Search results

This dissertation analyzes the various scientific, political and cultural narratives about and the official public health responses to the recent 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. The historical planning emphasis on avian influenza, or `bird flu,' unintentionally created a large amount of uncertainty about how to respond to the threat from a milder, less severe, strain of influenza. I suggest that the specter of a future deadly global pandemic of avian influenza spurred a fascination or myopia in global health policy reminiscent of the mythical danger of listening to the Greek Sirens' song. Throughout this dissertation, I attempt to make sense out of the various and still-emerging accounts of the "swine flu" or 2009 H1N1 outbreak. Thus, I define `pathography' here as the combined historical, biological, social, political, economic and cultural narratives of the 2009 pandemic. The first section explores the historical and biological origins of influenza. Chapter one examines influenza research and early attempts to sequence the H1N1 virus. I use the genetic structure of the virus to suggest that public health agencies are related through a `viral kinship.' Chapter two details the material processes involved in the sequencing and discovery of influenza viruses. In it, I argue that what virology laboratories construct through these material processes of DNA sequencing is not - reductio ad absurdum - the virus itself, or even simply `knowledge' about a virus, but rather a complex network of scientists, laboratories, farms, public health institutions and other `actors' involved in the circulation of influenza samples and genetic information about influenza viruses. Chapter Three explores Hong Kong's history as an international `lab' for disease research, its local identity crisis as a former colony and current position as a Chinese city, and its unique role within global scientific and public health networks. The H1N1 virus is not simply a symbol of the complex global forces that shaped its emergence and its spread, the microscopic 2009 H1N1 virus embodies those macroscopic forces. Using the terms of molecular biology itself, I would like to suggest here that influenza viruses are not born sui generis out of larger economic, political or social processes, but are both created from and used to create the worlds in which they inhabit. The second section of the dissertation deals with this macro-level of analysis, or the political and cultural ramifications of influenza pandemics. Chapter four examines the seemingly new paradigm shift within global public health from the use of a scientific "certainty" to a biological and situational "uncertainty" as one of the foundations of response to infectious disease outbreaks. Chapter five analyzes the production, collection and sharing of epidemiological information during a pandemic. Scientific facts about the virus and the pandemic were freely circulated and agreed upon, but their cultural and political interpretations needed to be continuously negotiated. I argue that not only are cultural politics alive and well, but that they played a vital role in the global response to the influenza outbreak. Finally, I argue that to understand the pandemic as more than just a biological, social, political or historical event, one must look at all these narratives at once. The influenza virus is not thus merely a symbol of our times or for an increasingly globalized world; instead, I argue that it has partially constructed - and continues to shape - the contours of our world.

Through the lens of Type 2 diabetes this dissertation considers race and problems of difference and risk with developments in treatment, genomic science, and the conduct of research and research priorities. Based primarily on fieldwork in New York and California, I interrogate public health notions of outreach with biotechnology and clinical research concepts of biomedical translation as synonymous practices. Institutional relationships and marketing drivers, I argue, reflect relatedness back onto the Type 2 diabetes patient through causal narratives of risk and inevitability. In effect, kinship--genetic, familial, racial, ethnic, and environmental--becomes the driver of both risk and emergent forms of bioliterary discipline. I present a narrative of how diabetic risk became racialized over time and how African Americans became seen as a desirable research population. Arguing against biological race, I present an ethnographic example of how one such African American population, or community, emerged from particular social and political histories. Fieldwork uncovered lingering memories of the Tuskegee Experiment combined with cultural incompetency in both public health and biotechnology sectors. Further, I consider the bioethical challenges of African (American) participation in new genomic research aimed toward reducing health disparities. However, as a racial category, genetics researchers debate the precise genetic location and definition of "Africa" in the human genome. I suggest that the search for a pathological Africa in the human genome may deepen racial stigmatization as well as author new narratives of difference. I submit that social disparity, not biological disparity, presents the ultimate challenge to successful effective clinical translation and public health outreach.

