'Undoubtedly an expert'? Anthropologists in British asylum courts

Many British social anthropologists have been asked in recent years to provide expert evidence for use in legal appeals by asylum seekers. This article describes the administrative and legal decision-making procedures to which asylum claims are subject. It considers how the courts respond to 'objective evidence' from 'country experts' such as anthropologists, comparing this to legal approaches to evidence from medical experts. The problems which arise – especially in relation to the key issue of an asylum seeker's 'credibility'– are analysed with reference to diverse forms of reasoning among social scientists and lawyers, and their different understandings as to the nature of 'fact' and 'truth'.     

The Truth from the Body: Medical Certificates as Ultimate Evidence for Asylum Seekers

Whether through traditional law or modern torture, the body has always been a privileged site on which to demonstrate the evidence of power. But for immigrants, the poor, and, more generally, the dominated—all of whom have to prove their eligibility to certain social rights—it has also become the place that displays the evidence of truth. In France, as immigration control increases, asylum seekers are more and more submitted to the evaluation of their physical sequels and psychic traumas, as if their autobiographical accounts were not sufficient. In this article, we show how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) deal with the dilemmas posed by this situation, how they develop protocols standardizing their expertise, and how their medical authority progressively substitutes itself for the asylum seekers' word. In this process of objectification, it is the experience of the victims as political subjects that is progressively erased.     

A rite of reverse passage: the construction of youth migration in the US asylum process

Drawing on ethnographic research at a legal aid organization, I analyse the legal brokerage of youths’ asylum applications. As youths increasingly seek asylum alone, the US has adopted policy changes allowing them more favourable access to the asylum process than adults. Despite this opening, I argue that mediating youths’ asylum claims remains challenging. First, youths have more difficulty sharing their stories than adults, and I identify three youth-specific interviewing strategies that legal intermediaries employ to elicit their accounts of forced migration. Second, I analyse how intermediaries edit these accounts to satisfy the asylum system’s expectations about childhood, as well as forced migration, constructing narratives that distance youths from criminalized adult identities and depict them as innocent child-refugees, which configures the asylum process as a victimizing and infantilizing rite of reverse passage.     

The epistemic logic of asylum screening: (dis)embodiment and the production of asylum knowledge in Brazil

The current era demands our thoughtful attention to how states process asylum seeker claims for safe haven, yet we know little about the practices through which asylum officials carry out that work. Building from literature on the body and knowledge production, this paper illuminates the workings of (dis)embodiment in the asylum process. I use the term (dis)embodiment to refer to an arrangement of separate yet interdependent practices of disembodying and embodying knowledge. These practices of knowledge production together form an integral part of what I call the “epistemic logic” of asylum – the techniques and processes of reasoning used to produce and analyse information to determine if an asylum seeker qualifies for refugee status. Through an ethnography of the asylum process in Brazil, I document how officials produce and privilege disembodied knowledge, while they contrastingly constrain the knowledge of asylum seekers to their bodies and lived experiences.     

Language analysis in the United Kingdom's refugee status determination system: seeing through policy claims about ‘expert knowledge’

This paper examines claims made about the role of ‘expert knowledge’ in analysing the language of individuals seeking asylum in the UK. I treat policy as a type of power and seek to understand how this policy uses the language of science to further the British government's stated interest to provide ‘secure borders’ and a ‘safe haven’ for refugees. I look at how the Home Office defines, shapes and implements the policy, and at how the policy has influenced judicial decisions. In short I unmask UKBA's claim that it relies upon expert, scientific knowledge to assess asylum claims.     

Suffering the Winds of Lhasa: Politicized Bodies, Human Rights, Cultural Difference, and Humanism in Tibet

Tibetan refugees and Western activists note that if universal human rights standards were enforced in China, Tibetans would suffer less and come closer to political independence. This article explores potential problems of universalism and individualism in human rights discourse by examining understandings of the body and suffering among Lhasa Tibetan women. Data are taken from accounts of political prisoners and women patients at Lhasa's traditional Tibetan medical hospital. The data suggest a collective subjectivity, based on ideas about karma and congruencies of body, mind, and society that contrast with those found in international human rights discourse. Tibetans are forced to adopt universalist and individualist positions to make their claims for human rights heard while ironically articulating ideas about suffering that would contest such universalist positions. The article proposes a need for alternative conceptualizations of human rights taken from Tibetan epistemologies of suffering, and illustrates the utility of medical anthropological inquiries about embodiment and subjectivity for addressing larger political debates about human rights. [Traditional Tibetan Medicine, Human Rights, Epistemology, Bodily Suffering]     

The Political Economy of ‘Trauma’ in Haiti in the Democratic Era of Insecurity

This article explores the challenges that emerge at the intersection of economies of compassion and terror: local, national, and international forms of humanitarian assistance; security practices in insecure social and institutional environments; questions of victimization and global reparations; and quests for justice, as revealed through an analysis of political violence and humanitarian interventions in Haiti during and after the 1991-94 coup period. Each domain is constrained by politics and history but can engender "occult economies" that challenge the intended consequences of restitution policies at international, national, and local levels of exchange. 'Trauma' and discourses about traumatic suffering are the hinge around which these economies pivot, generating new forms of political subjectivity for Haitian activists.     

