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

Abstract

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.

Scoping Review and Bibliometric Analysis of the Term “Planetary Health” in the Peer-Reviewed Literature

“…More specifically, this may mean an expansion of these 14 themes. Five of the original research articles that we found did not fit within these themes but suggested new, primarily qualitative themes: inter-and trans-disciplinary research development and directions (28,29), ecological behavior and spiritual healing (30)(31)(32) and participatory methods of communication. The need for an expansion of the themes was supported by the lack of congruence between the keywords provided by authors and the expert-derived themes used in our content analysis.…”

Making Measuring Bodies

“…As Tim Rhodes and Kari Lancaster (2019) write, numbers are afforded life through their entanglements with situated practices, an important part of which is learning with measuring objects that become part of a way of knowing. Looking at making measuring bodies––not only measured bodies––attends to Yates-Doerr’s (2017) plea to engage with studying when, where, and with what effects embodiment matters. It adds insights into how counting gets embodied by medical practitioners as a way of knowing the world and in the crafting of their future patients.…”

Collective eating and the management of chronic disease in Dakar: translating and enacting dietary advice

“…The households that I discuss in this paper were affected by multiple forms of malnourishment (Branca et al, 2019 ); under-nutrition, micronutrient deficiencies and anaemia were all present, affecting the health of household members at all stages of the lifecourse, and the younger women responsible for cooking shared meals and nourishing the family were confronted with the significant task of producing an adequate amount of food that met the needs of everyone in the household. This was further complicated by the fact that in Dakar, as Emily Yates-Doerr writes of households in Guatemala, women ‘did not cook for bodies, but for diffuse and shifting collectives’ (Yates-Doerr, 2017 , p. 143). In a context where all food is shared and the act of collective eating carries a strong moral weight and cultural significance, there is significant pressure for everyone to eat from the collective bowl and crafting an individual ‘diet’ is an extremely complex undertaking.…”