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in migration to Europe, primarily by refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia, but with significant flows of refugees and other migrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa as well. Portugal is not among the primary European destinations for refugees or immigrants; possibly, in part, because there are fewer migrants in Portugal, it is an E.U. country where new arrivals are still met with a degree of enthusiasm. Hard right, anti-immigrant parties—on the rise in other parts of the E.U.—have not gained much traction in Portugal. This work looks at the relative invisibility of immigrants in Porto, the country's second largest city, which may make those immigrants a less visible target for intolerance and political opportunism, but may also impede a larger, more self-determinant role for immigrants and their communities in greater Portuguese society.A major contributing factor to immigrant invisibility is the absence (outside of Lisbon and southern Portugal) of neighborhoods where African immigrants are concentrated. In Porto, communities do not form around geography; instead, communities form around institutions. The role of religious institutions in community formation is examined—institutions such as Protestant and Catholic churches, Catholic seminarian education, and one of Porto's two mosques. Some of these institutions are attended mostly by non-Africans, but nevertheless appeal to sub-Saharan African immigrants on an aesthetic and/or affective level. Others are attended mostly or exclusively by immigrants. The roles of charismatic and well connected individuals in facilitating further connections between immigrants and their communities is also examined, as are aging shopping centers—the centros comerciais—which offer a secular space where Africans might gather together, socialize, and share information in the course of patronizing African groceries, cafés and hair salons.Porto's African immigrants have created or nurtured communities through common goals, interests, and beliefs. In the absence of geographic concentration, they have managed to find ways to share information, support one another, and celebrate their shared experiences.

This dissertation is a study of the landscape ecologies made by the phosphate fertilizer industry in Florida. Chemical fertilizers are one of the big stories of our times, rivaling fossil fuels in terms of Earth-altering effects. I use the Florida phosphate industry and the human-altered phosphorus cycle as a lens to understand the emergence of what earth scientists call the Anthropocene. Unlike most Anthropocene scholars, I argue that we are not "in" the Anthropocene so much as we are living through the Holocene/Anthropocene transition. Studying the Holocene/Anthropocene transition, I assert, requires arts of noticing patchy multispecies landscapes with both Holocene and Anthropocene parts. It also requires anthropological elucidation of industrial capitalism. Understanding how industrialization drives the Holocene/Anthropocene transition is at the core of a new discipline I call critical landscape ecology. At the heart of my critical landscape ecology of Florida is a structural critique of the human-altered phosphorus cycle and the industrial food system it fertilizes. In the Anthropocene, phosphorus forms a broken biogeochemical cycle, feeding the capitalist world-system in a one-way flow from mine to farm to fork and to water body. By learning to convert phosphate rock into an overabundance of cheap food, humans have created the biogeochemical foundations for economic, human population, and (sub)urban growth.Located within Central Florida is one of the world's largest and oldest phosphate-rock-producing regions, known as Bone Valley. Central Florida is also an agricultural region with lakes, rivers, and estuaries that have been polluted by phosphate fertilizers. Lastly, it is a region transformed by suburban sprawl and the politics of growth. I examine how phosphate mining, the eutrophication of agricultural watersheds, and suburban development have fractured the regional Holocene and generated an Anthropocene. As Holocene natures are destroyed and polluted, Floridians invest in restoration and conservation. I document how environmental managers attempt to stave off the ecological entropy unleashed by phosphorus industrialization. Attending to the natural history of this mosaic Holocene/Anthropocene region reveals a strange and surprising mix of invasive weeds, native remnants, restored habitats, and the ghosts of extirpated species.

How can we understand the social and economic dynamics that enable the operative space of the militant networks in northern Mali? This article argues that jihadist militant groups are actors in local power struggles rather than 'fighters' or 'terrorists' with extremist ideological motivations. I argue that the sharp distinctions drawn by the Malian government and the international community between compliant and non-compliant groups in the implementation of the peace agreement from June 2015 is problematic. Understanding the conflicts in northern Mali requires an increased focus on the links between jihadist militant groups, local politics and criminal network activities in Gao and Kidal.

This thesis looks at the Vietnamese undocumented immigrants in Berlin and their choice of risk as mobility through their perception of risk, their migration experiences, and their recollection and retrospective evaluation of risk. Risk here refers to the dangers and challenges the immigrants perceive and face in preparation for migration, en route to, and in Berlin. These three distinct moments unfold in three locations: Vietnam, the Eastern European countries they traverse, and Berlin, but flow in an integral continuum and not as separate or independent intervals. The three moments show the fluidity of migration and the transnational nature of risk through the linkage between temporality and spatiality, and between perception, experiences, and memories. In each of the three main sections of the thesis, I juxtapose theories with ethnographic accounts and oral history narratives to illuminate how these theories play out in the experiences of the Vietnamese immigrants. I follow the call to pay attention to and to integrate the non-humans in research on urban spaces. I embrace the departure from the sacrosanct separation of nature and society as seen in various bodies of sc¬holarship of late, including political ecology and urban studies.

