Download or read book HIV AIDS and the Social Consequences of Untamed Biomedicine written by Graham Fordham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the case of HIV/AIDS in Thailand, this book examines how anthropological and other interpretative social science research has been utilized in modeling the AIDS epidemic, and in the design and implementation of interventions. It argues that much social science research has been complicit with the forces that generated the epidemic and with the social control agendas of the state, and that as such it has increased the weight of structural violence bearing upon the afflicted. The book also questions claims of Thai AIDS control success, arguing that these can only be made at the cost of excluding categories such as intravenous drug users, the incarcerated, and homosexuals, who continue to experience extraordinarily high levels of levels of HIV infection. Considered deviant and undeserving, these persons have deliberately been excluded from harm reduction programs. Overall, this work argues for the untapped potential of anthropological research in the health field, a confident anthropology rooted in ethnography and a critical reflexivity. Crucially, it argues that in context of interdisciplinary collaborations, anthropological research must refuse relegation to the status of an adjunct discipline, and must be free epistemologically and methodologically from the universalizing assumptions and practices of biomedicine.

Download or read book Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand written by Anjalee Cohen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand examines how young people in urban Chiang Mai construct an identity at the intersection of global capitalism, state ideologies, and local culture. Drawing on over 15 years of ethnographic research, the book explores the impact of rapid urbanisation and modernisation on contemporary Thai youth, focusing on conspicuous youth subcultures, drug use (especially methamphetamine use), and violent youth gangs. Anjalee Cohen shows how young Thai people construct a specific youth identity through consumerism and symbolic boundaries – in particular through enduring rural/urban distinctions. The suggestion is that the formation of subcultures and “deviant” youth practices, such as drug use and violence, are not necessarily forms of resistance against the dominant culture, nor a pathological response to dramatic social change, as typically understood in academic and public discourse. Rather, Cohen argues that such practices are attempts to “fit in and stick out” in an anonymous urban environment. This volume is relevant to scholars in Thai Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Urban Studies, and Development Studies, particularly those with an interest in youth, drugs, and gangs.

Download or read book Interdisciplinarity and Wellbeing written by Roy Bhaskar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the authors provide a much-needed general theory of interdisciplinarity and relate it to health/wellbeing research and professional practice. In so doing they make it possible for practitioners of the different disciplines to communicate without contradiction or compromise, resolving the tensions that beset much interdisciplinary work. Such a general theory is only possible if we assume that there is more to being (ontology) than empirical being (what we can measure directly). Therefore, the unique approach to interdisciplinarity applied in this book starts from ontology, namely that there is a multimechanismicity (a multiplicity of mechanisms) in open systems, and then moves to epistemology. By contrast, the mainstream approach, which fails to acknowledge ontology, is “unserious” and tends to result in a methodological hierarchy, unconducive of interdisciplinarity, in which empiricist science is overtly or tacitly assumed to be the superior version of science. This book is primarily aimed at those people interested in improving health and wellbeing – such as researchers, policy-makers, educators, and general practitioners. However, it will also be useful to academics engaged in the broader academic debate on interdisciplinary metatheory.

Download or read book After the Crisis written by James G. Carrier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Crisis: Anthropological Thought, Neoliberalism and the Aftermath offers a thought-provoking examination of the state of contemporary anthropology, identifying key issues that have confronted the discipline in recent years and linking them to neoliberalism, and suggesting how we might do things differently in the future. The first part of the volume considers how anthropology has come to resemble, as a result of the rise of postmodern and poststructural approaches in the field, key elements of neoliberalism and neoclassical economics by rejecting the idea of system in favour of individuals. It also investigates the effect of the economic crisis on funding and support for higher education and addresses the sense that anthropology has ‘lost its way’, with uncertainty over the purpose and future of the discipline. The second part of the book explores how the discipline can overcome its difficulties and place itself on a firmer foundation, suggesting ways that we can productively combine the debates of the late twentieth century with a renewed sense that people live their lives not as individuals, but as enmeshed in webs of relationship and obligation.

Download or read book An Anthropological Economy of Debt written by Bernard Hours and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debt is often thought of as a mere economic variable governed by a simplistic mechanical logic, ignoring its other facets. Whose debt, and debt of what exactly? This volume analyzes debt as a political and social construct, with a multiplicity of purposes and agents. All of these are vectors of meanings that are highly diverse, and of subtle distinctions; they show that debt is a transverse phenomenon, cutting across spaces that are not merely economic but also domestic, social and political. Each contributor takes a fresh view of the subject, dealing with debt at a different time, in a different society, on a different scale of observation. By adopting a determinedly interdisciplinary approach, the authors reveal in the phenomenon of debt a diversity of social and gendered determinants that amount in some cases to domination, allegiance or slavery, and in others to solidarity and emancipation. Debt is at one and the same time shared, imposed, political and gendered.

