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Seen through the prism of public health, the cigarette industry is an apparatus of death. To those who run it, however, it is something more prosaic: a workplace comprised of people whose morale is to be shepherded. Provisioning employees of the cigarette industry with psychic scaffolding to carry out effective daily work is a prime purpose of the China Tobacco Museum. This multistoried exhibition space in Shanghai is a technology of self, offering a carefully curated history of cigarette production thematized around tropes such as employee exaltation. Designed to anchor and vitalize the ethical outlook of those working for the world’s most prolific cigarette conglomerate, the museum is a striking illustration that industrial strongholds of ‘slow violence’ produce their own forms of self-care. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I analyze the practices of a group of Catholic nuns who run shelters for ‘victims of human trafficking’ in Italy, and are thus involved in state-funded rehabilitation programs for former foreign prostitutes. This case shows how the state and the Church are deeply implicated in each other’s projects of redemption and the creation of new forms of life. In Italy, the legal model for rehabilitating foreign prostitutes is avowedly secular yet also deeply shaped by a Catholic impetus to purify sinners. At the same time, however, the nuns themselves develop an understanding of redemption as a secular life-saving project in line with the state’s project of recognition, and thus inscribe their practices within the biopolitical effort to transform lives. Ultimately, I argue, leading by example becomes a specific Catholic instantiation of biopolitics that characterizes both the state’s and the Church’s approach to foreigners. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite constitutional obligations to provide clean water to all citizens in South Africa, access to water and related services remains highly contested. The discord between constitutional promises and lived realities of water access, particularly through national infrastructure, provides a platform on which to examine Foucauldian notions of biopolitics, the control of populations through technologies of governing. Drawing on the situations of residents in the rural Vhembe district in the north eastern corner of the country, I examine how individuals conceptualize the relationship that exists between citizen and state and the responsibilities of each in post-Apartheid South Africa as it relates to water access. In addition, I describe strategies employed throughout South Africa to voice rights to water and how these approaches are perceived. Finally, I consider how the three primary forms of ‘water citizenship’—citizen, agent, and subject—influence the current and future health of vulnerable residents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dedicated to a South Indian goddess, devadasis are priests in a healing cult, whose nonconjugal sexuality has been designated ‘prostitution’ and subjected to eradication by the state. Drawing on ethnographic research, I consider two ways in which they cross the threshold of the clinic, as ‘vectors of disease’ and as sex worker peer educators, in order to think about the bio-politics of citizenship in postcolonial India. If biopolitical citizenship describes the way the state takes hold of their bodies, dedication describes how their bodies are claimed by the Devi Yellamma. I juxtapose these different ways of embodying power as a means to mark the limits of secular social scientific terms of recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Increasingly, there is a temporal differentiation among kinds of treatments available through medicine. Cures offer one-time resolution of symptoms; that is, with the benefit of a cure, there is no longer a medical problem in need of treatment. Remedies offer temporary, situational relief of symptoms. Therapies offer temporary relief of symptoms, but promise the possibility of nonsituational fixes, offering universal cessation of symptoms but only for a limited time. Therapy has become increasingly integral to the rhythm of everyday life, particularly in the United States, where medical treatment and pharmaceutical consumption have become a means for normalizing oneself to social expectations. I draw on fieldwork with people who experience sleep disorders—narcolepsy, sleep apnea, and delayed and advance sleep phase syndrome—to explicate these models of treatment and consider how these medical spatiotemporalities formulate emergent everyday orders of life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine research and marketing in India exemplifies the privatization of public sectors and global assemblages of novel actors and public-private partnerships in service delivery and pharmaceutical marketing. Drawing on ethnographic research, in this article I examine how the molecularized conception of cervical cancer and the simultaneous global rise of the HPV vaccine is redefining the meaning of prevention, the role of the state, and blurring the relationship between health care and health research in India. In 2009, two Indian states began “demonstration projects” to vaccinate 30,000 girls. The subsequent deaths of a number of girls exposed inherent problems with the projects. For many health activists, the vaccine has potentially grave consequences for India's public health system. This case demonstrates how biopolitical actors, and the drive for biocapital, can create a public health campaign that might in the end place women's health and the public health system at a greater risk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes a public controversy surrounding the hormonal treatment of infertility associated with observance of rabbinic law to illuminate the reach of rabbi-doctor relations in a local configuration of religion and biomedicine that I call “kosher medicine.” I combine a historical perspective on the evolution of religious laws governing menstruation, and the rabbi-doctor relations with a contemporary ethnography of these relations and laws to illuminate the interplay of continuities, discontinuities, tradition, and modernity and their uses and abuses in the contemporary mode of interpenetration between observant Judaism and biomedicine. The controversy highlights asymmetric permeations into biomedical and rabbinic professional domains. Collaborations persist as long as doctors who declare their incompetence in rabbinic law accommodate to demands of rabbis who are expert in it and also claim competence to challenge medical decisions. Once a doctor demonstrates competence in rabbinic law to challenge rabbinic directives a crisis develops. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Emergent conditions of life at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century create new opportunities and challenges for medical anthropology. The articles included in this special issue of Medical Anthropology suggest four areas that call out for more attention: the changing scientific and philosophical status of the human, including definitions of life and biology more broadly; the material consequences of anticipatory fictions; the expanding and intensifying forces invested in the production of bodies; and the emergent and historical conditions shaping expectations and experiences of bodies as they are managed and lived. In elaborating the significance of these issues, we provide an introduction to the articles included in this special issue and point to how the contributions to this collection offer models for approaching emergent forms of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from an ethnographic study of American astronautics, I argue that, in an inversion of the usual clinical model, astronaut medical subjecthood is fundamentally environmental rather than biological. In extreme environments like outer space, the concept of environment cannot be bracketed out from life processes; as a result, investments of power and knowledge shift from life itself to the sites of interface among living things, technologies, and environments. To illustrate what this means on the ground, I describe space biomedicine as a form of environmental medicine that seeks to optimize and manage technically enabled human ecologies where life and environment are dually problematized. I provide two examples of what I term its ecobiopolitical strategies: creating a new “space normal” physiological category and situating humans as at-risk elements within integrated biological/technological/environmental systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]