Tribal synthesis: Piros, Mansos, and Tiwas through history

This article critically examines recent anthropological theorizing about indigenous tribalism using ethnographic and historical data on the Piro-Manso-Tiwa Indian tribe of New Mexico. Debates about constructionism, neo-tribal capitalism, and proprietary approaches to culture provide valuable insights into recent indigenous cultural claims and political struggles, but also have serious limitations. The approach taken in the article, 'tribal synthesis', emphasizes process, agency, interdependence, and changing political and cultural repertoires of native peoples who seek survival amidst political domination and internal conflict. Such an approach can apply the best of recent critical theory in an advocacy anthropology that supports indigenous struggles.     

The Good Farmer: Morality,Expertise, and Articulations of Whiteness in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

In Zimbabwe, land has always been a visible index of racial domination and oppression. Following independence in 1980, the redistribution of white property to black farmers emerged as one of the most contentious battlegrounds for refiguring citizenship and nationhood. This article explores how white farmers in a small community in western Zimbabwe fought to establish claims to belonging as they faced the threat of imminent land reform at the turn of the millennium. Drawing upon Tania Li’s concept of articulation [2000. “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource Politics and the Tribal Slot.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (1): 149–179], I suggest that farmers constructed themselves both as moral subjects who cared for the environment, and skilled subjects with the technical know-how to safeguard and maximise the country’s resources. In the absence of claims to indigeneity, farmers attempted to offset their own compromised morality by invoking the language of expertise. By examining this intersection between morality and expertise, I argue that white farmers in Zimbabwe brought together logics typically imagined to be distinct as a strategy to claim moral belonging while obscuring the historical and political factors that threatened to void those same claims.     

Qualitative and quantitative characteristics of estrogen receptors in patients with atrophic gastritis and stomach cancer

The article deals with the comparative estimation conducted both in the normal and atrophic gastric mucosa, its cancer tumoral tissues. All the results obtained have been studied in dependence on the atrophic gastritis variants. The process various stages as well as on the patients sex. The findings obtained evidence about more high frequency of identification and more high estrogens receptors level in the patients suffering from the cancer if compare with suffering from atrophic gastritis one.     

Connecting the Dots between Consumer Protection,Skepticism, and Science

The concept of relevance is an obvious component in the success of classroom science investigations, but it is also one of the tenets behind the numerous media advertisements that bombard our senses on a daily basis. The authors decided to capitalize on the similarities between process-based science and the world of advertising by initiating consumer protection investigations with a side venture into the commercial world of Madison Avenue. Advertisers use many strategies in an attempt to convince consumers to buy their products. By analyzing the strategies used in a sales pitch, one begins to recognize that data can be manipulated, facts can be skewed, and visuals can be controlled to enhance product performance. Such analyses require students to look deeper and seek answers beyond the surface of presented information, superficial declarations, visual discrepancies, and verbal innuendo. In other words, such analysis is all about deciphering claims and evidence, making it analogous to science. The antithesis of this procedure, synthesizing a sales campaign for a real or imagined product, is the application of these process skills. In sum, if students can create a successful advertising campaign by using their data, then they understand the art of data manipulation and may, therefore, become better consumers.     

Illness, suffering and voluntary euthanasia

It is often accepted that we may legitimately speak about voluntary euthanasia only in cases of persons who are suffering because they are incurably injured or have an incurable disease. This article argues that when we consider the moral acceptability of voluntary euthanasia, we have no good reason to concentrate only on persons who are ill or injured and suffering.     

Recombinant Identities: Biometrics and Narrative Bioethics

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in finding stronger means of securitising identity against the various risks presented by the mobile globalised world. Biometric technology has featured quite prominently on the policy and security agenda of many countries. It is being promoted as the solution du jour for protecting and managing the uniqueness of identity in order to combat identity theft and fraud, crime and terrorism, illegal work and employment, and to efficiently govern various domains and services including asylum, immigration and social welfare. In this paper, I shall interrogate the ways in which biometrics is about the uniqueness of identity and what kind of identity biometrics is concerned with. I argue that in posing such questions at the outset, we can start delimiting the distinctive bioethical stakes of biometrics beyond the all-too-familiar concerns of privacy, data protection and the like. I take cue mostly from Cavarero’s Arendt-inspired distinction between the “what” and the “who” elements of a person, and from Ricoeur’s distinction between the “idem” and “ipse” versions of identity. By engaging with these philosophical distinctions and concepts, and with particular reference to the example of asylum policy, I seek to examine and emphasise an important ethical issue pertaining to the practice of biometric identification. This issue relates mainly to the paradigmatic shift from the biographical story (which for so long has been the means by which an asylum application is assessed) to bio-digital samples (that are now the basis for managing and controlling the identities of asylum applicants). The purging of identity from its narrative dimension lies at the core of biometric technology’s overzealous aspiration to accuracy, precision and objectivity, and raises one of the most pressing bioethical questions vis-à-vis the realm of identification.     

