Contemporary African American followers of Sunni Islam are self‐consciously articulating a form of eating that they see as liberating them from the heritage of slavery, while also bringing them into conformity with Islamic notions of purity. In so doing, they participate in arguments about the meaning of “soul food,” the relation between “Western” materialism and “Eastern” spirituality, and bodily health and its relation to mental liberation. Debates within the African American Muslim community show us how an older anthropological concern with food taboos can be opened up to history and to the experience of the past reinterpreted in terms of the struggles of the present.
Anthropologists have used Michel Foucault’s thesis on biopolitics to critique modern institutions. Yet while useful, biopolitics is often misapplied. The arrests, killings of unarmed Blacks by police, COVID-19 racial health inequities, and the January 6 white nationalist act of sedition made visible fault lines between a biopolitical system set up to care for whites and a necropolitical system that treats Black bodies as expendable. By critiquing the facile overuse of biopolitics and biopower, this article also speaks to what COVID-19 uncovered within the academy.
In this article, I explore a struggle between parents and medical professionals to define the meaning and value of a critically ill child, Jasperlynn. I argue that the parents, who refused to sign a do‐not‐resuscitate (DNR) order, transformed the perceptions of the medical professionals by affiliating themselves with powerful moral signifiers. In particular, I explore the roles of embodiment and transcendence as they relate to the contest over the assignment of cultural metaphors defining Jasperlynn's life. I use the term embodiment‐by‐proxy to describe the ways in which the parents and the professionals each attempted to change the others' dispositions toward Jasperlynn, or to become what Thomas Csordas calls “specialists in cultural objectification.” Ultimately, the only weapon the parents had in their struggle to change the value and meaning of Jasperlynn's life was their newly acquired religious consciousness. Through the family's demonstration of their deep commitment to God and family, many professionals came to realize that the value of Jasperlynn's life lay in her relationship to her parents. In effect, the parents were able to transform medicine's object to include the family.
Currently, the life expectancy of black Americans is about five years shorter than that of white Americans when factoring for gender. Poor patient compliance is often used as an explanation for why black people have worse health outcomes. The proof, however, is anecdotal and relies primarily on discourses about black people's general dysfunction. Black patients often respond in kind to problems they experience with health care access. They often conclude that the medical professionals they work with are racist. In most cases, neither of these explanations is correct. This paper argues that behavioral explanations for health care disparities shift attention away from structural issues, namely health care rationing and the limits of therapeutic medicine. The lack of an open discussion about the structural issues is part of the reason the goal initiated by the Clinton administration to end racial disparities by 2010, Healthy People 2010, largely failed.
The emergence of two different sickle cell disease and disease/treatment paradigms in two clinics, Children's Hospital West (CHW) and Children's Hospital East (CHE), demonstrates how physicians can influence institutional regimes of truth to improve patient access. Physicians at both clinics, far from simply acquiescing to dominant biomedical paradigms, recognize that their paradigms are in part rhetorical strategies designed to subvert problematic staff biases and perceptions, and to encourage a particular "self-efficacy" ethic in the patients. This paper positions physicians as struggling within the discursive regimes of biomedicine to create an institutional space where the disease and the sickle cell patient matter, and where patients comply with the performative rules of that space. This paper explores how physicians, patients, and institutions collaborate in the construction of sickle cell disease in such a way that biomedicine becomes a plural, as opposed to a singular and oppressive, discursive regime.
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