The Miiyupimatisiiun Research Data Archives Project

The Miiyupimatisiiun Research Data Archives Project (MRDAP) is a digitization and data transfer initiative between medical anthropologist Naomi Adelson and the Whapmagoostui First Nation (FN) in the territory of Eeyou Istchee (in northern Quebec). This report provides an overview of phase one of the MRDAP from three distinct perspectives: the researcher, the archivist, and the community. The authors discuss the history of the relationship between Adelson and the Whapmagoostui FN, the digitization process, and the work that is required to transfer the digitized materials to the community for access and safekeeping. The report also foregrounds how the project team is working to ensure that the community has full control over how the data is managed, stored, accessed, and preserved over the long term. The report provides a case study on how Indigenous data sovereignty is being negotiated in the context of one community.

Notes from the field

Every day in my work as a resident physician, I deny my patients’ particular wishes about living and dying. It is not that I desire to be inhumane; rather, on a daily basis in my job, I am tasked with caring for patients who have been clinically marked with the diagnosis ‘failure to thrive’, in some way deeming them as unsafe to live out in the world. In this think piece, I trace the evolution of this term and what its growing use might mean. As a medical anthropologist, I feel deeply conflicted about these situations that physicians encounter routinely. And as I probed this internal conflict, I realized that the clinical diagnosis of ‘failure to thrive’ is actually an attempt by physicians to grapple with how the social world becomes embodied within our aging or chronically ill populations. Caring for these patients is a complicated, consuming task that also must be further illuminated in relation to the failures of self-care among trainees and practitioners of medicine. I consider here how anthropological theories of care and well-being of both patients and providers can illuminate this ongoing phenomenon of ‘failure to thrive’ among patients who are increasingly at the social margins.

Anthropologists Respond to The Lancet EAT Commission

The Lancet Commissions are widely known as aspirational pieces, providing the mechanisms for consortia and networks of researchers to organize, collate, interrogate and publish around a range of subjects. Although the Commissions are predominantly led by biomedical scientists and cognate public health professionals, many address social science questions and involve social science expertise. Medical anthropologist David Napier was lead author of the Lancet Commission on Culture and Health (2014), for example, and all commissions on global health (https://www.thelancet.com/global-health/commissions) address questions of social structure, everyday life, the social determinants of health, and global inequalities.

Community, Clinics, and Courts: An Applied Anthropology Journey

This article describes my non-linear path to becoming an applied medical anthropologist. After earning a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology (UC Berkeley), my career has spanned corporate finance, college teaching, psychiatry research, evaluation, health services research, and community-based research. Each career juncture provided opportunities to develop new skills and knowledge—with applications to medical anthropology.

The Many Forks in the Road: A Nontraditional Journey as a Medical Anthropologist

As a medical anthropologist and health disparities researcher, my work focuses on cancer health disparities, health beliefs and behavior, health systems, and preventative care in underserved communities, particularly among immigrants and refugees. Throughout my career path to this current identity, I faced many forks in the road. From undergraduate studies including fieldwork abroad, to medical research in underserved communities, to hospital administration while completing my doctorate, each fork in the road led me closer to becoming an applied anthropologist. I recently became a full-time research faculty member at an academic oncology center, in part due to skills learned in each previous opportunity. It did not happen on its own; it took hard work, persistence, and, most importantly, a vision. Each experience provided a unique set of cross-disciplinary skills that allowed me to accomplish my goals. This paper focuses on this nontraditional journey to lend insight to divergent approaches to applied medical anthropology.

The Price of Excluding the ‘Unworthy’

A medical anthropologist explains how a popular view of drug addicts as devoid of morality and autonomy has contributed to an HIV/AIDS epidemic in Ukraine.

Illness as a phenomenon of being-in-the-world with others: Plato’s Charmides, Kleinman and Merleau-Ponty

Plato’s Charmides, I argue, is a remarkably productive text for confronting and questioning some common presuppositions about the body and illness, particularly when we take seriously Socrates’ claim that healing Charmides’ headaches requires first examining—and perhaps healing—his soul. I begin by turning to the work of the psychiatrist and medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman to argue that even if the pain Charmides experiences is more ‘physical’than ‘mental’, a physical exam and physical intervention alone will not necessarily be effective in treating his headaches. Next, I turn to the work of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his discussion of the phenomenon of the ‘phantom limb’ to argue that the body, rather than simply being a physical object is, instead, primarily an experiencing subject; the body is fundamentally our way of having a world. Furthermore, illness, rather than being conceived of as either a physical or mental disorder, should instead be understood in terms of a person’s being-in-the-world with others. Finally, I return to Plato’s Charmides and argue that, just as the phantom limb reflects the destruction of a specific way of being-in-the-world with others, Charmides’ headaches reflect the construction of a specific way of being-in-the-world with others.

Julio Tello as a medical anthropologist: assessing the antiquity of syphilis in ancient Peru

This paper explores the methods used by Julio Tello to address the antiquity of syphilis in ancient Peru, examining his thesis La antigüedad de la sífilis en el antiguo Perú to understand the logic behind the procedures he used to test his hypothesis. The contention presented here is that despite being a medical thesis, his text can actually be considered an exploration of the origins of syphilis using a truly anthropological method, making Tello a pioneer in the subfield of medical anthropology in the Andes.