Anthropologies and Uncertain Futures explore the same subject – the experience of cancer in a specific cultural context – yet, they are based on different approaches to cancer. First, Mathews and her colleagues explore cancer in adults, and Clemente focuses on childhood cancer. Second, Mathews and her colleagues conducted ethnographic studies within the field of medical and health anthropology; Clemente, as a linguistic anthropologist, observed children with cancer, their parents, and medical staff, as agents of communication and social interaction, using participant observation, interviews and conversation analysis. Finally, most of the twelve chapters of Anthropologies are focused on cancer-affected subjects (both patients and caregivers) in developing countries or immigrants living in developed countries. Field work was conducted in different locations and communities, including China, France, Brazil, India, Kenya and Puerto Rico, France, Scotland and Argentina, and the USA (Mexican and Filipino immigrants). Clemente's monographic study deals with the micro-context of a paediatric cancer unit in Catalonia, Spain. The above differences make these two volumes complementary, providing a broad perspective on the anthropology of cancer.

The aim of this text is to briefly introduce practically oriented discipline called policy analysis, and to do so in the perspective of (applied) social anthropology.After the introductory definition of terms, which are crucial within the area of public policy, such as policy, policy studies, policy evaluation and policy analysis, I continue with the definition of the very policy analysis of which the explanation of its types and gradual steps towards reaching it are the necessary parts. Another part of the study summarizes the interrelation, interconnection and the enrichment of both disciplines – the policy analysis and the social and cultural anthropology. Several roles in which an anthropologist can assert himself/herself are presented in conclusion. ; The aim of this text is to briefly introduce practically oriented discipline called policy analysis, and to do so in the perspective of (applied) social anthropology.After the introductory definition of terms, which are crucial within the area of public policy, such as policy, policy studies, policy evaluation and policy analysis, I continue with the definition of the very policy analysis of which the explanation of its types and gradual steps towards reaching it are the necessary parts. Another part of the study summarizes the interrelation, interconnection and the enrichment of both disciplines – the policy analysis and the social and cultural anthropology. Several roles in which an anthropologist can assert himself/herself are presented in conclusion.

Anthropologists contend that the organism-environment connections responsible for human evolution are indirect—mediated by culture. This chapter reviews influential twentieth-century anthropological interpretations of the cultural mediation of human adaptations to environments, arguing that ethnography and other qualitative forms of analysis reveal important phenomena overlooked by quantitative analysts committed to methodological individualism. It highlights work by post-positivist anthropologists, who describe relations among human and non-human organisms, cultural forms, and features of environments as "natural-cultural" networks, an approach reminiscent of developmental systems theory and niche construction. Evolutionary theorists have much to gain by incorporating these sophisticated, contemporary post-positivist anthropological understandings of culture into their models of human-environment connections.

El presente escrito constituye un análisis de segundo orden que relaciona diacrónicamente el campo de la antropología con el del turismo e incorpora, a modo de reflexión, las potencialidades epistémicas de los Estudios Culturales. Para ello se establece una hoja de ruta en función de las coordenadas que establecen dos momentos históricos‑contextuales diferentes, aunque relacionados entre sí. Uno de ellos hace alusión al contexto de surgimiento de la antropología del turismo y, un segundo, propio de las últimas décadas del siglo XX que, pese su marginalidad, se caracterizará por la crítica al corazón antropológico: el concepto de cultura y su arbitrariedad. La propuesta tiene la particularidad de exponer discusiones ontológicas y epistemológicas en torno a la cultura y al turismo que no solo ofrece una lectura de tipo histórica sino también por poner en juego el sentido político que adquieren estos conceptos a la luz de tensiones disciplinares contemporáneas. ; The present paper constitutes a second order analysis that relates diachronically the field of anthropology with tourism and incorporates, by way of reflection, the epistemic potential of Cultural Studies. For this purpose, a roadmap is established based on the coordinates that display two different but interrelated historical‑contextual moments. The first is when Anthropology of Tourism emerged as a subject matter in itself, and the second, typical of the last few decades of the twentieth century that, although marginal is insidious, that is the critics of the very concept of anthropology, based on culture and subjective perspectives. The proposal highlights various ontological and epistemological debates relating to culture and tourism that have existed not only in time but also in politics, above all in academic interdisciplinary tensions.

It is no secret that in recent еars the effectiveness of research in our country devoted to the study of social processes remains low. It is worth noting that many factors influence this. On the one hand, the active interaction of the international community and the waves of globalization go ahead than the development of diagnostic findings and the implementation of preventive measures in social research, and on the other hand, current studies lack clear scientific approaches and paradigms. Except for the requirement of a specific approach of the Higher Attestation Commission under the CM of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the scientific community (in most cases, even in its environment) did not come to a general scientific decision about certain paradigms. For this reason, substantial social studies characterizing the reality and developing appropriate effective measures are hardly noticed. This position is argued in the active journalistic activities of bloggers, rather than the academic community. It is necessary to philosophical and conceptual analysis of "culture" in order to search for scientific solutions to existing problems, to provide a deeper understanding of social processes, and their organization in the direction of cultural development. This article is aimed at identifying deterministic relationships between different approaches to the concept of "culture" and, therefore, at developing a modern meritological paradigm for cultural development.

