Anthropology & Medicine最新文献

Child maltreatment is a pervasive global concern, and general practitioners, like other health care professionals, are legally and ethically obliged to report suspicions of abuse or neglect. In practice, however, general practitioners face moral and practical dilemmas in balancing their duty to report with their commitment to care, as they seek to support children and families who may be at risk. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Danish general practice, this paper examines how these tensions unfold in everyday clinical encounters. It explores how general practitioners navigate the ambiguous space between care and control when deciding whether to report suspicions to child protection services. The analysis shows how moral reasoning in these encounters is shaped by broader configurations of power, governance, and cultural norms of parenting, as well as by the intimate ethics of the doctor-patient relationship. By tracing how general practitioners negotiate these entanglements, the article argues that they occupy a dual and often contradictory position-as agents of the welfare state and as caregivers committed to family wellbeing. This dual role situates general practitioners within the contested moral terrain of child protection politics and contemporary ideals of responsible parenthood.

Chlordecone, a highly persistent organochlorine insecticide, was widely applied to banana plantations in Martinique and Guadeloupe from 1972 until being banned in 1993. Decades later, its residues still permeate soil, waterways, food systems, and human bodies in the two islands. Classified as both a carcinogenic and an endocrine disruptor, the chemical compound has generated widespread protests, epidemiological debates, and political critique. Drawing on six months of non-consecutive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Martinique between 2017 and 2022, this article examines how people interpret and navigate the chemical's enduring effects. We develop the concept of 'articulations of poisoning' to describe the ways in which Chlordecone is rendered meaningful, not simply as a biomedical or ecological risk, but as a lived, historically sedimented, and politically contested experience. These articulations unfold along three interconnected dimensions (i.e. historicity, relationality, and contextuality) that shape how poisoning is perceived, embodied, and contested in everyday life. Through the voices of activists, farmers, medical professionals, institutional actors, and community members, we explore how poisoning becomes entangled with colonial legacies, political debates, and the everyday struggle for environmental justice in the French Antilles.

In some Sino-Tibetan languages, the gustatory term meaning 'sour' is widely used to describe somatosensory states such as muscle aches, exertional soreness, and tender sensations during acupuncture: a sensation called sngception. This study draws from the fields of linguistic anthropology, medical humanities, and corpus linguistics to investigate the cultural-historical and cognitive basis of sngception. Through a corpus analysis of modern Mandarin Chinese, the current study examined the semantic patterns and collocations of suān () 'sour.' With current medical findings on acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs), the sourness metaphor emerges as both physiologically and culturally grounded. Such cultural-linguistic frameworks play a significant role in shaping how discomfort is perceived and interpreted, which calls for greater attention to clinical awareness of culturally embedded expressions of pain in intercultural healthcare settings.

This commentary argues for a reconceptualisation of the relationship between care and precarity within medical anthropology, moving beyond the limiting framework of 'precarity-as-context'. By treating care and precarity as a fruitful conceptual couple, the paper traces a shared trajectory of these two concepts, both of which have been reframed, expanded, and opened to ethnographic complexity. Drawing on medical, social, and labour anthropology, philosophy, and ethnography, the commentary situates precarity as imbricated in the constitutive core of care. This approach allows for a consideration of precarity that exceeds a mere contextual frame within which care occurs. It is argued that examining care and precarity in tandem reveals vital connections between care practices beyond the clinic, and between forms of care subject to connected precarisation processes. Furthermore, it highlights the articulations between health, labour, and life, while keeping the door open for unexpected, ambiguous, and ambivalent outcomes. Ultimately, this pairing serves as a starting point for inquiring into the complex interdependencies and unequally distributed uncertainties that define contemporary human life.

In this paper, we discuss the practical and moral complexities of diagnostic-seeking pathways for three uncertain medical conditions: fibromyalgia, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), and long COVID. We analyse qualitative data collected in the UK between 2023 and 2025, comprising in-depth interviews with medical professionals, researchers, and patients, as well as documentary sources. Drawing on the anthropology and sociology of diagnosis, this paper discusses how chronic illness can be marked by challenging and unstable pathways, influenced by the organisation of the medical system and the resources patients have to navigate it. Diagnoses further do not guarantee a solution to the condition, and can, on the other hand, produce stigma. Medical professionals recognise the uncertain nature of these conditions and emphasise how diagnosis can play an instrumental role in providing patients with access to therapies, benefits, or acceptance. Patients discuss the complexity of the strategies they deploy not only to obtain a diagnosis but also to navigate the practical and moral complexities associated with their condition. Analysing the practical and moral complexity of diagnostic-seeking pathways represents a way to enrich anthropological reflections on diagnosis by demonstrating how this key concept of biomedicine is strongly influenced by social, economic, and moral, as well as biological, factors.