Download or read book Ethnographies in Pan Pacific Research written by Robert E. Rinehart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is about exciting ethnographic happenings in the vibrant and growing global interface which includes Australia, New Zealand, and some of the Asian geographical regions, as well as - more broadly - the global South. It explores ethnographic writing as culture(s) (re)produced, positionalities of authors, tensions between authors and others, multi-faceted groups, and as co-productions of these works. The contributors describe and discuss a variety of topical areas of interest, from Facebook to memory work, from children's sexuality to urban racism, from meanings of Indigenous knowledge to how communities can come together to retain what is valuable to themselves. The authors also manage to locate themselves and others (positionings) in the research hierarchies (tensions). This is a valuable guide to the effects of 21st-century ethnography on the qualitative research project.

Download or read book Environmentalism Ethical Trade and Commodification written by Adam Henne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the global connections between Chilean landscapes and Northern consumers embodied by the Forest Stewardship Council logo, the green seal of approval for certified sustainably-produced "good wood." How do we decide what makes good forestry? What knowledges and values are expressed or silenced when "good" is defined with a market mechanism like certification? Henne's ethnographic study documents the new forms of labor and the new expectations about sustainability and responsibility that certification generates, in the context of the competing ideas about how to manage a forest – or even what a forest is – that constitute forest certification in Chile. A critical analysis of certification’s practices helps understand the role of ethical trade initiatives in creating sustainable, survivable global futures.

Download or read book Anthropologies of Cancer in Transnational Worlds written by Holly F. Mathews and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cancer is a transnational condition involving the unprecedented flow of health information, technologies, and people across national borders. Such movement raises questions about the nature of therapeutic citizenship, how and where structurally vulnerable populations obtain care, and the political geography of blame associated with this disease. This volume brings together cutting-edge anthropological research carried out across North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia, representing low-, middle- and high-resource countries with a diversity of national health care systems. Contributors ethnographically map the varied nature of cancer experiences and articulate the multiplicity of meanings that survivorship, risk, charity and care entail. They explore institutional frameworks shaping local responses to cancer and underlying political forces and structural variables. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138776937_oachapter3.pdf

Download or read book The Anthropology of Postindustrialism written by Ismael Vaccaro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores how mechanisms of postindustrial capitalism affect places and people in peripheral regions and de-industrializing cities. While studies of globalization tend to emphasize localities newly connected to global systems, this collection, in contrast, analyzes the disconnection of communities away from the market, presenting a range of ethnographic case studies that scrutinize the framework of this transformative process, analyzing new social formations that are emerging in the voids left behind by the de-industrialization, and introducing a discussion on the potential impacts of the current economic and ecological crises on the hyper-mobile model that has characterized this recent phase of global capitalism and spatially uneven development.

Download or read book Diagnostic Controversy written by Carolyn Smith-Morris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-20 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is dedicated to the diagnostic moment and its unrivaled influence on encompassment and exclusion in health care. Diagnosis is seen as both an expression and a vehicle of biomedical hegemony, yet it is also a necessary and speculative tool for the identification of and response to suffering in any healing system. Social scientific studies of medicalization and the production of medical knowledge have revealed tremendous controversy within, and factitiousness at the outer parameters of, diagnosable conditions. Yet the ethnographically rich and theoretically complex history of such studies has not yet congealed into a coherent structural critique of the process and broader implications of diagnosis. This volume meets that challenge, directing attention to three distinctive realms of diagnostic conflict: in the role of diagnosis to grant access to care, in processes of medicalization and resistance, and in the transforming and transformative position of diagnosis for 21st-century global health. Smith-Morris’s framework repositions diagnosis as central to critical global health inquiry. The collected authors question specific diagnoses (e.g., Lyme disease, Parkinson's, andropause, psychosis) as well as the structural and epistemological factors behind a disease’s naming and experience.

Download or read book An Anthropology of Robots and AI written by Kathleen Richardson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the making of robots in labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It examines the cultural ideas that go into the making of robots, and the role of fiction in co-constructing the technological practices of the robotic scientists. The book engages with debates in anthropological theorizing regarding the way that robots are reimagined as intelligent, autonomous and social and weaved into lived social realities. Richardson charts the move away from the “worker” robot of the 1920s to the “social” one of the 2000s, as robots are reimagined as companions, friends and therapeutic agents.

Download or read book Islam Standards and Technoscience written by Johan Fischer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Halal (literally, "permissible" or "lawful") production, trade, and standards have become essential to state-regulated Islam and to companies in contemporary Malaysia and Singapore, giving these two countries a special position in the rapidly expanding global market for halal products: in these nations state bodies certify halal products as well as spaces (shops, factories, and restaurants) and work processes, and so consumers can find state halal-certified products from Malaysia and Singapore in shops around the world. Building on ethnographic material from Malaysia, Singapore, and Europe, this book provides an exploration of the role of halal production, trade, and standards. Fischer explains how the global markets for halal comprise divergent zones in which Islam, markets, regulatory institutions, and technoscience interact and diverge. Focusing on the "bigger institutional picture" that frames everyday halal consumption, Fischer provides a multisited ethnography of the overlapping technologies and techniques of production, trade, and standards that together warrant a product as "halal," and thereby help to format the market. Exploring global halal in networks, training, laboratories, activism, companies, shops and restaurants, this book will be an essential resource to scholars and students of social science interested in the global interface zones between religion, standards, and technoscience.

