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- Convenors:
-
Simon Cohn
(London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine)
Rebecca Lynch (University of Exeter)
- Location:
- JUB-G22
- Start time:
- 10 September, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
Drawing on arguments that humans should not always be accorded an exceptional status in accounts of social & cultural life, this panel will explore alternative medical anthropology configurations that attend to the mutual relationships between people, other living things, objects, and environments.
Long Abstract:
The intellectual and moral imperatives that underscore medical anthropology have invariably sustained the idea that its fundamental scope is the study of human health, illness and suffering, and that these are self-evidently attributable to individuals and groups of people. This panel will explore to what extent the shifts towards more post-human perspectives taking place in contemporary anthropology and beyond, in which the status of the human as the obvious focus for our attention is de-stabilised, might catalyse complimentary or alternative accounts of common topics addressed by the sub-discipline. The potential is that such standard categories as health, illness and even the body might be re-conceived as more distributed features arising from the interactions between such things as people and the environment, people and other living things, and people and material objects across time and space - rather than as inherently human properties. Beyond having ramification for the meaning of such key terms, and what kind of things we might study, the panel will collectively ask:
- Does a post-human perspective allow for a more nuanced understandings of scale and relationships between 'the global' and 'the local'?
- How might the concept of global health be reconfigured if we take into greater account non-humans and relationships between humans and non-humans?
- Can it ever be productive to think about medical anthropology as not always primarily interested in the lives of people, and what happens to its moral and ethical commitments if it no longer puts humans first?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Melanie Rock (University of Calgary)
Paper short abstract:
Anthropologists have begun to engage with the One Health concept, but without considering the implications of extending posthumanism to social suffering or mental health. Drawing on longitudinal fieldwork, this paper reconsiders anthropological theory regarding non-humans in Western societies.
Paper long abstract:
This paper approaches the question of posthumanism in medical anthropology through the concept of One Health. The One Health concept emphasizes that human health depends on healthy animals and ecosystems. As illustrated by the 2015 special issue of Social Science & Medicine, "One world, one health? Social science engagements with the one medicine agenda," anthropologists and other social scientists who have become interested in One Health have focused mainly on infectious diseases in people, most of which originate in non-human species. Responses often implicate non-human animals as "reservoirs" in epidemiological terms. Often these responses are violent in nature, structurally and directly, as regards both human and non-human lives. The present paper expands on the concern with human and non-human suffering. More specifically, I approach One Health through Descola's synthesis of ethnology. The main argument is that within contemporary Westernized societies, institutionalized distinctions between human and non-human life with regards to selfhood, identities, cognition and emotions no longer hold in many contexts. To support this argument, I draw on more than 10 years of fieldwork in a Canadian city that has received national and international recognition for progressive policies and programs to support animal companionship. Findings from this work suggest that medical anthropologists must give serious consideration to non-human animals. First, people worldwide care deeply about non-human animals, but never uniformly. Second, controversy and conflict can arise from differences in views and practices regarding non-human animals.
Janelle Lamoreaux (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork among reproductive toxicologists in China, I show how longstanding ideas of mutual resonance and the oneness of heaven, earth and humans harmonize with biomedical epigenetic research, reconfiguring understandings of the interconnectivity between human and non-human health.
Paper long abstract:
Medical anthropologists have often highlighted characterizations of the body and health that go beyond the biological (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). Through Chinese medicine (Farquhar 1996) or spirit possession (Ong 2010), anthropologists have shown that the body is both cultural and natural, biological and symbolic. In this paper I think further about how ideas of the body are being transformed, not in anthropology but in the biomedical sciences. Based on fieldwork among reproductive toxicologists in China, I discuss how longstanding ideas of mutual resonance (Hsu 1999) and the oneness of heaven, earth and humans (tianrenheyi) (Zhan 2012) harmonize with contemporary toxicological understandings of reproductive health that go "beyond the body proper" (Lock and Farquhar 2007). For example, in toxicological studies of male infertility, unhealthy occupational, atmospheric and national environments are taken within the body and come out again as low quality sperm, a finding that is compounded when studied for its transgenerational effects. With increasing international scientific embrace of the idea that environments have inheritable impacts on the health of future generations, solving human reproductive dilemmas becomes a problem that cannot be addressed at the level of the individual or the biological. Instead "the environment" - however defined - becomes the site of necessary biomedical intervention. I argue that such an ethical commitment to "the environment" might be thought of not as a step toward a post-humanist medical anthropology, but instead as a move toward understanding short and long-term human health as deeply intertwined with the health of the planet.
