Newsletter: February 2004
Editorial Vision for SMA Column
Several months each year, the SMA column brings readers time-sensitive
announcements about conferences, fellowships and awards. Beyond this important
function as a vehicle for this information, our goal is for the SMA column
to serve as a space for substantive intellectual exchange and debate on
matters of importance to all medical anthropologists. For the past year
the column has focused on “Institutional Review Boards.” The
most recent contribution to this call, by Helen McGough (U Washington),
is featured as a Commentary in this month’s AN.
We propose a new topic of discussion another subject that affects many of
us, regardless of our home institutions or topic specialization: research
funding. We invite submissions on the Pragmatics of Funding--from discussion
of finding the right-fit funding source to insights into how peer review
systems work, from explanations about the internal workings of funding organizations
to advice about writing proposals that get funded. We hope that by featuring
such pieces, the SMA column will serve as a means for transmitting institutional
knowledge among medical anthropologists. If you’ve learned some lessons
along the way that you wish someone had told YOU about, this is your opportunity
to inform and aid your colleagues. We particularly welcome short (650 words)
submissions. Please send in your contributions directly to us, or contact
us (see emails below) if you have ideas or questions you’d like to
discuss.
CAR Edited Book and Student Prize Paper Awards
The Council for Anthropology and Reproduction 2003 award for Most Notable Recent Edited Collection was awarded to Marcia Inhorn and Frank van Balen for their edited volume, Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender and Reproductive Technologies. CAR’s 2003 award for Most Enduring Edited Collection went to Robbie Davis-Floyd and Carolyn Sargent for Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge. The 2003 CAR Graduate Student paper prize was awarded to Helene Goldberg for her paper entitled, "The Man in the Sperm – Silenced Male Infertility in Israel."
Special Interest Group in Child Health
Elisa Sobo (Children’s Hospital San Diego)
SMA is exploring the possibility of supporting a special interest group for child health (with 'child' and 'health' broadly defined). The purpose of the group is to provide a forum for persons interested in all aspects of child health, including researchers, parents, and providers. Members will meet to share information and ideas at the yearly AAA conference, and will communicate through a website maintained by SMA. Contact Elisa J. Sobo, Children's Hospital San Diego (esobo@chsd.org) with name, affiliation, interest area, and email address.
Ethnography in Diabetological Scenes
Liliana Cora Saslavski (U Buenos Aires)
Diabetes treatment as a medical specialty was well developed throughout Argentina in the 1990’s: it had academic institutions that were well known in large industrialized nations. Yet, at the same time, Argentina was suffering from the collapse of health institutions and all epidemiological statistics pointed at poor control over diabetes. There were no consistent official health policies for the population in general or for diabetics in particular.
The treatment efficacy crisis became the gist of my research, carried out between 1991 and 2001 in the endocrinology and nutrition departments of private and public hospitals of the city and province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. My field work showed the multifaceted nature of the crisis: it was different in the consulting room, the waiting room, for inpatients, for doctors during their case reviews, in the hospital corridors, the medical seminars or in medical assemblies in scientific societies. In all of these spaces, defined as diabetological scenes, the crisis became alive in the players’ actions.
For example, if we pause to consider the diabetes consultation as a scene, it becomes a social space where hybrid notions and action strategies pertaining to the disease are produced. Diverse contradictory pieces of knowledge and values are bundled together and mingle there, making the image of the disease more complex, and often undermining the traditional notions of medical efficiency. Diabetics, besides having their lives medicalized, must endure a moral judgment embedded in the biomedical act. The treatment becomes thus an axis around which the social life of the patient revolves, rather than a technical procedure.
For more information on this study, please contact the author at lilchame@hotmail.com.
Please send your comments, contributions, news and announcements to the SMA Contributing Editors Nancy Vuckovic (nancy.vuckovic@kpchr.org) or Janelle Taylor (jstaylor@u.washington.edu)