The Ritualisation of Abortion in Contemporary Vietnam

Induced abortion was introduced in Northern Vietnam in the 1960s as part of socialist efforts to develop and modernise Vietnamese society. With approximately two million pregnancy terminations per year, Vietnam now has the highest abortion rate in the world. This article explores how unmarried urban youths seek to cope with the experience of abortion and the suffering it entails. It is argued that while some forms of suffering are officially recognised, glorified and heroised in Vietnam, the suffering that a premarital abortion involves is surrounded by shame, stigma and denial. The ‘ethos of suffering’ that dominates Vietnamese public culture makes it difficult for youths to find resolution for the emotional turmoil and moral dilemmas that abortion experiences give rise to. In this situation, many young people turn to ritual practice, seeking help and compassion from spiritual beings and powers. Young people's reactions to abortion indicate the presence in their daily lives of spiritual orientations deriving mainly from Buddhist traditions. The paper proposes that in order to understand how reproductive events are experienced in local worlds in and beyond Vietnam, more analytical attention needs to be paid to cosmological aspects of human procreation.     

Mad Kings, Paper Houses, and an Asylum in Rural Ireland

This essay examines aspects of the local history and cultural life of St. Columba's Mental Hospital, a formerly large asylum in the west of Ireland. The way local people talk about the hospital as a place and the way the institution mixes its local, colonial, and national histories reveal that native spatial logics have succeeded in at least partially domesticating this bureaucratic structure, even as the asylum and the thinking that motivated it have contributed to historical changes at this periphery.     

Animal Suffering: Representations and the Act of Looking

Animal advocacy uses images of nonhuman suffering as a form of normative rhetoric and a method of persuasion. Although much attention has been given to various facets of the depiction of human suffering, images of animal suffering have, to a large extent, escaped closer scrutiny. This paper seeks to remedy the situation by investigating four issues—the risk of aesthetics, the risk of perpetuating moral wrongs, the problem of privacy, and compassion fatigue—as they relate to images of farmed animal suffering. The paper will argue that images of nonhuman suffering are in danger of being interpreted as a form of visual intrigue, and that they invite seldom-asked questions concerning the justification of the act of looking, together with the privacy of nonhuman animals. Moreover, it will be maintained that compassion fatigue commonly affects how these images are perceived. Making use of the views of Susan Sontag, J. M. Coetzee, and Stanley Cohen (among others), it will be argued that, in order to escape the problematic connotations and consequences of the aforementioned issues, a normative dimension pointing toward action must be explicated.     

Digging the rabbit hole,COVID-19 edition: anti-vaccine themes and the discourse around COVID-19

This article draws on a broadcast popular among the anti-vaccine community to map out six themes used by the broadcast to mislead viewers about COVID-19. The themes are the claim that “they” – government and pharma – are lying to you, claims that COVID-19 is an excuse to remove civil liberties, viewing everyone as an expert, claiming that science cannot save us, skewing the science, and a claim that “they” are out to harm the viewers. The article points out that similar themes are used to mislead followers with anti-vaccine information. It highlights the concern that these themes will not only mislead people who are already anti-vaccine about the pandemic, but may draw in people who are not anti-vaccine but are seeking information about COVID-19, and suggests some options for dealing with the misinformation. Scientists benefit from understanding these claims, as we are often tasked with providing rebuttals to this misinformation.     

Life-and-Death Decisions in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in Denmark: The Discrete Authority of Origin Stories

In what ways are care and compassion implicated in efforts to establish lives worth living? Drawing on fieldwork in a Danish Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), in this article we investigate the role of family biographies in conducting life-and-death decisions around premature infants. Guided by a larger literature on citizenship, we view decisions in the NICU as political acts of assigning citizenship. We ask what bodies and biographies can generate and evoke care and compassion among NICU staff and forge entries or exits from the Danish Welfare State. We demonstrate that infants’ origin stories are appointed legitimate forms of suffering in contemporary Danish society and are thus granted an unnoticed form of authority in life-and-death decisions. In this way, we conclude that what comes to constitute a life worth living in the twenty-first-century Danish Welfare State is in fact the worth of the family.     

Ethnic Elders and American Health Care—A Physician's Perspective

The aging process is a fugue composed of innumerable themes; the theme of “ethnicity” is by far one of its more dominant. Due to the increasing incidence of chronic, progressive infirmity and acute, catastrophic illness, the elderly are thrust into direct contact with the health care systems of their society. The experiences of ethnic elders in American health care situations are fraught with conflict and mutual dissatisfaction with the physician-patient relationship. Both providers and consumers of health care services harbor differing culture-bound perceptions of health, illness and the healing process; these cultural beliefs define personal and professional needs and expectations and notions of how those needs are to be met by others. Both physicians and patients can enhance their communication and their compassion for one another by acknowledgment of cultural differences and by increased willingness to interpret motives and behavior within native context.It behooves us in medicine to examine the cultural traditions underlying our own attitudes, beliefs and values about the aged in a universal sense, as well as in a culturally specific sense, that we may gain insight that will be helpful in serving elderly persons more effectively, and in solving some of the problems inherent in the aging process.