Medical Anthropology

This article examines incarceration as a chronic condition with social, biological, and psychological elements. We do so through the lens of “institutionalization,” a concept that emerged during interviews conducted with 26 people incarcerated in Washington state prisons as a chronic and often disabling state resulting from prolonged incarceration. We argue that institutionalization helps conceptualize how the social inequities of mass incarceration become embodied as health inequities, and how social harms become physical harms.
[prison, incarceration, institutionalization, chronic, inequality]

After beginning his historical work in Switzerland in the 1950s and then continuing it in the United States at the Menninger Foundation, Henri Ellenberger (1905–1993) became the leading historian of " dynamic psychiatry ". This expression commonly denotes mental medicine that draws from psychotherapeutic practices and psychological theories to improve our understanding of mental diseases and to cure them. Although still used today, usually in juxtaposition to 19th century alienism or to biological psychiatry, the origin and meaning of this expression are unclear. An unpublished lecture (1956) by Ellenberger on this subject, accompanied by an explanatory introduction, is reproduced here to shed light on Ellenberger's interpretation of that term. This article additionally aims to draw certain parallels and distinctions between Ellenberger, Michel Foucault and George Devereux's teaching in the 1950s. Considering that the history of psychiatry is now a well-established speciality in the academic world, Ellenberger's lecture is also an original document which enables us to trace the professionalization of psychiatric historiography as an academic discipline back to its beginnings after World War II.

This article highlights the importance of sexuality in assisted conception cycles through a method of inquiry that focuses on the biomedical professionals of the clinics studied, as well as the protocols they offer. Gamete donations and their link to incest, the organization of sperm collection, and the characterization of sexual infertility, a poorly studied form of infertility, are successively examined here. This comparative approach helps to delineate how in India and France two relatively similar, normative models of kinship and shared biotechnological tools are entwined in different conceptions of corporeality and its associations with technology.

This article examines how 'safety case' experts working on Finland’s nuclear waste repository project at Olkiluoto summoned, conjured, or channeled memories of Seppo—a deceased colleague whose ‘specter,’ as some put it, still ‘haunts’ their scientific community. For some, Seppo’s postmortem presence manifested as gaps in knowledge left behind by an expert often reluctant to document the methodological assumptions underlying his knowledge-practices. For others, it manifested as anecdotes about Seppo’s stubbornness, irritability, and intellectual intensity as well as his more jovial demeanor during sauna nights, workplace parties, or trips abroad. Still others caught themselves asking ‘What Would Seppo Do?’ while troubleshooting at work. Inspired by anthropological and philosophical work on ancestors and haunting, the article unpacks how the multi-millennial time horizons of nuclear waste risk, the intergenerational time horizons of expert succession, and the everyday time horizons of a single expert life-course shared entwined fates. It focuses less on what knowledge disappeared when an expert’s body died – or how it could have been preventatively backed-up or managed – and more on what has lived on of the expert in and through surviving colleagues. Analysis of 'afterlives of expertise' like these can, it concludes, provide insights for a current moment of intergenerational transition in nuclear energy sectors in Europe, North America, and beyond.

In this article, I examine the clinical practices engaged in by U.S. homebirth midwives and their clients from the beginning of pregnancy through to the immediate postpartum period, deconstructing them for their symbolic and ritual content. Using data collected from open-ended, semistructured interviews and intensive participant-observation, I describe the roles ritual plays in the construction, performance, and maintenance of birth at home as a transgressive rite of passage. As midwives ritually elaborate approaches to care to capitalize on their semiotic power to transmit a set of counterhegemonic values to participants, they are attempting, quite self-consciously, to peel away the fictions of medicalized birthing care. Their goal: to expose strong and capable women who "grow" and birth babies outside the regulatory and self-regulatory processes naturalized by modern, technocratic obstetrics. Homebirth practices are, thus, not simply evidence-based care strategies. They ...

Mexican cuisine has emerged as a paradox of globalization. Food enthusiasts throughout the world celebrate the humble taco at the same time that Mexicans are eating fewer tortillas and more processed food. Today Mexico is experiencing an epidemic of diet-related chronic illness. The precipitous rise of obesity and diabetes—attributed to changes in the Mexican diet—has resulted in a public health emergency.