This paper reports on ethnographic observations about the filling in, and handling, of application forms for a garden-based wellbeing program. It describes the ethical challenges involved in determining the eligibility of applicants, particularly where application forms aren't completed clearly or don't present cases indicative of potential health benefit. The paper utilises a narrative approach to the anthropology of ethics to interpret application forms as gambits in self-narratives about worth and need. These narratives are diverse, sometimes unclear, and sometimes do not fit easily with institutional remits. As such, the paper contributes to understandings of the infrastructures required for inclusive and accessible programs supporting contexts of health with three claims: (1) That potential beneficiaries present to such services in ways that vary in communicative form, technical capacity, and ethical orientation, and that application forms do not easily accommodate this breadth. (2) That participants may not present to services in terms of their health need, or in terms relevant to health inequality evaluation, while services, funders, and referrers may require those sorts of information. (3) That to buffer the exclusionary potential of application processes, administrative work is ethical work that must be well resourced and supported.

As a result of ethnographic research conducted during five months between 2019 and 2020 in the ñuu savii community called Santa Cruz Mitlatongo in Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca (Mexico), this article outlines reproductive dynamics within this Mixtec community. Against the background of the historical dispute between the so-called 'traditional' medicine and biomedicine, medical and often obstetric violence seemed to permeate the stories of women in this community, whilst the midwife was still a highly important alternative for most of the locals. This paper reflects on the sui generis notion of body and the role it plays within the processes of health/illness/assistance and draws upon the local care practices of pregnancy, birth and postpartum with the aim to address the narratives portrayed towards the clinic: a cold and unhealthy place where women become choiceless over the way they want to give birth that materialises in the rejection to C-sections and anaesthesia, procedures that cause irreversible changes to women's bodies.

Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork with a grassroots self-injury support organisation in the North of England, this paper examines how ethical priorities shape decisions about wound care among people who practice self-injury. Drawing on in-depth engagement with three participants-Julie, Eliza and Nuala-this paper explores how values of agency, autonomy, and wound/body ownership are prioritised over biomedical imperatives to heal wounds efficiently and to restore bodily health. While clinical frameworks often understand these practices as 'non-compliance,' this paper shows how autonomous wound-management practices function as ethical strategies through which individuals assert control, maintain psychosocial balance and navigate their moral responsibilities towards themselves and others.

Scholarship has highlighted how the identification of breast cancer risk and false-positive screening results operate as modes of governance that shape subjects and extend the reach of medicine. Building upon this work, this article offers a phenomenologically-informed analysis of women's experiences of false-positive results in breast cancer screening, examining how such encounters with risk and the possibility of disease are lived and carried into everyday life. Based on ethnographic interviews with women who received false-positive results approximately 18 to 20 years previously, this study focuses on their narratives of receiving and living with a false-positive result over time. Drawing on narrative approaches and a focus on temporality, we analyse how women navigate the tensions of proximity to a potentially life-threatening disease through embodied experiences of risk, and how they seek to sustain meaningful lives in the wake of this uncertainty through narration. This study sheds light on the long-term impact of receiving false-positive screening results, demonstrating how such experiences can threaten notions of health while also generating appreciation and opportunities for personal and emotional growth. We suggest that the long-term accounts extend existing theoretical works on false-positive results, which has tended to emphasise the immediate emotional responses and shifts in risk perceptions as forms of biomedical harm. In contrast, these accounts enrich biomedical definitions of harm with experiential understandings of harm that feature both medicalised narratives, opportunities for reflection and personal growth, and ambiguous states of feeling ill but not feeling harmed.

In Khuzestan, Iran, Conocarpus erectus, a nonendemic, fast-growing evergreen tree species with rich foliage has been widely planted to fight the consequences of extractivism, war, and climate change. The trees were supposed to form a physical barrier to the dust-laden winds while releasing oxygen to alleviate air pollution. Yet the roots of the tree destroyed infrastructure and its pollen proved even more hazardous, provoking asthma attacks in large parts of the population. Hence the tree that was planted to ease breathing became a source of respiratory harm. This article investigates the affordances of the Conocarpus as a living being and its changing value as a 'lively commodity' at the intersections of extractivism, political economy, and human health. It traces the life and death journeys of the tree as it is degraded within the 'hierarchy of breathers' and pushed into abjection, as those who employed it as a green fix did not acknowledge it as a vegetal being with unique characteristics, and affordances.