This handbook provides an up-to-date reference point for ethnography in healthcare research. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the chapters offer a holistic view of ethnography within medical ...contexts.
This edited volume is organized around major methodological themes, such as ethics, interviews, narrative analysis, and mixed methods. Through the use of case studies, it illustrates how methodological considerations for ethnographic healthcare research are distinct from those in other fields. It has detailed content on the methodological facets of undertaking ethnography for prospective researchers to help them to conduct research in both an ethical and safe manner. It also highlights important issues such as the role of the researcher as the key research instrument, exploring how one’s social behaviours enable the researcher to ‘get closer’ to his/her participants and thus uncover original phenomena. Furthermore, it invites critical discussion of applied methodological strategies within the global academic community by pushing forward the use of ethnography to enhance the body of knowledge in the field.
The book offers an original guide for advanced students, prospective ethnographers, and healthcare professionals aiming to utilize this methodological approach.
O objetivo do presente artigo foi clarificar os aspectos conceituais e práticos do cuidado espiritual na perspectiva do ministerio médico conforme o pensamento de Viktor Frankl. Destacam-se a ...concepçao antropológica e a dinâmica do espírito humano, em seus aspectos da autotranscendencia e do auto distanciamento. Para tanto, procedeu-se uma análise tanto dos principais conceitos abordados na antropologia médica de Viktor Frankl, quanto de suas casuísticas. Dessa forma, pódese identificar algumas necessidades espirituais do homo patiens, sobretudo o anseio para encontrar um sentido no sofrimento. Conclui-se apontando para a demanda de uma nova miss o na área da saúde: o cuidado espiritual, resultando em uma pastoral médica.
In this brief article we have to start looking at the patient as a person and at the complexity of the situation he or she is handing over to us. After setting some coordinates on medical ...anthropology, we will try to understand how it can be of help to the rheumatologist, what new perspectives arise from the dialogue between these two disciplines. Medical Anthropology shows how every individual in every social context perceives, interprets, and deals with illness and health in a manner closely linked to personal experience and the socio-cultural environment of which he or she is a part; it recovers the old holistic paradigm of ancient and primitive and folk medicine, the reunification of soul and body, the global study of the person. In this perspective, the issue of pain emerges, particularly in rheumatology (we have to consider that in Italy there are about 4 million patients with arthrosis, the most widespread chronic degenerative rheumatic disease, about 400,000 those with rheumatoid arthritis, and at least 600,000 who are affected by other diseases of great clinical relevance, such as psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, lupus and scleroderma). Starting from the assumption that man is not a machine, nor is his pain the result of a series of mechanisms, we could assume that between man and his pain there is the ambivalence of the relationship that unites man to the world. Pain affects man’s identity, often shattering it, thus becoming the disease to be cured. In this perspective, it can never be considered as something good, something that adds to a person's life. Pain, therefore, being a multiple reality, needs to be inserted in the relationship that the subject has with himself, the socio-cultural uses that he has assimilated, elements from which the physician cannot prescind.
Manic behavior holds an undeniable fascination in American culture today. It fuels the plots of best-selling novels and the imagery of MTV videos, is acknowledged as the driving force for successful ...entrepreneurs like Ted Turner, and is celebrated as the source of the creativity of artists like Vincent Van Gogh and movie stars like Robin Williams. Bipolar Expeditions seeks to understand mania’s appeal and how it weighs on the lives of Americans diagnosed with manic depression. Anthropologist Emily Martin guides us into the fascinating and sometimes disturbing worlds of mental-health support groups, mood charts, psychiatric rounds, the pharmaceutical industry, and psychotropic drugs. Charting how these worlds intersect with the wider popular culture, she reveals how people living under the description of bipolar disorder are often denied the status of being fully human, even while contemporary America exhibits a powerful affinity for manic behavior. Mania, Martin shows, has come to be regarded as a distant frontier that invites exploration because it seems to offer fame and profits to pioneers, while depression is imagined as something that should be eliminated altogether with the help of drugs.