In her gripping new book, Alyshia Gálvez exposes how changes in policy following NAFTA have fundamentally altered one of the most basic elements of life in Mexico—sustenance. Mexicans are faced with a food system that favors food security over subsistence agriculture, development over sustainability, market participation over social welfare, and ideologies of self-care over public health. Trade agreements negotiated to improve lives have resulted in unintended consequences for people’s everyday lives.

VITA
Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
With photographs by Torben Eskerod

Updated Blurb (2013)

Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the “dictionary” she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form.

An instant classic, Vita has been widely acclaimed for its bold fieldwork, theoretical innovation, and literary force. Reflecting on how Catarina’s life story continues, this updated edition offers the reader a powerful new afterword and gripping new photographs following Biehl and Eskerod’s return to Vita. Anthropology at its finest, Vita is essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought, and ethics in the contemporary world.

University of California Press, 2013

Awards
2013 J.I. Staley Prize, School for Advanced Research

2007 Margaret Mead Award, Society for Applied Anthropology and American Anthropological Association.

2006 Anthony Leeds Prize, Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology.

2006 Stirling Prize, Society for Psychological Anthropology.

2006 Outstanding Book Award, Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change.

2005 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, Society for Medical Anthropology.

Honorable Mention, 2005 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology.

Monica H. Green, “Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval Women’s Medicine,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd series, vol. 2 (2005), 1-46.

Abstract: This long essay review summarizes work in the field of History of Medicine as it relates to topics on women and gender in the medieval world—mostly focusing on western Europe but bringing in some comparative work. It supplements and expands upon two earlier reviews of the field that I did in 1989 and 1993. Topics include:
(1) a review of edited texts (where I argue that “we have perhaps reached the point of critical mass, where enough work has been done to identify both the major continuities and the major novelties in the textual traditions of women’s medicine”);
(2) “technologies of the body,” a term I have coined to refer to “a group of techniques, beliefs, and practices focused on intervening in the functioning of the body (including, but not limited to, the alleviation of pain)” and which I propose as a definition wider than “medicine” to capture the focus on cosmetics, promotion of fertility (rather than contraceptives), and even andrology in many medieval texts on women’s medicine;
(3) sex differences as they were understood in medieval medical literature, which challenge Laqueur’s idea of a “one-sex body,” including beliefs in male menstruation, the emphasis on “provoking the menses” in texts on women’s medicine, and the impact of the “new Aristotle” starting in the 13th century, especially new interest in the nature of generation;
(4) women as medical agents, a concept I develop here to circumvent the limiting vocabulary of medical professionalization and encompass women’s various engagements with healthcare, including as readers of medical texts and recipes, the lack of evidence for professionalized midwives before the 14th cent.;
(5) childbirth as a female space, where I contest the assumption that childbirth was exclusively a female concern and show instead that there are a variety of ways pregnancy, childbirth, and wetnursing can be analyzed as gendered phenomena; and
(6) future directions, where I explore topics and methodologies that might yet prove valuable.
The essay draws on medical anthropology both for conceptual analyses of the workings of gender, but also (via ethnographies) as a source of comparative material.

This review is 3rd in a series of 4 essays I have done reviewing literature on women, gender, and medicine in the medieval period. The others are:

Monica H. Green, “Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1988-1989), 434-73; reprinted in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Bennett, E. Clark, J. O’Barr, B. Vilen, and S. Westphal-Wihl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 39-78; reprinted again in Monica H. Green, with corrigenda in Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts, Variorum Collected Studies Series CS680 (Aldershot, 2000).

Monica H. Green, “Recent Work on Women’s Medicine in Medieval Europe,” Society for Ancient Medicine Newsletter 21 (1993), 132–41.

Monica H. Green, “Gendering the History of Women’s Healthcare,” Gender and History, Twentieth Anniversary Special Issue, 20, no. 3 (November 2008), 487-518; reprinted in Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodisation, ed. Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 43-82.

See also, for comprehensive bibliography up through 2009: Monica H. Green, “Bibliography on Medieval Women, Gender and Medicine, 1980-2009,” an 82-page cumulative annotated bibliography of over 375 items of European and North American scholarship published in the past 30 years, posted for free access on Sciencia.cat, http://www.sciencia.cat/english/libraryenglish/publicationssc.htm, posted 02 March 2010.

