The Tempering of Medical Anthropology: Troubling Natural Categories

This article reviews an approach in medical anthropology that commenced in the early 1980s and that continues to the present day in which biomedical knowledge and practices are systematically incorporated into anthropological analyses. Discussion then focuses on contributions made by feminists and medical anthropologists to the literature on medicalization and resistance, illustrating how the ethnographic approach has been crucial in critically reconceptualizing and situating these concepts historically and cross-culturally. The concept of local biologies is introduced in the third section of the article in creating the argument that the coproduction of biologies and cultures contributes to embodied experience, which, in turn, shapes discourse about the body. Subjective reporting at menopause provides an illustrative case study of local biologies in action. The final part of the article takes up the question of the moral economy of scientific knowledge. Comparative ethnographic work in intensive care units in Japan and North America reveals how a moral economy is put into practice in connection with brain-dead bodies and the procurement of organs from them. Medical anthropological contributions to policy making about biomedical technologies is briefly considered in closing.     

Becoming a Spirit Medium: Initiatory Learning and the Self in the Vale do Amanhecer

Drawing on ethnographic data from the Brazilian mediumistic religion known as Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn), this article addresses the learning process at the core of mediumistic development. The process of learning is here approached as a multi-layered experience, which is embodied, intuitive, performative, conceptual and inter-subjective. I will illustrate how the relationship between mediums and spirits is established in trance states through what Thomas Csordas calls a ‘multi-sensory imagery’. The discussion examines the concurrence of emotions, feelings, somatosensory experience and doctrinal discourses in developing mediumistic skills, which simultaneously engenders the attributes of extendability and multi-dimensionality that ground the notion of the self, informing the conceptualisation of trance.     

A view from the bridge: Subjectivity,embodiment and animal minds

Abstract

In contemporary discussions of animal mind the difficulty of studying the nature of private, subjective awareness in animals is often seen as a barrier to a fuller understanding of animal experience. Relatively little work has focused on more recent psychological accounts of mind that emphasize its extended, embodied and social aspects. We examine some of the main conceptual difficulties in this area, and then consider a number of more embodied approaches. We suggest that a consideration of the nature of the animal-human relationship is crucial to a consideration of animal awareness.     

The role of emotional labour in oncology

Oncologists and related health care professionals (HCPs) do not only have to follow professional protocols in their everyday work, but also have to communicate proper attitudes towards patients suffering from malignant diseases. This task is often a heavier load than the implementation of professional activities themselves. The present article is based on a survey on HCP work motivation, employment parameters and correlations with emotional labour. Fifty oncology HCPs at Debrecen University Medical Health Sciences Centre volunteered to participate in this survey containing 20 simple-choice questions. More than 90 percent of HCPs make an effort to hide their emotional state, giving way to possible negative side effects. The survey showed significant differences between the level of emotional labour of those working in the field of oncology longer or shorter than ten years. Surface and deep emotional labour is more frequent among professionals already working in oncology for a longer period of time. This can serve us with explanation to the burn-out syndrome so frequent in this profession. To diminish the load of emotional labour, healthcare institutes have to aim at hiring employees that spontaneously fit the emotional and behavioural norms facing them, and do not need officially prescribed behavioural norms for everyday work. Their constant need for respect and appreciation of their values must be kept in mind, because the capability of genuine emotional labour diminishes parallel to the number of years spent in work.     

The making of an ‘ideal’ live-in migrant care worker: recruiting,training, matching and disciplining

This essay investigates the contested processes through which gender and racial ideologies are practised and thereby place specific groups of women in particular gendered and racialized labour markets. The migration of female live-in care workers to Taiwan exemplifies how gender and racial ideologies are embodied in everyday practices that justify the paid care work done by these women and that produce their subordinate status. In this essay, I take the problematic of representation of ‘migrant care workers’ as a point of entry, to investigate how a gendered-racialized ideology is utilized to legitimate and naturalize the gendered-racialized division of care labour within the global capitalist context.     