Elizabeth Mills (University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
Based on twelve months' ethnographic research in Khayelitsha, South Africa, the paper outlines the recent biomedical and political shifts in the country and considers them in light of an emergent biopolitical landscape that brings embodied inequality into focus.
Paper long abstract:
This paper articulates a set of 'new generation struggles' that emerged in the wake of the historic struggle for antiretroviral (ARV) treatment in South Africa. It proposes that biomedical technologies like ARVs are more than their material form and reflect a broader politics of life: they assemble potent economic coalitions, political alliances, particular ways of thinking about disease and about health, modes of clinical care and practices of interaction between health care practitioners and patients. The shifting biopolitical landscape in South Africa and globally, means that my research found that ARVs can no longer be framed as a 'technology of life', nor as the 'technofix' to the problem of HIV and potential death. I draw on the notion of performativity to explore how individuals embody, reproduce and subvert discourse in different times and spaces through particular sets of strategies and tactics to address embodied precarity. In particular, I use using the concept of post-humanist performativity and integrate the conceptual approach of actor networks with performativity, through the concept of intra-action. I propose that, in understanding HIV and ARVs and non-human actants that travel complex pathways into and within women's bodies, we can also start to view some of the more nuanced dynamics that women negotiate in their everyday lives, through their social and economic relationships, and beyond categorisations that frame HIV as a problem (and proxy for women's vulnerability) with ARVs (and women's activism as a proxy for power) cast as the solution.
Anne Sigfrid Grønseth (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer)
Paper short abstract:
Starting off from a study of Tamil refugee’s illness and well-being in Norway, this paper discusses how migration implies a transit and movement of people, objects and practices travelling within a global network to new localities in which they take on shifting values and meanings.
Paper long abstract:
Starting off from a study of Tamil refugee's illness and well-being in Norway, this paper discusses how migration implies a transit and movement of people, objects and practices travelling within a global network to new localities in which they take on shifting values and meanings. Recognising how migrating objects and images are severed from traditional points of reference, I suggest how 'objects in diaspora' can highlight shapes and objects' openness and potential for new creative interactions and structuring of experiences, illness, feelings and sensations, thus, as a kind of 'social agents'. This view rests in an understanding of objects, as also rituals, to be living phenomena; as they are interactive in the present and bring together structures and symbols in the context of senses of illness, well-being and decisions of identities (ethnic, communal, local, national and personal). From this view, I explore how materiality and objects can be seen to interplay in global relations of knowledge, illness, well-being and identity.
Jonathan Ventura (RCA) Wendy Gunn (Aalborg University Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
Design anthropology (DA) is an emerging discipline, within which we are developing a sub-discipline titled "medical design anthropology". In this paper we wish to present theoretical and practical outlines of this new sub-discipline, and its relevance to global health systems.
Paper long abstract:
Recently there is a new focus in medical sociology and anthropology, which is patient's practices and influence on wider global health environment (see for example vol. 36(2) of Sociology of Health & Illness). While various social science theoreticians have written about agentic abilities of objects, there is a gap in literature concerning various levels of socio-cultural influence of the medical environment through medical products. In our research we have outlined the importance of medical design anthropology (MDA) to the practice and theory of design (Ventura and Gunn, 2016). In this paper, we study the ways in which medical products influence the various participants in the hospital environment (medical staff, patients, families etc.). We will demonstrate our approach through several projects dealing with medical design. In this preliminary research, we will present various issues regarding the understanding of redesigning a scoliosis corset and hospital patients' uniform. Furthermore, we wish to highlight the importance of the medical design anthropologist as a key correspondent, drawing upon anthropology's holistic approach to bring attention to and understand the affects of medical products upon various participants. While psychology is indeed crucial for understanding of patient's behaviour, we argue understanding the relationality of products and practices in the medical environment can shed light on daily activities of staff and patients alike. By combing theory and practice of medical anthropology and design anthropology (DA) we propose our inquiry has potential to influence the discourse as well as the practices of global health systems.
Anthony Page
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses concepts from science and technology studies such as the materially heterogeneous network, enactment and the cyborg to explore, by means of a case study, the question of subjectivity in schizophrenia.
