in this article by a two-year ethnographic study of Assertive Community Treatment (ACT), a popular mode of outpatient psychiatric services. ACT clinicians' moral unease when they break the confidentiality of patients is connected to high-order debates, dating back 35 years, about ensuring patients' autonomy without abandoning them. These debates originally spurred the invention of ACT, and they get braided into today's moral discourse through several mediations: regulatory paperwork, the mandates and micropolitics of staff–patient interactions, and the idealized self-image of front-line staff. This article shows how everyday moral talk is coproduced by both the immediate contexts of clinical work and the categories of formal bioethics.
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Physician and Lay Models of the Common Cold
Roberta D Baer & Susan C Weller Javier García de Alba García Ana L Salcedo Rocha
We compare physicians and laypeople within and across cultures, focusing on simi-larities and differences across samples, to determine whether cultural differences or lay–professional differences have a greater effect on explanatory models of the common cold. Data on explanatory models for the common cold were collected from physicians and laypeople in South Texas and Guadalajara, Mexico. Structured interview materials were developed on the basis of open-ended interviews with samples of lay informants at each locale. A structured questionnaire was used to collect information from each sample on causes, symptoms, and treatments for the common cold. Consensus analysis was used to estimate the cultural beliefs for each sample. Instead of systematic differences between samples based on nationality or level of professional training, all four samples largely shared a single-explanatory model of the common cold, with some differences on subthemes, such as the role of hot and cold forces in the etiology of the common cold. An evaluation of our findings indicates that, although there has been conjecture about whether cultural or lay–professional differences are of greater importance in understanding variation in explanatory models of disease and illness, systematic data collected on community and professional beliefs indicate that such differences may be a function of the specific illness. Further generalizations about lay–professional differences need to be based on detailed data for a variety of illnesses, to discern patterns that may be present. Finally, a systematic approach indicates that agreement across individual explanatory models is sufficient to allow for a community-level explanatory model of the common cold.Before Your Very Eyes: Illness, Agency, and the Management of Tourette Syndrome
Andrew Buckser
In this article, I examine the ways that people with Tourette Syndrome (TS) manage the motor and vocal tics characteristic of this neurological disorder. To mitigate the powerful stigmas associated with TS, individuals must either remove tics from public view or strive to recast the way that they are perceived. Drawing on ethnographic research with TS sufferers in Indiana, I elaborate three strategies by which this is done, strategies referred to here as displacement, misattribution, and contextualization. These processes strongly affect both the symptoms themselves and the subjective experience of the illness. They also affect the perception of TS in the larger culture, associating the disease with florid symptoms like cursing—symptoms that, although not at all typical of TS, are the ones most resistant to these kinds of management. These patterns highlight how individual agency may actively shape the cultural construction of illness.
book reviews
… and a time to die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life. Sharon Kaufman Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, x + 400 pp.
Review by Sherylyn Briller
Old Age in a New Age: The Promise of Transformative Nursing Homes. Beth Baker Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2007, xii + 236 pp.
Review by Athena McLean
Witches, Westerners, and HIV: AIDS and Cultures of Blame in Africa. Alexander Rodlach Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2006 272 pp.
Review by Brooke Grundfest Schoepf
Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Sarah Franklin Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, x + 254 pp.
Review by Francesca Bray
A Marriage of Convenience: Rockefeller International Health and Revolutionary Mexico. Anne-Emanuelle Birn Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006, ix + 434 pp.
The Value of Health: A History of the Pan American Health Organization. Marcos Cueto Scientific and Technical Publication, 600 Washington, DC: Pan American Health Organization, 2007, vii + 239 pp.
Review by Linda M Whiteford
Culture, Health and Illness. Fifth edition. Cecil Helman New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, vii + 501 pp.
Review by Brian McKenna
Politics and Poetics of Migration: Narratives of Iranian Women from the Diaspora. Parin Dossa Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars' Press, x + 199 pp.
Review by Sarah J Mahler
Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles. Emily K Abel New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007, x + 188 pp.
Review by Stephanie C Kane
Shapes in the Wax: Tradition and Faith among Folk Medicine Practitioners in Rural Ukraine. Sarah D Phillips dir. Media Production, Instructional Support Services, prod. 55 min. 2004. Bloomington: Indiana University.
Review by Catherine Wanner