11. The Ascetic Subject of Compliance

Whitmarsh, Ian

doi:10.1515/9781400846801-015

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Several anthropologists have noted that when it comes to chronic illness, wellness is not often felt, but instead lies in a diagnostic capacity and the anticipation of a future manifestation of illness yet to come (Whitmarsh 2013;Manderson and Smith-Morris 2010). One way anthropologists have responded to the growing concern for chronic illness is to levy skilful critique of how the uncertainty that results from anticipation can be commodified for financial gain (see especially Dumit 2012a;Roberts 2015).…”

Section: Ontological Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Counting bodies? On future engagements with science studies in medical anthropology

Yates‐Doerr

2017

Anthropology & Medicine

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Thirty years ago, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock outlined a strategy for 'future work in medical anthropology' that focused on three bodies. Their article -a zeitgeist for the fieldsought to intervene into the Cartesian dualisms characterizing ethnomedical anthropology at the time. Taking a descriptive and diagnostic approach, they defined 'the mindful body' as a domain of future anthropological inquiry and mapped three analytic concepts that could be used to study it: the individual/ phenomenological body, the social body, and the body politic. Three decades later, this paper returns to the 'three bodies'. It analyses ethnographic fieldwork on chronic illness, using a rescriptive, practice-oriented approach to bodies developed by science studies scholars that was not part of the initial three bodies framework. It illustrates how embodiment was a technical achievement in some practices, while in others bodies did not figure as relevant. This leads to the suggestion that an anthropology of health need not be organized around numerable bodies. The paper concludes by suggesting that future work in medical anthropology might embrace translational competency, which does not have the goal of better definitions (better health, better bodies, etc.) but the goal of better engaging with exchanges between medical and non-medical practices. That health professionals are themselves moving away from bodies to embrace 'planetary health' makes a practice-focused orientation especially crucial for medical anthropology today.

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Section: Ontological Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Counting bodies? On future engagements with science studies in medical anthropology

Yates‐Doerr

2017

Anthropology & Medicine

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“…At the same time, the spaces that will undermine non‐communicable disease prevention efforts through the perpetuation of risky behaviours – bars, nightclubs, supermarkets, fast food restaurants, fortressed gated communities, privatised green space – have already mushroomed (Solomon ; Watson ). Running alongside this, the commercial palliatives to non‐communicable diseases – gyms, Zumba classes, sugar‐free options, weight‐loss surgery – are already a firm fixture for the urban middle classes across the global south (Baglar ; Whitmarsh ), even as they remain absent from global health research priorities regardless of discipline. This is a huge oversight because residents of the global south do not just subsist with and suffer through what Susan Whyte () has called ‘life conditions’, but rather increasingly have the same ‘lifestyle’ aspirations and rights as those in the global north.…”

Section: The Absent Spaces Of Global Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These sites and the people who navigate them are the neglected spaces and subjects of global health. In a ‘dystopia of lifestyle pandemics’ (Whitmarsh , 309), such places become new archetypes for the management of the short‐term attractions of pleasure relative to estimations of the likelihood of future suffering (Berlant ). As should thus be achingly clear to health geographers, they are not a distracting frivolity from the real biomedical spaces of global health, but rather crucial and alternative archetypal spaces where suffering and pleasure collide in complex ways that are too often antithetical to good health.…”

Section: The Absent Spaces Of Global Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

When places come first: suffering, archetypal space and the problematic production of global health

Herrick

2017

Trans Inst British Geog

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The rise of global health as a field of study and site of intervention has animated significant critical social science engagements. Of these, medical anthropology has arguably emerged as the ascendant in the field with its growing corpus of writing and advocacy largely animated by the discipline's 'suffering slot'. This paper thus applies a geographical critique to anthropology's moral, humanitarian impulse to give voice to suffering by exploring the spatial consequences of this mode of scholarship. It argues that the suffering slot inevitably leads global health researchers to certain archetypal spaces and that, in turn, these places: (i) are overwhelmingly biomedical; (ii) come to function as 'truth spots' in the production and circulation of global health knowledge and (iii) perpetuate a global health riddled with 'ignorance spots'. Given this, the paper asks what happens if we look beyond suffering to consider the hidden geographies of global health that might then be revealed. It argues that in order to develop a richer topography of global health knowledge and critique, we must also consider those spaces where pleasure and suffering intersect in ways that challenge the humanitarian impulse and crisis-led readings of health. These other archetypal spaces of global health -gyms, bars, supermarkets and more -are not flippant distractions from the grave reality of human suffering, but rather spaces that condition the genesis of suffering and where affliction is put aside in favour of pleasure. In arguing that we need to be far more attuned to the non-medical spaces where global health is produced, experienced and challenged, the paper also articulates how geography might productively meet anthropology in critical studies of global health.

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“…Some suggest that the turn to public health is about reenergizing a fi eld of science that has failed to live up to expectations (Whitmarsh, 2013), helping to extend its importance and relevance (Lindee, 2013). However, as Karen Sue Taussig and I note elsewhere, also of signifi cance is the "social action set in motion by researchers seeking to translate genomic knowledge and technologies into public health" (Taussig & Gibbon, 2013, p. 3).…”

Section: Constituting Clinical Need Rights and Resources In Braziliamentioning

confidence: 99%

Anthropologies of Cancer in Transnational Worlds

Mathews¹,

Burke²,

Kampriani³

2015

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11. The Ascetic Subject of Compliance

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Counting bodies? On future engagements with science studies in medical anthropology

Counting bodies? On future engagements with science studies in medical anthropology

When places come first: suffering, archetypal space and the problematic production of global health

Anthropologies of Cancer in Transnational Worlds

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