Paper long abstract:
Using a science and technology studies (STS) case study approach, this paper deploys Haraway's (1991) metaphor of the cyborg to explore subjectivity in schizophrenia. Following Moser and Law (1999), the person and their autobiographical narrative are conceived as partially connected but irreducible reciprocal extensions to each other. Using Mol's (2002) concept of enactment and drawing on the STS notion of the network the paper shows how partially connected materially heterogeneous networks enact both schizophrenia (treated as an object) and the 'schizophrenic' (treated as the subject). As the networks delineated are specific and located, the paper argues that specific networks enact specific subjectivities and offers an understanding of how passages between networks might also be passages between a 'schizophrenic' subjectivity and a subjectivity that is not 'schizophrenic'.
The paper goes further and, using Cussin's (1998) notion of ontological choreography, shows how a 'schizophrenic' subject allowed himself, or even actively sought, to be objectified in order to pursue a long term goal that is 'a life away from schizophrenia'.
Rebecca Lynch (University of Exeter) Simon Cohn (London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine)
Paper short abstract:
Taking a post-human approach to blood donation we consider donated blood as something that is 'made' only when it leaves the body, not simply extracted but constructed through the process of donation. This blood is a different kind of substance that mediates relationships between donor and society.
Paper long abstract:
Many traditional studies of blood donation have looked at the relationship between the individual and the wider society, and corresponding values such gift-giving and social responsibility. However, such perspectives often fail to address the material nature of blood, or more specifically blood once it is outside the body as a substance that is by definition 'ex-human'. In this paper we start off by considering donated blood as something that is 'made' only when it leaves the body; in other words, it is not simply extracted, but is constructed. We go on to focus on the process of donation- the donating body, the instruments of donation and the blood itself. Through donation, as blood is extracted, the donor is increasingly separated conceptually from their body. For staff too, donations are not from persons but from bodies which must fit with the standardized equipment and professional practices. By stripping the person from their blood, the blood is depersonalized, and thereby becomes part of a generalized resource. This presents a different kind of substance; no longer circulating within, but flowing between, actively mediating relationships between donor and society.
Fay Dennis (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will use my PhD project on injecting drug use and Harm Reduction to argue in favour of posthumanism as a productive perspective. That is, by focusing on the injecting ‘event’ rather than the individual ‘drug user’ a more complex and ethical approach can be forged.
Paper long abstract:
The Public Health response to injecting drug use (IDU) in the UK has focused on a rationalisation of drug use, in which it is argued that people, given the right information and tools, will make rational decisions to reduce the harms associated with their drug use. This Harm Reduction approach can be seen to be based on a neoliberal understanding of 'self-control', which is in ideological contrast to dominant discourses of addiction based on a 'lack of self-control'. Although this approach has had huge benefits in reducing harms associated with IDU, along with challenging pathologising models of addiction, I do not feel that it goes far enough to address the often un-thought, non-cognitive aspects of drug use.
Therefore, in my research based on 'creative' interviews and participant observation at drug services in London, rather than focusing on the decisions/feelings/experiences of 'drug users' as the primary unit of analysis, I focused on the injecting event. This allowed for an understanding of the complexities of IDU and the drug-body-world entanglements in which a notion of 'self-control' made little sense. Instead, I will show how in the drug assemblage, that brings about the injecting event and enacts certain modalities of feeling, there is a shared control, which is pre-individually relational. In this sense, the 'drug user' is made in the event, which may contribute to a more ethical and productive harm reduction - easing participants' agonies over being both 'in control and out of control' and taking every'thing' in the event seriously.
Rebecca Oxley (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper outlines a few crucial ways that post-humanism can offer a valuable insight into the lived embodiment of postnatal depression in new fathers.
Paper long abstract:
Postnatal depression (PND) is beginning to emerge into public healthcare policy and practice as a valid experience that fathers can suffer, rather than a solely female condition. Yet for mothers and fathers this 'mute illness', as it has been described, is still categorised in dual terms. For men, PND is considered to be primarily psycho-social in origin, and for women, the root cause is perceived as predominantly biological, due to fluctuating hormones after childbirth. Post-humanism and new materialism offer valuable insights into how PND is embodied and lived by men, by questioning conventional morals and ethics that underpin its conception, which appear to posit male and female, individual and collective, and biology and sociality in dual terms. Conversing with key anthropological and feminist texts and exploring the performance of biological actors such as hormones and neurons, this paper outlines a few crucial ways in which the binary of nature and culture can be reconsidered and made more complex, more attentive to, and more telling of, somatic experience. In doing so, we can also begin to question what constitutes evidence in medical anthropology and account for the active, even literate quality of the body in expressing its lived embodiment.