Includes bibliographical references. ; American cultural values : disorders and challenges / James L. Peacock -- Democratic participation : a view from anthropology / Carol MacLennan -- The heartbeat of productivity : hierarchy and transformation in American work relations / Frank A. Dubinskas -- Deindustrialization, poverty, and downward mobility : toward an anthropology of economic disorder / Katherine S. Newman -- Psychophysiological stress and disorders of industrial society : a critical theoretical formulation for biocultural research / Michael L. Blakey -- Plural strategies of survival and cultural formation in U.S.-Mexican households in a region of dynamic transformation : the U.S.-Mexico borderlands / Carlos G. Vélez-Ibanez -- Disorders of our own : a conclusion / Roy A. Rappaport -- A statement to the profession : the American Anthropological Association, Panel on Disorders of Industrial Societies / Michael L. Blakey . [et al.]. ; Mode of access: Internet.

How should we tell the histories of academic disciplines? All too often, the political and institutional dimensions of knowledge production are lost beneath the intellectual debates. This book redresses the balance. Written in a narrative style and drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it depicts the complex pattern of personal and administrative relationships that shape scholarly worlds. Focusing on the field of social anthropology in twentieth-century Britain, this book describes individual, departmental and institutional rivalries over funding and influence. It examines the efforts of scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Evans-Pritchard and Max Gluckman to further their own visions for social anthropology. Did the future lie with the humanities or the social sciences, with addressing social problems or developing scholarly autonomy? This new history situates the discipline's rise within the post-war expansion of British universities and the challenges created by

In this introduction, we aim to demystify the concept of wealth, too entangled in financial discourses, which have generally reduced it to 'accumulated assets'. This is at odds with the intricate cultural history of wealth as a concept, as well as with abundant anthropological accounts, instead defining wealth as a question of reproduction, relational flows and life vitality. When we view wealth as firstly a product of relational capacities, we begin to understand the processes wherein it is constantly being pulled at from forces that demand appropriation, be that finance, community or state. We therefore outline wealth as a triangular phenomenon between capital, the commons, and power. Careful at the dynamics between such forces, we structure our analysis around the paradoxical social processes where wealth, originating in every day relationships and human reproduction, is continually exposed to claims – such as market alienation, but also 'commoning', or governmental state control. ; publishedVersion

Der Band versammelt ethnographische Beiträge zur Frage der Homosexualität vor dem Hintergrund einer "heteronormativen" Mehrheitskultur. Vorgeführt werden Aspekte der akademischen und politischen Debatte in den USA, das methodische Problem der Wahrnehmung "fremder" Sexualkulturen vor dem Hintergrund "eigener" kultureller Vorstellungen und zuletzt der Umstand, dass sich auch ein beobachtendes Subjekt "im Feld" als Geschlechtswesen präsentieren und etablieren muss. Die Beträge sind durchaus informativ und instruktiv zu lesen, dem Band mangelt es aber an einer angemessenen und zu diesen Punkten theoretisch hilfreichen Einleitung. Insbesondere bleibt das Grundproblem unterreflektiert, ob nicht der erste und wichtigste Schritt zur Abschaffung der "Heteronormativität" ein wirklich radikales Infragestellen der Dichotomie "Heterosexualität" / "Homosexualität" selbst sein müsste. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0302144 ; This issue of the journal brings a sample of cultural anthropologists' papers on homosexuality in relation to the "heteronormative" majority. It deals with US-American academic and political debates, methodical problems in perceiving "alien" sexual cultures under the perspective of one's own cultural beliefs and, finally, the point that epistemic subjects have to present and establish themselves as sexual beings "in the field", too. The contributions are informative and instructive to read, but the issue lacks a helpful introduction. It is never discussed whether the first and most important step in deconstructing "heteronormativity" would be to radically take up the question of the dichotomy of "heterosexuality"/"homosexuality" itself. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0302144 ; Este volumen de la revista ofrece una muestra de artículos de antropólogos culturales sobre la homosexualidad en relación con la "heteronormatividad" mayoritaria. Aborda los debates políticos y académicos en USA, aborda también los problemas metodológicos al percibir las culturas sexuales "extrañas" bajo la perspectiva de las propias creencias de ...