With thousands of migrants attempting the perilous maritime journey
from North Africa to Europe each year, transnational migration is a
defining feature of social life in the Mediterranean today. On ...the
island of Sicily, where many migrants first arrive and ultimately
remain, the contours of migrant reception and integration are
frequently animated by broader concerns for human rights and social
justice. Island of Hope sheds light on the emergence of
social solidarity initiatives and networks forged between citizens
and noncitizens who work together to improve local livelihoods and
mobilize for radical political change. Basing her argument on years
of ethnographic fieldwork with frontline communities in Sicily,
anthropologist Megan Carney asserts that such mobilizations hold
significance not only for the rights of migrants, but for the
material and affective well-being of society at large.
Italy has been on the frontlines of the European Union's “migration crisis,” intercepting hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers at sea and on its shores. Yet it has lacked adequate ...resources to ensure humane reception, as other forms of welfare state provisioning have also been rolled back through recent and ongoing austerity measures enforced by the EU and the IMF. While Italians face fewer employment opportunities, lower pensions, and higher taxes, migrants of precarious legal status and asylum-seekers struggle to navigate the weakened bureaucratic apparatus of the Italian state, including the health system. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Italian provinces of Lazio and Sicily in early 2014 and 2016, this article documents the imbricated economic and health struggles of Italian citizens and noncitizens, and alludes to lived experiences of and community responses to economic austerity characterizing much of the Mediterranean borderlands. I argue that marginalization by the state of both citizens and noncitizens in this setting undergirds some of the local and community responses to economic austerity. Moreover, I suggest that contemporary struggles in this geopolitical context intersect in important ways with the repercussions of austerity legacies that have contributed to widespread displacement in neighboring regions and subsequent migration into the EU.
•Presents a “borderlands perspective” of austerity's effects on health system and local responses.•Analyzes interview data on economic austerity, migrant reception, health, and solidarity in Italy.•Identifies intersecting struggles of Italian citizens and noncitizens in this context.
The rapidly expanding Pacific Northwest (PNW) craft beer industry and the heralding of Seattle as an epicenter of "hoppy beer" has benefited from geographic proximity to the Yakima Valley, revered by ...many as the "hops capital of world." In this article, I center theory from Black studies, Native studies, and critical whiteness studies to examine the intersectional violences of settler colonialism and whiteness as structuring logics of the PNW hops and craft beer industries. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2012 and 2019, I argue that the settler colonial history of PNW hops cultivation and present-day culture of exclusion that extends outward into relationships with craft brewers, sustain a hegemonic whiteness. Moreover, I suggest that craft beer culture in the United States, as a site of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, has benefitted from ongoing dispossession through gentrification and cultural appropriation. By way of conclusion, I discuss the possibilities and limitations of existing attempts to dismantle whiteness within the US craft beer industry.
Critical Perspectives on the Microbiome Carney, Megan A.
American anthropologist,
September 2020, 2020-09-00, 20200901, Letnik:
122, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Chronic metabolic conditions disproportionately cohere along lines of race, gender, class, and citizenship. Despite overwhelming evidence that racism, gendered violence, social and economic ...disparities, trade regulations, lack of food sovereignty, and land and livelihood dispossession play the biggest roles in chronic disease, and biomedical explanations given for why people become sick are often firmly rooted in personal behavior or "lifestyle." Mainstream discourse and public policies continue to center the individual in discussions of something they have insisted on labeling as "diet-related disease." Health issues such as diabetes, heart disease, and other metabolic conditions are positioned as failures in an individual's knowledge, habits, self-control, diet, and exercise.
For years now, the United States has faced an "obesity epidemic" that, according to the dominant narrative, is harming the nation by worsening the health burden, raising health costs, and undermining ...productivity. Much of the responsibility is laid at the foot of Blacks and Latinos, who have higher levels of obesity. Latinos have provoked particular concern because of their rising numbers. Michelle Obama's Let's Move! Campaign is now targeting Latinos. Like the national anti-obesity campaign, it locates the problem in ignorance and calls on the Latino community to "own" the issue and take personal responsibility by embracing healthier beliefs and behaviors. In this article, we argue that this dominant approach to obesity is misguided and damaging because it ignores the political-economic sources of Latino obesity and the political-moral dynamics of biocitizenship in which the issue is playing out. Drawing on two sets of ethnographic data on Latino immigrants and United States-born Latinos in southern California, we show that Latinos already "own" the obesity issue; far from being "ignorant," they are fully aware of the importance of a healthy diet, exercise, and normal weight. What prevents them from becoming properly thin, fit biocitizens are structural barriers associated with migration and assimilation into the low-wage sector of the US economy. Failure to attain the normative body has led them to internalize the identity of bad citizens, assume personal responsibility for their failure, naturalize the conditions for this failure, and feel that they deserve this fate. We argue that the blaming of minorities for the obesity epidemic constitutes a form of symbolic violence that furthers what Berlant calls the "slow death" of structurally vulnerable populations, even as it deepens their health risks by failing to address the fundamental sources of their higher weights.