Street working children in lima: The child's ‘Surcharge’ between survival strategies and socialisation

Child labour is usually analysed within the framework of exploitation. This essay is an attempt to analyse children's economic activities in the street using the concept ‘surcharge”, which may be defined as a child's negative experience of overload or over work. In the comparison between dissatisfactory and satisfactory working conditions, it has been argued that the first is linked not only to a lack of protection, but also to a lack of autonomy and recognition. Analyses include examinations of extreme conditions, different representations of the family, childhood and labour, as too women's roles. Such dimensions are considered essential for the comprehension of children's experience, since they are often surcharged due to the lack of economic resources, the unequal division of labour within the family and contradictory practices found in the research population. Examples of those difficulties draw on children and families' experiences of compulsory and ‘free’ education. The author concludes the need for better knowledge of socialisation processes and children's experience of work that should ideally integrate into the theoretical framework of exploitation.     

Learning Courage: Child Labour as Moral Practice in Northeast Brazil

This article explores the moral dimensions of child labour as cultural practice in Northeast Brazil. It reveals a link between children's participation in labour and local constructions of childhood as a period of ontological uncertainty and impending transition. Through detailed ethnographic exegesis, the article reveals the symbolic dimensions surrounding children's engagement in productive endeavours, and shows how the local opposition between ‘work’ and ‘play’ arises out of an encompassing moral process. The article critiques the tendency within protectionist influenced anthropological literature to acknowledge the important contribution that children make towards material survival, while denying that contribution any deeper cultural significance.     

Negotiating precarious labour relations: dynamics of vulnerability and reciprocity between Chinese employers and their migrant workers in Santiago,Chile

Precarious labour research has highlighted the multidimensional factors shaping migrants’ vulnerability to labour exploitation. This article takes a different approach by attending to the possible reciprocity in labour relations– despite unequal power dynamics– particularly when workplaces are small and involve daily interactions between migrant workers and migrant employers. Methodology is based on observations in Chinese-run retail shops and restaurants in Santiago, and interviews with Chinese employers and their Latin American migrant employees of diverse backgrounds. Proposing the concept of “precarious labour relations”, we examine the independent and shared uncertainties between migrant employers and workers who are differently marginalized through race/migrant status axes in Chile. Analyzing dynamics of hierarchy, (mis)trust, and reciprocity in how these actors negotiate precarity and security as workers and/or migrants, we complicate dichotomies of exploitation and resistance in migrant labour research, by foregrounding the multidimensional relationship between employers and workers when both are racialized migrants and minorities.     

A Proposal on Occupational Accident Risk Analysis: A Case Study of a Marble Factory

In this article, some occupational risk analyses are summarized, and then the possible occupational accidents, and their causes and effects are discussed. In the second section, an idea on risk analysis called Failure-Consequence Analysis is proposed to be applied in workplaces. In the third section, a case study about the implementation of this method in a marble factory is given as an example. In the final section, advantages and disadvantages of the proposal are discussed.

As a result, it's suggested that the proposal is simple, easy, and can be applied quickly. It can identify the possible accident spots, severities, and causes in a single pass in the facility.     

Austerity,skill, and gendered work in Kazakhstan's heavy industry

Earlier analyses have demonstrated the loss of industrial worker autonomy and the rise of deskilling after production is automated. But what happens to autonomy and skill in times of austerity, when automation breaks down? Through studying the labour process in a Kazakhstani coal processing plant, I explore how the lack of investment in machinery and staff influences the way female workers conduct their everyday work. Workers are simultaneously reskilled and exhausted by invisible extra maintenance work, with their gendered dispositions drawn on as a resource. Ethnographies of the economic crisis and austerity have so far paid little attention to the transformation of everyday industrial work. This ethnography makes a distinctive contribution by shifting the focus on to an embodied and detailed analysis of industrial work in austerity, developing ideas of gendered maintenance, repair, and skill.     