Following the neoliberal restructuration of the Turkish welfare and banking systems in the 2000s, many veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war faced debt enforcement due to failed payments for prosthetic limbs. Veterans responded to debt collection by turning their own bodies into spectacles of debt and sacrifice by publicly removing and showcasing their debt-ridden prostheses. The media interest in these prosthetic spectacles further amplified the visceral threat of dismemberment evoked by veterans’ embodied performances. The public debates surrounding “prosthesis repossession” cases extended well beyond veteran welfare issues, inscribing all sorts of social and political anxieties on the amputee veteran body, such as anxieties around the incommensurability between the value regimes of nationalism and neoliberalism or around the Syrian refugees. Providing a window into larger questions about the interconnections between disability, gender, nationalism, and neoliberal capitalism, prosthesis repossession cases show us how debt and disability coproduce each other at the nexus of consumer debt and nationalist welfare in Turkey. By homing in on the prosthetic re-membering and dismembering of veteran bodies in a rapidly changing health milieu, we see how the political economy of violence and the violence of political economy become complicit in the production of debt, dismemberment, and prosthetic rehabilitation.

Anthropologists and epidemiologists have been working for decades in the public health sector, but the relationship between these two 'communities' has not always been very good. Epidemiologists concentrate on quantitative data which is collated by structured interviews. In contrast, anthropologists depend on participant observation and produce qualitative data. For the dominant position in the public health sector, epidemiologists often ignore the qualitative data in their analysis. This qualitative data which relates to the behaviour of certain kinds of 'disease' gives a better and more authentic picture about a particular aspect of that disease. The reason for overlooking these ethnographic findings is because it is problematic to link up this behavioural data with 'risk factors' or with 'variables' in epidemiological statistical analysis. But apart from the 'germ theory' or 'risk factors' there are so many social and cultural factors in different contexts that can influence disease development and prognosis, which are also very important to consider in designing and implementing an effective intervention programme. Anthropologists can make a big contribution to finding out those factors.

What shape does ethical reasoning assume in the face of potentially contradictory commitments? Drawing on fieldwork in a private clinic in Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, I examine how patients, their families, and the clinic’s staff navigated ethically complex situations in which one was called on as both family member and patient. I argue that the doctors and counselors at the clinic attempted to reconfigure the relationship between what were experienced as divergent or contradictory commitments—to treatment and to close kin—in terms of what I call hierarchical subsumption. This mode of response worked not simply to recast treatment as noncontradictory with familial obligations; rather, the commitment to therapy became hierarchically subsumed by and therefore necessary to the fulfillment of such kin-based commitments. In attending to those ordinary moments in which commitments are felt to be at odds, I suggest that we might develop a better understanding of the particular styles of ethical reasoning that people employ to manage such conflictual situations, which refuse the kind of tacitness that scholars have associated with everyday life.

"Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of illness, of life—and death—in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience studying diseases in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world’s poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. A thoughtful memoir with passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other.Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are mirrored in pathology, plague, disease and death. Yet this doctor’s autobiography is far from a hopeless inventory of human suffering. Farmer’s disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer’s urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world’s poor should be of fundamental concern to pathologists, medical students, and humanitarians in a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering."

This paper investigates, in an anthropological key, the different connotations, valences and functions assumed in the human societies by the patient and the healer, omnipresent poles of the couple upon which every medical practice is founded. First of all, we point out how both these terms are referred not only to the “objective” condition of the sufferer and of the healer, but rather they are referred to positions assigned to individuals in their own social framework, on the basis of factors and considerations which can even go beyond the psycho-physical conditions of the single patient and the concrete knowledge of the healer. We therefore investigate here the nature of them both, as well as the various levels in which therapeutic actions are performed; in particular, we emphasize the assumption that in every single illness episode the human suffering is placed in a meaningful framework. This is quite central to point out the fundamental relevance of communication in therapeutical settings (between patient and healer, but also between them both and the rest of the society). The profound awareness of the cultural and social construction of illness allows us to better understand how simbolic and ritual therapies can be efficacious, even if they disregard and leave out of account a direct (pharmacological, mechanic, surgical, etc.) intervention upon the sick organism. Moreover, the same determination about the illness and the recovery status is socially produced on the basis of facts and considerations which are not limited to the single patient and his physical condition. We have to realize how health and illness are conceived exclusively in an holistic perspective, in order to clarify the reason why so frequently the comprehension of the meaning of suffering is a fundamental step towards the recovery.

