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Paper short abstract:

FGC policies prioritize interventions with limited effect while investing little in evaluations and research that to improve their efficacy. The acceptance of claimed change of type, continued support to non-working interventions and avoidance of major motivation, thus contribute to lack of change.

Paper long abstract:

Despite decades of work against FGC is decline limited. Moral outrage and the desire to demonstrate action may lead to prioritizing interventions that are; simple – providing health information and the passing laws; measurable – change of attitude; and marketable – photos of circumcisers “dropping the knife”. These methods have limited effect. Information about health complications have limited effect on abandonment, and can in diaspora contribute to shame and humiliation of those affected. Change of attitude have limited consequences on action. And many marketable interventions such as alternative rites of passage, conversion of excisers and religious leaders have little if any effect on practice. In general, ethnographic knowledge show find many nuances and complexities in power-relations, decision making and underlying motives and meanings that are often overlooked. I will illustrate with three important topics that are commonly silenced or avoided in interventions. First, that the claimed change from a more serious to a less invasive form of FGC that is claimed in Somalia and Sudan, is interpreted as success, whereas empirical evidence suggests this to be more often than not a form of equivocation, i.e. that the term and claimed motivation and meaning is changed, whereas the procedure continues much as before. Secondly, that a strong emphasis on religion and religious leaders may actually be counterproductive, in providing new and stronger religious legitimation than what was common traditionally. Third, interventions tend to target religious underpinning while ignoring sexual concerns that commonly lies at the heart of the practice.

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Paper short abstract:

Who decides when an urgent request for care is legitimate? How is such a decision made? The ER is a space where this question is negotiated daily. The paper discusses how different analytic strategies may reveal or hide vital systemic aspects of the long-troubling issue of ER overcrowding.

Paper long abstract:

These days, there are countless representations of the Emergency Room (ER) on television and in movies, where attention is mostly devoted only to moments of crisis in which health care staff rush off in a frenzy to save lives (and also to exploring the personal and romantic relationships of the ER staff). Perhaps unsurprisingly, during my year-long ethnographic fieldwork in an Italian ER (between 2017 and 2018), most healthcare providers told me that they can’t stand television shows or movies about the ER.

But apart from such melodramatic representations, in real life the ER is also a place which people suffering from chronic conditions visit recurringly. The ER can be alternatively described as a place where social isolation, homelessness, and invisibility, that are not readily apparent in many other public spaces, become tangible and real. The ER is a place of waiting just as much as it is a place of urgency and crisis. It is a space of failure as much as it is a space of healing.

This paper examines the possibility to create an alternative systemic description of a long-standing healthcare problem such as hospital overcrowding, by avoiding to focus on the most critical situations (the red codes). It examines the ethical, analytic and narrative choice to write about the urgency of people’s needs, rather than the one of clinical assessments, a dimension of life in the ER that is generally overlooked, both in health systems research and certainly in popular depictions.

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Paper short abstract:

The present paper examines what exactly future Greek doctors could learn from anthropologists’ understandings of the ‘‘process of personal historisation’’ with the ultimate goal of looking into the possible ways in which the cutural logic of empathy could be ingrained into the biomedical ethos.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropological theory asserts that the recognition of the cultural dimension of subjective experiences of illness and health could serve as a decisive therapeutic tool in helping doctors understand what counts most to a subject when a serious illness threatens not only their biological dimension, but also the very meaning of their existence. Nevertheless, our research has shown that the majority of Greek biomedical personnel found it hard to believe that feelings of trust and familiarity could help patients find the courage to face pain and reconstruct the vital details of their life-story.

At least until recently, as the universal threat of Covid-19 and its special protocols of hospitalization emphatically brought the value of the anthropological necessity for empathy to the forefront, having forced Greek doctors and medical personnel not only to unconsciously feel, but also to consciously attempt to subvert the agonizing sense of the patient’s other side through their sentimental presence and logos by the patients’ bedside, as it seems that in this instance they were forced to recognize the mutual human story of pain and death.

From this aspect, drawing from phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the focus of the present paper is to examine what exactly future Greek doctors could learn from anthropologists’ understandings of the ‘‘process of personal historisation’’ (Davis 2000: 110) with the ultimate goal of looking into the possible ways in which the cultural logic of empathy could be ingrained into the biomedical ethos.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores complicities and compliances produced at the intersections between the intensification of research governance, and the economies and infrastructures generated by the growth of transnational research partnerships, as anthropologists aim to make Covid research collaborations work.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we focus on two distinct developments that have significantly impacted research in medical anthropology over the past few decades: 1) the intensification of research governance as its scope has extended from ethics to risk to ‘data’ itself, and 2) the growth of transnational collaborative research partnerships and the new economies and infrastructures they have generated. While both of these developments have been the focus of considerable research and commentary, the intersections between them have been less well studied – although the Covid pandemic has served to throw their enmeshment into sharp relief. Taking the form of a dialogue, we move back and forth between Nadine’s recent experience of applying for ethics approval for a collaborative study in a sub-Saharan African country on the UK’s Covid red list and Kirsten’s broader observations about transformations in research governance as someone who has worked within its machinery for decades. We highlight the conflicts and complicities anthropologists experience as they aim to ‘make it work’ in the face of ever-more complex institutional and national governance frameworks, transnational research partnerships embedded in broader structures of inequality, and in-country staff whose livelihoods depend on precarious employment in project-funded positions.