The role of prostaglandins for the coordination of myometrial forces during labour

Systematic studies using a superfusion technique for recording myometrial contractility in vitro have been conducted in our department to explore whether prostaglandins (PG) have a differential action on the different segments of the pregnant uterus and also whether the qualitative and quantitative response undergoes a change during spontaneous labour. Myometrial specimens were excised from the fundal area and from the lower uterine segment at elective caesarean section in the 39th week of pregnancy before commencement of labour and at acute caesarean section during ongoing labour. Before labour PGF2 alpha was without or had a very weak effect on upper segment preparations but was stimulatory on lower segment specimens. PGE2 and PGI2 generally induced a biphasic dose-dependent response (stimulation followed by inhibition). During spontaneous labour PGF2 alpha and PGE2 always stimulated upper segment preparations while the contractile activity of specimens from the lower segment was inhibited by PGE2, PGF2 alpha was generally without effect. PGI2 had the same biphasic action before as during labour. With all reservations for the validity of in vitro experiments, the results favour the hypothesis that initiation of labour in the human involves a qualitative shift in the myometrial reactivity to prostaglandins. These alterations may involve suppression of expulsive forces and perhaps some tightening of the lower uterine segment during pregnancy. Following initiation of labour there is a marked increase in the excitatory action of both PGE2 and PGF2 alpha in the fundal area while the lower uterine segment reacts in a way that favours dilatation.     

‘The complexity of an enduring relationship’: gender,generation, and the moral economy of the Gambian Mandinka household

This article examines the moral economy of the Gambian Mandinka household, focusing on girls' labour contributions in the time of neoliberalism. Scholarship on the moral economy of the household within rural production systems reduces the term to altruism and harmony within the domestic unit. This article provides a more theoretically nuanced understanding of the moral economy of the household, with a focus on the cultural codes that underpin intra‐household relations, the inter‐generational contract, as well as the generational and gendered hierarchies that inform processes of negotiation in relation to labour contributions. Transitions in the moral economy of the household can be captured in the shifting nature of girls' labour contributions and in their changing attitudes towards these contributions. Interpretations of work obligations are increasingly framed in terms of exchanges and incentives. Further, girls aspire to get an education and a good job, or marry well in order to move out of farming. Such novel interpretations and practices recast the moral economy of the household as dynamic and subject to change. These ethnographic insights have relevance for the anthropological study of children's labour, intra‐household relations, and the moral economy of the household.     

HIV,Embodied Secrets,and Intimate Labour in Northern Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This article explores how HIV-positive women manage secrets through the use of their bodies. Women conspicuously enhance their beauty in an attempt to defend themselves against the violence of social exclusion. Moreover, they do so in order to forge safe, loving, and prosperous relationships with their boyfriends, husbands, and families. My goal is to understand how intimacy, as a material, affective, psychological, and embodied state, characterises these women's corporeal and sartorial acts. Further, I question how these embodied practices become imbricated in exchange relations with family members, health workers, and the larger community. To describe these routinised toils and triumphs as women seek to care for themselves and others, I employ the term ‘intimate labour’. I demonstrate how women gain access to social and economic resources by attending to and capitalising on the sensual and bodily desires and needs of others.     

FACTORY, FAMILY AND NEIGHBOURHOOD: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INFORMAL LABOUR IN SHEFFIELD

This article explores the experience of formal and informal steel labour in the contexts of the factory, the family, and the neighbourhood in 'Endcliffe', an ex-industrial district of Sheffield, UK. The article reiterates Claude Meillassoux's claim, in his book Maidens , meal and money , that the informal economy is an ideological space for the cheap reproduction of labour in the interests of capital. Nevertheless, it also examines subjective and ethnographic understandings of the meanings of 'capital' and 'labour' and of the political nature of their shifting boundaries. In Endcliffe, capitalist subcontracting, state welfare, and economic policies of local regeneration have increased the informalization and casualization of steel labour and blurred the social spaces of the factory, the family, and the neighbourhood. The increased permeability between formal and informal economic processes and the re-embeddedness of production in the social and political texture of the neighbourhood tangles idioms of kinship and capitalist ideologies of production and turns the structural conflict between 'capital' and 'labour' into a generational and gender conflict within the working class. The article shows that the 'New Labour' government's attempt to transform Britain into a post-industrial and classless society has paradoxically fostered the re-emergence of ancient modes of production and forms of bonded labour.     