Ongoing social, economic, and political marginalization combined with racialized gender violence has sentenced Black women in the United States to disproportionate harm in the form of premature ...illness and death. Despite widespread recognition within the medical social sciences, public health, and social work of the health inequities that unevenly impact Black women, as a population, their suffering continues to be overlooked and marginalized in biomedical research, healthcare institutions, and health policy. This omission contributes to the naturalization and normalization of heightened morbidity and mortality of Black women. In this article, we draw from theory on necropolitics, misogynoir, and Black ecologies of care in analyzing findings from semi-structured interviews conducted between February and June 2021 with African American women (n = 16) who were experiencing a chronic health condition or caring for someone with a chronic health condition in Tucson, Arizona. Interviews explored women’s healthcare-seeking behaviors, experiences with healthcare providers, and self-care and caregiving during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest that necropolitical logics in the form of naturalization and normalization of Black women's suffering – and of the structures that render such suffering – permeated but did not entirely define women's experiences of the pandemic, including how they navigated biomedical spaces and negotiated interactions with healthcare providers, engaged in practices of care (including self-care), and perceived and made meaning of their own health statuses. We advance a Black ecologies of care framework: (1) to make visible and hold accountable necropolitical structures in tabulations of morbidity and mortality; and (2), despite the myriad harms represented in logics of necropolitics-as-usual, to foreground the life-affirming practices by women that persist nevertheless.
•Provides empirical evidence of the experiences of Black women in the US during COVID-19.•Explores how living with a chronic health condition was complicated by the pandemic.•Argues that COVID-19 further naturalized and normalized Black women's suffering.•Highlights how Black women subverted oppressive institutions and practices in response to the pandemic.
Anthropological approaches to "immigrant mental health" as an object of ethnographic inquiry can illuminate how psychosocial well-being - or decline - and the therapeutic realm of mental health is ...always enacted by a variety of institutions and social actors. The ways that mental health is understood and approached across different geographical and social settings are constitutive of a range of cultural meanings, norms, and social relations. The authors in this special section provide crucial insights into the landscape of immigrant mental health and how the experience of multiple exclusions influences collective psychosocial well-being. They also illustrate the extent to which narratives shape the production of knowledge around immigration and health, engendering direct effects on public policy, social imaginaries, and community health. Future research in the anthropology of immigration and mental health will need to further elucidate the structural underpinnings and racial capitalist origins of psychosocial decline.
Attention to culinary care can enrich the framing of health within medical anthropology. We focus on care practices in six Latin American kitchens to illuminate forms of health not located within a ...singular human subject. In these kitchens, women cared not for individuals but for meals, targeting the health of families and landscapes. Many medical anthropologists have critiqued health for its associations with biomedicine/biocapitalism, some even taking a stance 'against health.' Although sympathetic to this critique, our focus on women's practices of caring for health through food highlights dissonances between clinical and nonclinical forms of health. We call for the development of an expanded vocabulary of health that recognizes health care treatment strategies that do not target solely the human body but also social, political, and environmental afflictions.
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic introduced unique challenges to teaching at the university level, while also heightening awareness of existing social and health disparities as these ...shaped interactions and influenced learning outcomes in class settings. Based on ethnographic and autoethnographic data, this article reflects on teaching about human-microbial relations in the context of the course "Anthropology of Food" and specifically at the start of the pandemic. Data demonstrate how students shifted from demystifying microbes to distrusting microbes to reacquainting with microbes through a hands-on experiment with fermentation. The article introduces a microbiopolitical perspective in interpreting students' learning trajectories and ultimate course outcomes.
As evidenced by classroom experiences in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, microbes are "good to teach with" not only within microbiology and related fields but across a variety of academic disciplines. Thinking with microbes is not a neutral process but one shaped by social, political, and economic processes. Imploring students to contemplate how power dynamics and patterns of inequality are detectable at the microbial level may offer a unique opportunity for transforming one's view of the world and our relatedness with both humans and nonhumans.
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