This paper introduces the concept of holistic sickening to the sociological literature on illness narratives. Drawing on interviews with 46 Boston-area complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners who treat breast cancer patients, we found that the CAM practitioners redefine their patients' breast cancer diagnoses in ways that expand and transform their illness, sometimes into a lifetime journey. The practitioners, for the most part, espouse broad and complex etiological frameworks that help give meaning to the woman's cancer. They tend to speak about breast cancer as a symptom of problems that exceed the cancer itself, at times suggesting that women are responsible, to some extent, for their own breast cancer. The practitioners articulate holistic philosophies that describe healing as open-ended with correspondingly expansive definitions of what it means to be healed, rarely articulating clear ways of conceptualising or measuring the efficacy of their own treatments. Their use of expansive and detailed etiological frameworks alongside vague and unelaborated efficacy frameworks make up the holistic sickening phenomenon described in this paper.

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This paper lays out a model of diminished citizenship as a tool for understanding the experiences of the large population of people who, at least in part by virtue of their relations with criminal justice apparatuses, do not benefit from the full complement of responsibilities and rights associated with citizenship in a modern democracy. The frame of diminished citizenship places mass incarceration within a larger historical and social context, moving ideas about “criminals” away from the individual focus of mainstream criminology and providing a useful framework for considering how a variety of marginalized groups navigate the American landscape. At the same time, the frame of mass incarceration offers insights into a crucial mechanism for constructing, diminishing and enforcing citizenship in the United States. Our argument draws on our decade-long ethnographic research with a cohort of women who had been released from prison in Massachusetts in 2007–2008.

In the course of interviews with Israeli women who had recently been treated for breast cancer, we found that our informants tended to offer us "treatment narratives" rather than, or sometimes in addition to, the "illness narratives" made famous by Arthur Kleinman. For the women we interviewed, treatment narratives constitute verbal platforms on which to explore what it means to be human during a period in which one's body, spirit, and social identity are undergoing intense transformations. A central theme in these narratives is the Hebrew word yachas, loosely translated as "attitude," "attention," or "relationship." The women consistently contrasted the good yachas of medical staff who treated them "like humans" or like "real friends" with the bad yachas of staff who treated them like numbers, machines, or strangers. We argue that the women used language (in various contexts) as a means of resisting the medical culture's pattern of treating patients as "nonhumans."

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Modernization affects the religious lives of women in diverse and dramatic ways. On the one hand, women may find increased arenas for religious involvement, both inside and outside of traditional religious frameworks. Simultaneously, women's rituals and beliefs are often especially vulnerable to attacks from the forces of modernization. This paper focuses on the experience of elderly Jewish women of Asian origin who now live in modern Israel. The author suggests that the very nature of women's religion—domestic, personal, hidden, and flexible—explains its tenacity and creativity in the face of modernization. These findings are examined within a broad, cross‐cultural context.

Drawing upon research with criminalized women in Massachusetts, this article examines barriers to health care before, during, and after incarceration. Although very few of the surveyed women reported having had to forgo medical treatment because of an inability to pay, almost all of them reported being unable to access consistent, ongoing health care services. Typically, the women recalled sequential contact with dozens of providers at dozens of facilities, treatment plans that had been developed but never executed, psychotherapy that opened wounds but was terminated before healing them, and involuntary interruptions in legally prescribed courses of psychiatric medications. Acknowledging that these problems are related to wider structures of health care delivery in the United States, this article ends with a modest proposal for developing a role for health care advocates assigned to coordinate care for those with complicated medical problems to help them manage their health care needs over a long period of time.