Near Human Svendsen, Mette N
2021, 20211112, 2022, 2021-11-12
eBook
Near Human takes us into the borders of human and animal
life. In the animal facility, fragile piglets substitute
for humans who cannot be experimented on. In the neonatal intensive
care unit, ...extremely premature infants prompt questions about
whether they are too fragile to save or, if they survive, whether
they will face a life of severe disability. Drawing on ethnographic
fieldwork carried out on farms, in animal-based experimental
science labs, and in hospitals, Mette N. Svendsen shows that
practices of substitution redirect the question of "what it means"
to be human to "what it takes" to be human. The near humanness of
preterm infants and research piglets becomes an avenue to unravel
how neonatal life is imagined, how societal belonging is evaluated,
and how the Danish welfare state is forged. This courageous
multi-sited and multi-species approach cracks open the complex
ethical field of valuating life and making different kinds of pigs
and different kinds of humans belong in Denmark.
Suffering and Sentimentexamines the cultural and personal experiences of chronic and acute pain sufferers in a richly described account of everyday beliefs, values, and practices on the island of Yap ...(Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia. C. Jason Throop provides a vivid sense of Yapese life as he explores the local systems of knowledge, morality, and practice that pertain to experiencing and expressing pain. In so doing, Throop investigates the ways in which sensory experiences like pain can be given meaningful coherence in the context of an individual's culturally constituted existence. In addition to examining the extent to which local understandings of pain's characteristics are personalized by individual sufferers, the book sheds important new light on how pain is implicated in the fashioning of particular Yapese understandings of ethical subjectivity and right action.
The land is dying Geissler, Paul Wenzel; Prince, Ruth Jane
2010., 20100615, 2010, 2010-06-15, 20100101, Volume:
5
eBook
Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores life in and around a Luo-speaking village in western Kenya during a time of death. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS affects every aspect of ...sociality and pervades villagers' debates about the past, the future and the ethics of everyday life. Central to such debates is a discussion of touch in the broad sense of concrete, material contact between persons. In mundane practices and in ritual acts, touch is considered to be key to the creation of bodily life as well as social continuity. Underlying the significance of material contact is its connection with growth – of persons and groups, animals, plants and the land – and the forward movement of life more generally. Under the pressure of illness and death, economic hardship and land scarcity, as well as bitter struggles about the relevance and application of Christianity and ‘Luo tradition’ in daily life, people find it difficult to agree about the role of touch in engendering growth, or indeed about the aims of growth itself.
Eating Drugs Ecks, Stefan
11/2013, Volume:
20
eBook
A Hindu monk in Calcutta refuses to take his psychotropic medications. His psychiatrist explains that just as his body needs food, the drugs are nutrition for his starved mind. Does it matter how - ...or whether - patients understand their prescribed drugs?Millions of people in India are routinely prescribed mood medications. Pharmaceutical companies give doctors strong incentives to write as manyprescriptionsas possible, with as little awkward questioning from patients as possible. Without a sustained public debate on psychopharmaceuticals in India, patients remain puzzled by the notion that drugscancure disturbances of the mind. While biomedical psychopharmaceuticals are perceived with great suspicion, many non-biomedical treatments are embraced.Stefan Ecks illuminates how biomedical, Ayurvedic, and homeopathic treatments are used in India, and argues that pharmaceutical pluralism changes popular ideas of what drugs do. Based on several years of research on pharmaceutical markets, Ecks shows how doctors employ a wide range of strategies to make patients take the remedies prescribed. Yet while metaphors such as "mind food" may succeed in getting patients to accept the prescriptions, they also obscure a critical awareness of drug effects.This rare ethnography of pharmaceuticals will be of key interest to those in the anthropology and sociology of medicine, pharmacology, mental health, bioethics, global health, and South Asian studies.Stefan Ecks is Director of the Medical Anthropology Program and Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
AIDS and accusation Farmer, Paul
2006., 20060503, 2006-05-03, 20060101
eBook
Does the scientific "theory" that HIV came to North America from Haiti stem from underlying attitudes of racism and ethnocentrism in the United States rather than from hard evidence? Award-winning ...author and anthropologist-physician Paul Farmer answers with this, the first full-length ethnographic study of AIDS in a poor society. First published in 1992 this new edition has been updated and a new preface added.