Kinship on the waterfront: logistics labour in a global port

This article examines how kinship forms a contested element of labour under capitalist distribution. The focus of the article is on a thriving Spanish container port where the dockworker collective has been steadily growing since the multinational companies first arrived in the 1970s. In the wake of containerization – a standardized system of freight transport based on the intermodal shipping container – dock work has been revalued and become attractive in an area otherwise characterized by high unemployment rates and below-average salaries. Drawing on ethnographic research, the article analyses how unionized dockworkers are met with stigmatization from the general public and criticized for their intergenerational access to ‘container capital’. The article contributes to current anthropological debates around the role of labour under global capitalism by tracing the links between kinship and labour in the making of a global port.     

The ethics of marriage in American evangelicalism

The idea that marriage should be treated as a site of pious ethical work is widespread in conservative Christian discourse. This article considers how and why conservative American evangelicals have come to regard the everyday routines of heterosexual marriage as potential forms of religious labour that can cultivate robust Christian subjectivities along with successful conjugal relationships. It argues that the notion of pious marital work was strongly shaped by the secular culture of therapeutic counselling and self-help that developed during the twentieth century. While pious ethics and secular, everyday ethics are often seen as distinct, this historical perspective illuminates the modern coevolution of secular and conservative religious conceptions of marriage, revealing how each has linked marital work to personal as well as societal redemption.     

Late results of cesarean and vaginal delivery in cases of breech presentation.

This study compared the subsequent development of children in breech presentation according to the method of their delivery - vaginal or cesarean section. No differences were found between children born vaginally and those born by cesarean section after some labour, except for a larger variability in the outcomes of the latter group. Only 4% of the deliveries were by cesarean section without labour, and when analysed separately the data for this group frequently showed the poorest outcome. Reasons for the observations are suggested, and proposed further research is outlined.     

The transnational village in Timor-Leste

Migrants in 2020 stay connected with their homes in ways unimaginable just 10 years ago. In the case of the Australian Seasonal Worker Program (SWP) which facilitates the short term, repeat travel of Timorese to Australia to engage in harvest labour, this connectivity particularly pronounced and important. In this article, drawing on original ethnographic fieldwork in the household of a returned SWP worker in Oecussi, I argue that this connectivity is intense enough that it calls us to reassess what we mean by migration how we think about its impact on development. Rather than thinking of SWP participants as migrants, I argue, it may be more useful to think of them as ‘trans-national villagers’ whose international labour encodes understandings of work and wealth that are essentially an extension of those prevailing in Timor and definitive in its impact.     

The Right Kind of Women Things: Changing Compositions of Gendered Subjectivity in New Caledonia

Drawing upon life histories compiled in New Caledonia, this article examines the ways in which some women inscribed and contested their gendered subjectivities. Anchored in the perception that ‘gender’ can be recognised as historically and culturally constituted in contingent human practices, it proffers testimonies to reason that women's composition and expression of their lived experience can be understood as modes of embodied consciousness. By situating each woman's discursive strategy into the complex interplay of historical processes, structured social organisations, and the anomalies, ambiguities and contradictions revealed through their conversations, the relationships and practices which inscribed the self-making of some Kanak and Caledonienne women are explored.     

In Search of Community: A Quest for Well-Being among Tamil Refugees in Northern Norway

Over the past ten years, Tamil refugees have settled in marginal fishing communities along the Arctic coastline of northern Norway. This article focuses on social aspects of Tamil resettlement and on the refugees' struggle for well-being. Tamils in these communities often experience diffuse aches and pains that are difficult for health workers to diagnose and treat. This article argues for the need to understand such health problems as embedded in social relations as they are experienced and embodied by the Tamils. Case studies are presented emphasizing that Tamils experience being misunderstood as individuals and as whole persons. This article draws a picture of a social context in which Tamils are stretched and pulled in different directions in search of community and individuality. The question emerges how best to understand the process of embodiment, which may transcend the individual body.