It is sometimes argued that the non-therapeutic, non-consensual alteration of children’s genitals should be discussed in two separate ethical discourses: one for girls (in which such alterations should be termed ‘female genital mutilation’ or FGM), and one for boys (in which such alterations should be termed ‘male circumcision’). In this article, I call into question the moral and empirical basis for such a distinction, and argue that all children—whether female, male, or intersex—should be free from having parts of their genitals removed unless there is a pressing medical indication.

The subject of the article comprises rituals of therapic offering recorded in the historical sources of the 16th–18th centuries and their structural elements, abundant in Lithuanian healing practices and concepts of the 19th–21st centuries.
There are two types of therapic offering mentioned in the sources: 1) those performed at definite times of the year (during warm and
cold periods), aimed at upholding the well-being of the family members, livestock, and crops;
2) those performed at any time of the year in case of unexpected threat to the well-being of the family, livestock or crops.
The rituals differ clearly according to the gender of performers (men or women); also, blood sacrifices and bloodless (food) offerings may be discerned. Differences in performing the rituals may be influenced by the ritual intention (e. g., pleading for health, thanking for healing or for staving off danger, harming the health, diagnosing, etc.). Seasonal offerings could have performed the function of blessing the raw medicinal materials.
The medicinal plants along with the body parts of the sacrificed animals used to be applied as healing means and amulets. Valuable data is provided by the analysis of the social context of the traditional healing of the 16th–18thcenturies. The organization
of ritual is characterized by active participation of the nobles, and the communal nature of the ritual is emphasized by the traits of the contract with spirits (deities), typical to the offering. Examination of the social context of the ritual also prompts critical evaluation
of the strict pattern of connecting animals of certain spices with concrete deities, hitherto quite established in the studies of the Baltic religion and mythology.
Traces pertaining to the complex of therapic offering are abundant in texts, concepts and social contexts of the living tradition of charms of the 20th–21st centuries. The ancient ritual offering used to have a multiple addressee, which is also preserved by the living tradition of charms.
Because of the pressure of external factors (e. g., persecution by the Church, the negative public opinion) the rituals of the blood sacrifice were denounced or transferred into the private space (e. g., turning into symbolic blood drops), and the charm tradition stemming from the old ritual prayers could have become pivotal in the Lithuanian healing tradition, replacing the earlier therapic offerings (sacrifices). Major part of the animals, corresponding to the ritual semantic of offerings in the practices pertaining to the living tradition of healing of the 20th–21st centuries, as well as the actions performed with them most probably are relics of the old rituals of the therapic offering, newly integrated in the syncretic tradition, preserving the essential old concepts of health and illness along with the strategies of healing.
The results of analyzing the ritual complex of the old therapic offering are especially important to the studies of development taking place in the customs of blessing the medicinal plants and the fragmentation and erosion of the vegetal ritual ethnomedicinal complex in the living tradition.

Some people with dementia are transformed by the disease, to the point that family members may describe them as a “different person.” These transformations may be negative or positive. What factors affect the judgements of ordinary people about whether an advance directive (AD) should be followed in such cases? We conducted three studies to test the influence of (1) positive versus negative transformation and (2) “treat” versus “withhold treatment” AD on the judgements of US participants (n = 1676) as to whether the AD should be followed and the extent to which the late-stage dementia patient had become a different person. We found that participants generally endorsed following the AD, irrespective of condition, but much less so when the patient had a positive transformation. Participants also favored “treat” over “withhold treatment” ADs. Unexpectedly, we found that AD type affected “different person” judgments: participants registered significantly weaker agreement with the propos...

For more than 25 years, we have been looking for biomathematical laws controlling and structuring DNA, genes, proteins, chromosomes and genomes [1,2]. In 1997 we discovered a simple numerical law based solely on atomic masses, unifying the 3 languages of biology: DNA, RNA, and amino acids. This law, “The Master Code Of Biology” is published in 2009 in the book codex biogenesis [3] and then in 2015 in a reference article peer review [4]. In 2017 we publish different applications: HIV, SNPs, brain genetics [5-8]. On the other hand, at the beginning of the 2000s we studied the integrity of the Prions proteins (CJD, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), showing a common invariant bi-attractors in “W”, while the amyloid was characterized by a pattern in “V” shape. Since that time, biologists such as Claudio Soto have visually demonstrated in 3D the same biological form in horseshoe for the amyloid protein [9-13].

