Search results

Borders and Healers: Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa. Tracy J. Luedke and Harry G. West, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 223 pp.

Intro -- Contents -- Introduction -- Bonnex Kaunda: "There are too many goings-on these days." -- 1. Dangerous Modernities -- Agnesi Kunjirima: "You can make your pregnancy safe." -- 2. Knowing Bodies -- Lillian Siska: "I help them right here at home." -- 3. Ambivalent Technologies -- Chimwemwe Bruce: "Changes, yes, but no development." -- 4. Abundant Scarcity -- Rhoda Nantongwe: "By the time she comes to the hospital, it is too late." -- 5. Countless Accountings -- Dyna Ng'ong'ola and Kettie Pensulo: "Women in this community are very much concerned." -- 6. Fragile Authority -- Conclusion -- Glossary of Chichewa Terms -- Key People and Places -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- References -- Index.

Physician anthropologists have contributed extensively to the anthropology of biomedicine, as well as to other aspects of medical anthropology. Their use of detailed clinical case narratives allows elucidation of what is at stake for individuals and communities in the course of any given illness. Biomedically informed observations of bodies illustrate the connections between microscopic harm and macrosocial arrangements, while observations of clinical spaces and medical knowledge production contribute to current debates over evidence, metrics, migration, and humanitarianism. In moving away from culturalist explanations for illness, physician anthropologists have drawn attention to the manifold workings of structural violence—and have often sacrificed the possibility of deep epistemological challenges to biomedicine. While raising a note of caution about the moral authority of physician anthropologists, I recognize that much of this scholarship has laid the intellectual groundwork for a movement toward equity that refuses to justify poor-quality health care for poor people.

ABSTRACT At an understaffed and underresourced urban African training hospital, Malawian medical students learn to be doctors while foreign medical students, visiting Malawi as clinical tourists on short‐term electives, learn about "global health." Scientific ideas circulate fast there; clinical tourists circulate readily from outside to Malawi but not the reverse; medical technologies circulate slowly, erratically, and sometimes not at all. Medicine's uneven globalization is on full display. I extend scholarship on moral imaginations and medical imaginaries to propose that students map these wards variously as places in which—or from which—they seek a better medicine. Clinical tourists, enacting their own moral maps, also become representatives of medicine "out there": points on the maps of others. Ethnographic data show that for Malawians, clinical tourists are colleagues, foils against whom they construct ideas about a superior and distinctly Malawian medicine and visions of possible alternative futures for themselves. [biomedicine, tourism, Africa, imaginaries]

How to be a doctor in Malawi / Claire Wendland and Chizowa Bandawe -- What you need to know to be a fish farmer in west Norway / Marianne Elisabeth Lien and John Law -- A magician in Paris / Graham Jones with Loïc Marquet -- Being a village court magistrate in Papua New Guinea / Melissa Demian -- The chaplain : a physician of the soul in a secular age / Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Christopher Swift -- Being a crime scene technician in Sweden / Corinna Kruse -- Playing piano without a piano in Bolivia / Michelle Bigenho -- Making do in perpetual crisis : how to be a journalist in Buryatia / Kathryn Graber -- How to be a professional organizer in the United States / Carrie M. Lane -- How to design a film costume in India / Lovleen Bains and Clare Wilkinson -- Reflections from a life on the line / Caitrin Lynch and Warren Chamberlain -- How to be a cell phone repairperson / Amanda Kemble, Briel Kobak, Joshua A. Bell and Joel Kuipers -- How to be a professional wrestler in Mexico City / Heather Levi -- The pains and peaks of being a ballerina in London / Helena Wulff

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part One. Global Medicines in Local Cultures -- Chapter 1 Global Health Goals and Local Constraints in a Rural Peruvian Clinic -- Chapter 2 Science and Sanctity: Biomedicine and Christianity at an Ethiopian Hospital -- Chapter 3 The Cosmopolitan Hospital -- Chapter 4 "Dangerous Disease" Epilepsy in Asante -- Chapter 5 The Salience of the State in Biomedicine: Congo and Uganda Cases Compared -- Part Two. Care Giving and Hospital Labor -- Chapter 6 Creating a Therapeutic Community: Lessons from Allada Hospital Benin -- Chapter 7 Medical "Errands" among Women with Cervical Cancer in Guatemala -- Chapter 8 Routinized Caring or a "Call" to Nursing: Shifts in Hospital Nursing in Rukwa, Tanzania -- Chapter 9 "We Work with What We Have, Not with What We Would Like to Have" Hospital Care in Mexico -- Part Three. Hospitals and the Patient -- Chapter 10 The Navigation of Public Hospitals by West African Immigrants with Cancer in Paris, France -- Chapter 11 Each Child Is Unique: The Responsible U.S. Parent's Take on Hospital Care Gone Wrong -- Chapter 12 Making Ethnographic Sense of Cesarean Rates in Greek Public Hospitals -- Chapter 13 The Nightside of Medicine: Obstetric Suffering and Ethnographic Witnessing in a Pakistani Hospital -- Afterword -- References -- Notes on Contributors -- Index