Suchergebnisse

In Glyphosate and the Swirl Vincanne Adams explores the chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—as a predicament of contested science and chemically saturated life. Adams traces the history of glyphosate's invention and its multiple uses as activists, regulators, scientists, clinicians, consumers, and sick people try to determine its safety and harm. Scientific and political debates over glyphosate's toxicity are agitated into a swirl—a condition in which certainty is continually contested, divided, and multiplied. This movement replicates the chemical's movement in soils, foods, bodies, archives, labs, and legislative bodies, settling in some places here and in other places there, its potencies changing and altering what it touches with different scales and kinds of impact. The swirl is both an artifact of academic capitalism, activist tactics, and contested scientific facts and a way to capture the complexity of contemporary life with chemicals

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Introduction -- 1. METRICS OF THE GLOBAL SOVEREIGN. Numbers and Stories in Global Health -- PART I. GETTING GOOD NUMBERS -- 2. ESTIMATING DEATH. A Close Reading of Maternal Mortality Metrics in Malawi -- 3. THE OBLIGATION TO COUNT. The Politics of Monitoring Maternal Mortality in Nigeria -- PART II. METRICS POLITICS -- 4. THE POWER OF DATA. Global Malaria Governance and the Senegalese Data Retention Strike -- 5. NATIVE SOVEREIGNTY BY THE NUMBERS. The Metrics of Yup'ik Behavioral Health Programs -- PART III. METRICS ECONOMICS -- 6. METRICS AND MARKET LOGICS OF GLOBAL HEALTH -- 7. WHEN GOOD WORKS COUNT -- PART IV. STORIED METRICS -- 8. WHEN NUMBERS AND STORIES COLLIDE. Randomized Controlled Trials and the Search for Ethnographic Fidelity in the Veterans Administration -- 9. THE TYRANNY OF THE WIDGET. An American Medical Aid Organization's Struggles with Quantification -- Epilogue: What Counts in Good Global Health? -- References -- Contributors -- Index

Sherpas are portrayed by Westerners as heroic mountain guides, or "tigers of the snow," as Buddhist adepts, and as a people in touch with intimate ways of life that seem no longer available in the Western world. In this book, Vincanne Adams explores how attempts to characterize an "authentic" Sherpa are complicated by Western fascination with Sherpas and by the Sherpas' desires to live up to Western portrayals of them. Noting that diplomatic aides at world summit meetings go by the name "Sherpa," as do a van in the U.K. built for rough terrain and a software product from Silicon Valley, Adams examines the "authenticating" effects of this mobile signifier on a community of Himalayan Sherpas who live at the base of Mount Everest, Nepal, and its "deauthenticating" effects on anthropological representation.This book speaks not only to anthropologists concerned with ethnographic portrayals of Otherness but also to those working in cultural studies who are concerned with ethnographically grounded analyses of representations. Throughout Adams illustrates how one might undertake an ethnography of transnationally produced subjects by using the notion of "virtual" identities. In a manner informed by both Buddhism and shamanism, virtual Sherpas are always both real and distilled reflections of the desires that produce them

It's not about Katrina -- The making of a disaster -- If this could happen to us, it could happen to anyone -- Navigating the road home -- Getting to the breaking points -- Faith in a volunteer recovery -- Charity, philanthrocapitalism and the affect economy -- Katrina as the future

Social Suffering. Arthur Kleinman. Veena Das. and Margaret Lock. eds. Berkeley. University of California Press, 1997. 404 pp.

This exploration of a Himalayan Sherpa ritual engages contemporary cultural anthropology debates concerning ethnographic essentialism, positivism, and so‐called postmodernist approaches. The author notes a parallelism between Buddhist Sherpa ritual processes that call upon patrons to engage in mimesis with idealized images of themselves and ethnographic representations that call for Sherpas to become that which is desired by foreign others. A positivist reading of Sherpas thus leads us toward both a necessary reflexivity about the effects of our writing upon them and the adoption of a strategic essentialism aware of its karmic consequences.

"The radically humanistic essays of Arc of Interference refigure our sense of the real, the ethical, and the political in the face of mounting social and planetary upheavals. Creatively assembled around Arthur Kleinman's medical anthropological arc and eschewing hegemonic modes of intervention, they advance the notion of a care-ful ethnographic praxis of interference. To interfere is to dislodge ideals of naturalness, blast enduring binaries (human-nonhuman, self-other, us-them), and redirect technocratic agendas while summoning relational knowledge and the will to create community. The book's multiple ethnographic arcs of interference provide a vital conceptual toolkit for today's world and a badly needed moral perch to peer toward just horizons. Contributors. Vincanne Adams, João Biehl, Davíd Carrasco, Lawrence Cohen, Jean Comaroff, Robert Desjarlais, Paul Farmer, Marcia Inhorn, Janis H. Jenkins, David S. Jones, Salmaan Keshavjee, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Adriana Petryna"--

This special section critically examines the paradigms and values that undergird the ever-expanding field of global health. The richly textured ethnographic think pieces presented here tackle problems of evidence and efficacy as complex forms of ethical and theoretical engagement in contexts of neoliberalism, war, technological innovation, inequality, and structural violence. These works seek to contribute to a people-centered and politically relevant social theory for the twenty-first century.

Foreword: Against the grain: medical anthropology in the Anthropocene / Paul Farmer -- Introduction: Arc of interference / João Biehl and Vincanne Adams -- Death by fire : the problem of moral certainty in China's Tibet / Vincanne Adams -- Bringing up the bodies : erasing and caring for Mexicans in the Mexico-US Borderlands / Davíd Carrasco -- In the vast abrupt : horizon work in an age of runaway climate change / Adriana Petryna -- Justifying a lower standard of health care for the world's poor : a call for decolonizing global health / Salmaan Keshavjee -- The moral economies of heart disease and cardiac care in India / David S. Jones -- Intimate and social spheres of mental illness / Janis H. Jenkins -- A good death : the promise and threat of biometric inclusion for transgender women in India / Lawrence Cohen -- Medical cosmopolitanism in moral worlds : aspirations and stratifications in global quests for conception / Marcia C. Inhorn -- Environments and mutable selves / Margaret Lock -- Anthropology in a mode of dying / Robert Desjarlais -- Ethnographic open / João Biehl -- Thinking on borrowed time . . . about privileging the human / Jean Comaroff -- Afterword: Lessons learned from the ethnography of care / Arthur Kleinman.