Consolidated around the middle of the 1960's in western anthropological research, medical anthropology or the anthropology of health, extremely young in specialized Romanian research, measures its growth on a tight field, where interdisciplines still seek those right words, meant to obtain truths out of maieutic exercises. In this case, the art of midwifery, to paraphrase the wise Socrates, should not only involve connecting the master with their disciples, but also to establish a code of communication of the results between: paleontologists, biologists, linguists, ethnologists and professionals in the health sciences. The study of populations from both a biologic and an ethnographic point of view, interactions between ecologic systems, as well as human evolution, the analysis of cultural and healing systems and of cognitive parameters of the disease or the political issues of health are extremely important subjects which require the immediate setting of a methodological code. We are now discussing statistics about the dynamics of professional migrations of the medical specialists, but very little about the forming of transcultural competences of a physician, about the condition of the "perfect patient" in the process of organizing a prevention on a national or continental scale, about social structures, personhood, faith, deontology. Our paper underlines the necessity of consolidation of this discipline, as a branch of cultural anthropology in Romanian research and, will try, as well to emphasize the great challenges drawn by the physician and their patient on the field, field which is more sensible than a multitude of classic geographic, political and economic limits. 1. Inițiere și discurs în profesiunea medicală; inițiere și discurs antropologic Jean Clavreul spunea în 1978 că ŗdiscursul medical nu este un discurs despre om, ci un discurs despre boalăŗ. Etimologic, cel puțin, antropologia este, categoric, un discurs despre om. Dacă acceptăm faptul că cele două domenii de cercetare sunt în slujba omului, că omul este obiectul lor fundamental de studiu, care ar putea fi oare calea cea mai firească pentru ca antropologia și medicina să poată intra într-un dialog fertil și perpetuu? ŖJur pe Apollo medicul, pe Esculap, pe Hygiea și Panakeia…ŗ Anii de studii universitare se încheie și astăzi, după atâtea sute de ani, cu jurământul lui Hipocrate, într-o deplină cunoaștere a legii medicale (Brătescu, Săndulescu, 1974). Legea sau Canonul medical este o foarte scurtă colecție de îndrumări deontologice destinate celor ce doresc să profeseze medicina. Recunoaștem că formulările marelui medic din Cos sunt pline de frumusețe, iar adevărul spuselor ne emoționează și astăzi. Problema pe care o supunem atenției ar fi legată de însăși rezistența canonului într-un prezent confuz în care nosologia moleculară, practica medicală, terapiile alternative, credința și vrăjitoria își dispută terenul în fața unui public tot mai informat și tot mai speriat de ceea ce i se revelă. Nosologia clasică, fondată pe baze anatomo-clinice, s-a dovedit puțin câte puțin incompatibilă cu rezultatele geneticii moleculare. Sunt date foarte recente. Cu puțin înainte de începutul acestui secol XXI dezbaterile s-au încins în jurul noțiunilor de heterogeneitate genetică / heterogeneitate fenotipică. Primul termen desemnează cazurile în care o entitate aparent omogenă pe plan clinic și anatomo-patologic poate, în realitate, să suporte mutații la

Culture, traditional practices, and social norms of different societies have been found to have great impact on healthcare systems and people understanding of health and illness. This paper discusses how the Dagomba of Ghana theorizes health and illness and the impact of language and secrecy in traditional healing. Using the Dagomba lay theories of health and illness and that of medical pluralism, the paper found that among Dagomba, the concepts of health and illness are complex, holistic and interrelated. The Dagomba theorized that health is a discourse and a relational concept. It is also seen as being in a state of balance with the self, others, the society and the spiritual world but not the absence of illness. The paper argues that illness among Dagomba has both internal and external dimensions. It is seen as something which is part of life and growing up. Accordingly, some illnesses are innate while others come and go. Within their traditional healthcare system, language and secrecy are found to have both pragmatic and psychological functions. Language is not only used in naming illnesses and expressing other medical conditions but it is also used as a means of communication such that patients and healers engagement in the medical discourse promote good health. Secrecy is found to perform the role of patent law (intellectual property rights) to healers' traditional knowledge. It is also used to protect both patients and the potency of traditional medicine and healing. Finally the paper draws the attention of medical practitioners, especially those in the formal health systems, to the fact that cultural sensitivity and the respect for people lay theories of health and illness need to be taken seriously since that could help to promote effective healthcare delivery and reduce conflicts between patients and healthcare professionals.

