ANTH 100 Week 8 Notes

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Anthropology

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Oct 30, 2023

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ANTH 100 Week 8 Notes (The Social Life of Medicine, Healthcare and Illness) 27 February ● Think about ethics; privacy of the people they are studying Medical Anthropology ● Part of cultural anthropology, focuses on illness, the body, medicine, etc; to understand social relations ● Considers culture’s role in medicine and views of the body, well-being, illness, and healing ● Center the mechanisms that help groups make sense of illness, health, bodily functions, and well-being ○ Describe their own experiences of their body; focus on how they frame their experience ● To understand cultural perspectives on medical issues ● Create meaningful improvements in healthcare systems and communities ● Consider sociocultural factors in health, behaviours around health, and medical systems ● Considers the structures that allow or constrain access to healthcare and determine how it will be distributed ● How people think about ‘functional’ bodies, ‘less functional or ‘ill’ bodies, and how to make them ‘well’ ○ Disability studies ● Consider how to address health issues within populations ● To what extent that societal norms shape our understanding of healthcare ● To what extent how culture shapes our understanding of what we think is healthy

K. Eliza Williamson - The iatrogenesis of obstetric racism in Brazil: beyond the body, beyond the clinic ● About Marcos and Bia; Bia is in labour but can’t get access to a room and maternity care; they are shuffled between wards, and Marcos gets handcuffed by military ● Argument → several forms of violence converged upon Bia and Marcos during those 24 hours, and all of them demonstrate the intersections of obstetric violence, iatrogenesis, and structural racism that remain deeply embedded in Brazil’s health system, despite efforts to humanize’ birth ○ Obstetric → related to childbirth and care of women giving birth ○ Iatrogenesis → side effects and risks associated with medical intervention ● Obstetric Racism: the various forms of harm to which racialized women are exposed during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum because of racial injustice ● Iatrogenic → relating to illness caused by medical examination or treatment ● Context for the fieldwork ○ Rede Cegonnha in Bahia, Salvador, Brazil ○ Humanize birth ■ promoting low-intervention care for women ■ Centres women as protagonists rather than passive patients ■ Better birth outcomes and experiences ■ Using non-pharmaceutical techniques ○ Short on addressing racial inequalities, address how race shapes women’s experiences of birth care ■ Indigenous and nonblack communities suffer from higher birth mortality ● Methods ○ Eight years of research on maternal and infant healthcare in Brazil ○ 24 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork ○ Tracing implementation of Rede Cegonha in Salvador da Bahia ○ Followed the work of ■ National Ministry of Health ■ Local health secretaries ■ Maternity care units ■ Communities in Salvador ○ Participant observations, interviews with government, healthcare professionals, birth activists, and women (to see the actual implementation) ○ Relationship between racialized social inequalities in Bahia and implementation of RC and impact on pregnant women and their kin ● Negative Consequences of rehumanizing birth ○ Despite the attempt, there has been a systemic blind eye to Black feminist health scholars and activists who have called for better quality care (both interventive and non-interventive) ○ Structural medical neglect is the priority for Afro-Brazilian women

● Social Iatrogenesis → Harm caused by the way society is organized that ends up fostering ill health and a lack of autonomy over one’s health ○ Includes racist violence upon pregnant and birthing people and their child ○ Historical: slavery, structural anti-blackness → over-policing of Black communities; segregation of Black people so that they are insulated from healthcare access ○ Being viewed as disposable/just another patient ● Necropolitics → The ways in which an institution that is in charge of governing a population actually ends up fostering the destruction of life ○ Obstetric racism combined with injury to one’s health due to social inequalities is a form of necropolitics ○ Brazil’s healthcare system produces fatal conditions in health services ○ The black population does not survive, or it lives in such limited conditions that the space between life and death is small ○ Seen as disposable subjects

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1 March Unpacking access ● Not tethered to law ● Access across scale ○ National ○ Corporate ○ Hospitals ○ Individuals ● Ethnographic field sites → the ethics of fieldwork with patients ● Access across time ○ Ww2 era drugs ○ Breakthrough therapies ○ Week-to-week access

March 3 Hold Your Breath Takeaways ● In Afghan culture, the doctor talks to the family before the patient and speaks to them indirectly about the illness which can cause misunderstandings about the illness ● The family does not tell him that he has cancer ● Puts his religion above his sickness → fasting even though he needs to eat ● He looks better after fasting which shocked the doctors ● He has the idea that his recovery from his illness is because Allah says so and that Allah gives the disease to him as a life lesson ● There are translation issues ● Issues about the word cancer, issues about semantics ● He thinks that it all depends on their God to take away his illness, going to Mecca as the last pillar ● In Islamic culture, it does not say that you can sit around and do anything and hope God will cure you completely, but still have to try to go to the doctor ● About chemo ○ He believes that it is no use because cancer will come back; Allah chooses his days, and they can’t do anything about it ○ The doctor believes that its good to prolong his life, so he feels better when it is time ● Misunderstandings caused by translations ● Some restrictions to religious practices caused by medical procedures Lecture How does culture mediate ● Culture differs over understandings of the body as a fundamental unit of being ● Ideas of health and disease ● Conceptions of care, treatment, and prevention may vary ● Kinds of medicine may vary - alternate medicine ● Attitudes towards medicine may vary - suspicion, disbelief, contradiction (often in cultural and religious beliefs) ● Access to medicine may not be unifrom ● Some issued could be trivalised - mental health, sexual health, reproductive health, mediated by sociocultural and religious beliefs

Care ● Gender roles and expectation → who is the caregiver and who gets cared ● Race, religion, caste, class, and other froms of discrimination ● What is a body that deserves care ● Class access to resources that enable care → the luxury of rests, healing ● Role of community in care ● Mind vs body in care economics ○ Only physical, needs more importance in how the mind views about the pain in the body Treatment ● Alternate medicine examples → ayurveda, traditional chinese medicine, homeopathy, etc ○ Whole medical systems ○ Mind-body techniques ○ Builogically based practices ○ Manipulative and body-based therapies ○ Energy therapies ● Question: how do these negotiate or sync with modern medicine Prevention ● What are some standards necessary to maintain good health ● Diet → what a culture eats, when and to what end ● Exercise → ways body needs to be trained ● Vaccines → differential attitudes - hesitation, resistance, suspicion ● Stigma → how some populations are [reconceived of as always already in a state of disease, shapes innteractions with them Writing exercise 2 1. A moment that stood out to me is when there were translation issues regarding chemotherapy causing misunderstanding about the different methods of it which makes the father keep declining to go on with it as it defies his religious beliefs. This film is anthropological as it looks into the different understanding of medical treatments between cultures, one influenced by religion and one by science, and how those differences affects someone’s experience in curing their illness. 2. I think what she meant about violence goes beyond the pregnant and birthing bodies is theer are other factors that goes beyond what happens during the event of child birth, such as the violence against people of color, especially women, that is already rooted in the social structures.

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