Download or read book Magical Consciousness written by Susan Greenwood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-20 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a mind think magically? The research documented in this book is one answer that allows the disciplines of anthropology and neurobiology to come together to reveal a largely hidden dynamic of magic. Magic gets to the very heart of some theoretical and methodological difficulties encountered in the social and natural sciences, especially to do with issues of rationality. This book examines magic head-on, not through its instrumental aspects but as an orientation of consciousness. Magical consciousness is affective, associative and synchronistic, shaped through individual experience within a particular environment. This work focuses on an in-depth case study using the anthropologist’s own experience gained through years of anthropological fieldwork with British practitioners of magic. As an ethnographic view, it is an intimate study of the way in which the cognitive architecture of a mind engages the emotions and imagination in a pattern of meanings related to childhood experiences, spiritual communications and the environment. Although the detail of the involvement in magical consciousness presented here is necessarily specific, the central tenets of modus operandi is common to magical thought in general, and can be applied to cross-cultural analyses to increase understanding of this ubiquitous human phenomenon.

Download or read book Transpacific Americas written by Eveline Dürr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores cultural, social and economic connections between the Americas and the South Pacific. It reaches beyond Sino-American collaborations to focus on rather neglected, and sometimes invisible, Southern linkages, asking how these connections originated and have developed over time, which local responses they have generated, and what impact these processes have in the region in terms of representational forms and strategies, new cultural practices, and empowerment of individuals in (post)colonial contexts. The volume also compares and contrasts intriguing parallels of politics and identity formation. By extending the focus beyond East Asia to the Southern Pacific region, including Island connections with the Americas, the volume provides a more comprehensive understanding of recent dynamics and shifting relations across the Pacific. By approaching the Transpacific Americas as an assemblage or relational space, which is created and becomes meaningful through multiple localities and their translocal connections, the book complicates the Euro-American distinction between "centre" and "rim". While the collection offers a distinctive geographical focus, it simultaneously emphasizes the translocal qualities of specific locations through their entanglements in transpacific assemblages within and across cultural, social and economic spheres. Furthermore, without neglecting the inextricable, historical dimension of anthropological perspectives, the focus is on the diverse and unexpected contemporary forms of cultural, social and economic encounters and engagements, and on (re)emerging Indigenous networks. Primarily based on empirical research, the volume explores face-to-face encounters, relations "from below," and transcultural interactions and relationships in, as well as ideas and conceptualizations of, cultural spaces across localities that have long been perceived as separate, but are indeed closely interconnected.

Download or read book HIV AIDS and the Social Consequences of Untamed Biomedicine written by Graham Fordham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the case of HIV/AIDS in Thailand, this book examines how anthropological and other interpretative social science research has been utilized in modeling the AIDS epidemic, and in the design and implementation of interventions. It argues that much social science research has been complicit with the forces that generated the epidemic and with the social control agendas of the state, and that as such it has increased the weight of structural violence bearing upon the afflicted. The book also questions claims of Thai AIDS control success, arguing that these can only be made at the cost of excluding categories such as intravenous drug users, the incarcerated, and homosexuals, who continue to experience extraordinarily high levels of levels of HIV infection. Considered deviant and undeserving, these persons have deliberately been excluded from harm reduction programs. Overall, this work argues for the untapped potential of anthropological research in the health field, a confident anthropology rooted in ethnography and a critical reflexivity. Crucially, it argues that in context of interdisciplinary collaborations, anthropological research must refuse relegation to the status of an adjunct discipline, and must be free epistemologically and methodologically from the universalizing assumptions and practices of biomedicine.

Download or read book The Fourth Wave written by Jennifer Klot and published by UNESCO. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Readings in Sexualities from Africa written by Rachel Spronk and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Images and stories about African sexuality abound in today's globalized media. Frequently old stereotypes and popular opinion inform these stories, and sex in the media is predominately approached as a problem in need of solutions and intervention. The authors gathered here refuse an easy characterization of African sexuality and instead seek to understand the various erotic realities, sexual practices, and gendered changes taking place across the continent. They present a nuanced and comprehensive overview of the field of sex and sexuality in Africa to serve as a guide though the quickly expanding literature. This collection offers a set of texts that use sexuality as a prism for studying how communities coalesce against the canvas of larger political and economic contexts and how personal lives evolve therein. Scholars working in Africa, the U.S., and Europe reflect on issues of representation, health and bio-politics, same-sex relationships and identity, transactional economies of sex, religion and tradition, and the importance of pleasure and agency. This multidimensional reader provides a comprehensive view of sexuality from an African perspective.