Introduction to See You On The Other Side podcast, episode 133, 28 February 2017 (interview by Mike Huberty and Allison Jornlin, Madison, Wisconsin).
Online at http://othersidepodcast.com/blog/2017/02/28/133-popobawa-dr-martin-walsh-idea-virus/.

The use of 'traditional' medicine, or a combination of biomedical treatment and 'traditional'
medicine, is a common phenomenon all over Indonesia. In today’s Indonesian healthcare system
'traditional' and alternative medicine coexist with globalized biomedicine. It has been found only
recently that Indonesian urban, educated households are more likely to use 'traditional' than
biomedical healthcare (Nurhayati & Widowati 2017). As early as 2003, Liebich described 80% of
the urban population of Jakarta as occasionally or frequently using 'traditional' medicine. Despite
the dominance of biomedical approaches in the Primary Health Care (PHC) system and the
accompanying skepticism towards other health etiologies, the 'traditional' and complementary
medicine (T&CM) market in Indonesia has experienced a veritable boom during the past 30 years.
Drawing on the transdiciplinary field of health psychology and medical anthropology, this thesis
discusses concepts and approaches that explain the use of T&CM in urban Yogyakarta (Java,
Indonesia). These discussions are based on a Reflexive Grounded Theory study, conducted with
semi-standardized interviews as the main source. The interview questions were designed to elicit
narrative elements addressing previous experiences and evaluations of illness and previous
treatment as well as possible combinations of medical practices. Additionally, expert interviews
with different health agents illustrate conflicting interests and controversies. Even though this study
focuses on illuminating issues of healthcare in urban Yogyakarta, it also finds a textual form to trace
the journey of a 'Western' researcher, who tries to understand the meaning of healthcare in urban
Yogyakarta. Thus, in addition to the substantive focus, this thesis has a methodological focus,
aiming to trace the formative influence of the author along different steps of meaning making about
healthcare in urban Indonesia.
The first part of the dissertation gives insights into the contextual, epistemological and
methodological background of the study (chapters 1 and 2). The second part analyzes interview
narratives. This is done, on the one hand, by highlighting narrations of binary conceptualizations of
'health', 'illness' and 'healing', presented in the model of natural versus kimia. On the other hand, the
analysis follows the ways in which my interviewees navigate healing, where they transcend conceptual
differences by referring to their 'traditional' Javanese rasa of cocok (chapter 3). The third part of the
thesis identifies the author as a situated outsider, highlighting the entanglement of a Western researcher
in conceptual constructions used during interviews with Javanese women (chapter 4). The last part
argues that binary thinking needs to be overcome in order to offer health seekers a truly people-
centered and context-sensitive navigation of healing (chapter 5).
This study highlights different voices of health seekers who emphasize that the current healthcare
system in Indonesia does not meet their needs: neither the needs of the female Javanese health seekers,
nor those of the medical experts and practitioners of both sectors, natural as well as kimia.
Consequently, research on healthcare needs to recognize and accomodate the plurality and complexity
of medical approaches, in order to bridge the rhetoric of healthcare systems and the experienced reality
of health seekers as well as the formal and the informal healthcare system. Similar to bricoleurs,
researchers need to consistently reflect upon and adjust their assumptions, introduce new
methodological tools and use different forms of representation and interpretation to unite various
disciplines, multiple methodologies, and various theoretical perspectives in their healthcare research.

Ethanopharmacological relevance: The process of formation or appearance of a urinary stone anywhere in the
renal tract is known as urolithiasis. It is a longstanding health problem, known to exist since early age of
civilization. Records about symptoms, signs and treatment strategies of urinary stones diseases are found in the
several ancient texts of traditional medicines such as Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Siddha
and Unani. In Ayurveda, urolithiasis has been considered as one of the eight most troublesome diseases.
Ayurvedic management and cure of urinary stone involves herbal formulas, alkaline liquids and surgical
procedures. Whereas, TCM recommends polyherbal drugs, acupuncture and mexibustion for treatment of the
urinary stones. Among these therapies, herbal remedies are in practice till today for the treatment and cure
urinary stone diseases.
Materials and methods: A comprehensive review of the scientific literature about pathophysiology of urinary
stones and antiurolithiatic plants was undertaken using the following bibliographic databases: MEDLINE/
PubMed, Scopus, Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar. The search was conducted from publications from all
years until Dec., 2015 by combination of the search terms and Boolean operators; ‘urinary stone’ OR ‘kidney
stone’ AND ‘plant’ OR ‘medicine’ OR ‘antiurolithiatic plants’. Outputs were restricted to those completed studies
only published in English. In this review, literatures about plants which are used as diuretic and/or in treatment
urinary tract infections have not also been considered. The Plant List and Royal Botanical Garden, Kew
databases were used to authenticate botanical names of plants. Books and monographs published in English
were used to collect information about historical records of antiurolithiatic plants.
Results: Recent pharmacological interventions accredited ancient antiurolithiatic claims to several plants and
their formulations. The majority of antiurolithiatic plants were found to either dissolve the stones or inhibit the
process of urinary stone formation. Plants such as Phyllanthus niruri L. and Elymus repens (L.) Gould, as well
as herbal products including ‘Wu-Ling-San’ formula, ‘Cystone’ and ‘Herbmed’ have been proved their utility as
promising antiurolithiatic medicines in the different phases of clinical trials. In addition, some of the isolated
phytochemicals such as berberine, lupeol, khelin, visnagin, 7-hydroxy-2′,4′,5′-trimethoxyisoflavone and 7-
hydroxy-4′-methoxyisoflavone were reported to have potent antiurolithiatic activity.
Conclusion: In ancient medicinal texts, antiurolithiatic potential has been ascribed to several plants and their
formulations. Present scientific studies provide scientific evidences for few of these claims however, they are
insufficient to establish many of these plants and herbal formulations as therapeutic remedies for the treatment
and management of urinary stones. Conversely, findings of pre-clinical and clinical studies about some plants
and herbal formulations are promising, which underlines the utility of herbal remedies as alternative medicines
for the treatment and management of urinary stones in the future.

A medical anthropological observation of the current gap in the Australian Indigenous Health Care system;

Nguiu a small mining town that is located on Bathurst Island in the Northern Territory, there resides a dual occupancy of white Anglo-Saxon miners and native Australian aboriginals. There is an obvious divide in the remote community of Nguiu, between the affluent mining industry boasting opportunity and privilege, and the natives who dwell there in poor quality living arrangements, mostly consisting of shared commission housing. The town has experienced the highest suicide rates in Australia, ten times the national average and mostly aboriginal. It’s clear that unequal power relationships are at play here, the re-enculturation of western influence has predisposed a transitional illness. As contemporary aboriginals struggle to cope and adapt; biomedical solutions are mostly not considered conducive to the healing process (ABC, 2008; Schub & Smith, 2016).

This paper proposes that established research techniques can be developed in new directions by becoming attentive to the ways in which novel epistemological and ontological frameworks can shape the production of research knowledges. Drawing upon ideas from performance theory and science studies, and two brief fieldwork examples – archival research on the MRC’s Common Cold Unit and participant observation of the challenge of moving a herd of cattle – we argue that habits are also always to extent improvised; shaped by the capacities of human bodies to sense and respond to the nonhuman agentive world around them, including methodological habits. We propose a new term, ‘experimental partnering’ to define an interpretative approach that is attentive to how practice can illuminate the improvisatory or unstable temporary alignments that underlie some habits. ‘Experimental partnering’ is not offering a new way to access the research field, but a term to express a particular interpretative mode that draws attention to human-nonhuman relations and assemblages, fostering new apprehensions of how these more than social relations modify and interrupt the habitual.

The purpose of this article is to describe the subjective experience of the diagnosis of Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and the cultural meanings that shape this experience. Based on interviews and discussion groups with diagnosed people and their families in Chile and France, this article show that ADHD can acquire multiple meanings. From a thematic analysis, we identified three registers or ways of living and thinking about ADHD. In the deficit register, the disorder is experienced primarily as a failure of certain abilities. In the disruption register, the disorder is experienced as disrupting the person’s life, personality and interactions, which must then be normalized. In the register of hidden potential, on which this article focuses, ADHD is simultaneously thought of as a difficult and valuable condition, a source of exceptional capacities that are often hidden in the ordinary functioning of social life. We therefore invite reflection that identifies the...

In a Case Study in Social Medicine, a man presents to a mobile clinic in Maine with pain in his right wrist. Recognizing that he has a repetitive motion injury from raking blueberries, a physician ventures out into the field to analyze the causes and collaborate in finding solutions.