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Medical anthropologists working in interdisciplinary teams often articulate expertise with respect to ethnography. Yet increasingly, health scientists utilize ethnographic methods. Through a comparative review of health ethnographies, and autoethnographic observations from interdisciplinary research, we find that anthropological ethnographies and health science ethnographies are founded on different epistemic sensibilities. Differences center on temporalities of research, writing processes, sites of social intervention, uses of theory, and analytic processes. Understanding what distinguishes anthropological ethnography from health science ethnography enables medical anthropologists – who sometimes straddle these two ethnographic modes – to better articulate their epistemic positionality and facilitate interdisciplinary research collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances a critical analysis of the concept of 'vulnerability' and highlights the ways in which it can work to justify the pre-emptive detention and over-policing of marginalised populations. Building on a historical analysis of the entanglement between public health directives and carceral techniques of securitisation, we provide a contemporary case study of the 'hard lockdown' of nine public housing towers in Melbourne, Australia in July 2020, at the start of the city's second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A thematic analysis of media discourses surrounding this event reveals that tower residents were constructed as vulnerable across four interconnecting discourses: spatially, culturally, behaviourally and psychologically. This enabled government actors to frame the exceptional mobilisation of police powers and detention directives to peoples' homes as caring measures, despite their punitive optics and effects. Our analysis suggests that the pandemic has heightened the securitisation of public health measures, which can extend notions of racial inferiority and pathology, and compound social and economic inequalities. It indicates the need for further interrogation of the nexus between 'care' and control and the intensification of police powers in times of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Societies often respond to a crisis by attributing blame to some groups while constructing others as victims and heroes. While it has received scant sociological attention, 'panic buying' is a critical indicator of such public sentiment at the onset of a crisis, and thus a crucial site for analysis. This article traces dynamics of blame in news media representations of an extreme period of panic buying during COVID-19 in Australia. Analysis reveals that lower socio-economic and ethnically diverse consumers were blamed disproportionately. Unlike wealthier consumers who bulk-bought online, shoppers filling trollies in-store were depicted as selfish and shameful, described using dehumanising language, and portrayed as 'villains' who threatened social order. Supermarkets were cast simultaneously as 'victims' of consumer aggression and 'heroes' for their moral leadership, trustworthiness and problem-solving. This portrayal misunderstands the socio-emotional drivers of panic buying, exacerbates stigma towards already disadvantaged groups, and veils the corporate profiteering that encourages stockpiling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2010.01255.x Byline: Tarryn Phillips Keywords: contested illness; multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS); medically unexplained physical symptoms (MUPS); expert disagreement; uncertainty Abstract: Abstract More than 20 years after it was first identified, the anomalous condition, multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS), remains immersed in controversy, with a continuing debate over its causation being played out in the medico-scientific community and in the courts. This article examines why sceptical and supportive experts disagree over the condition's legitimacy as an organic condition. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Perth, Western Australia, the author scrutinises the decision-making practices of 16 experts (eight sceptical and eight supportive of a chemical explanation). Both groups were found to use evidence-based, inductive reasoning. However, sceptical experts tended to use a different set of evidence requirements, exhibited more faith in the efficiency of the current biomedical paradigm regarding toxicity and were less likely to acknowledge uncertainty in their field. All the experts recognised a spectrum of beliefs about the causal mechanisms of MCS. However, when they were engaged in litigation as expert witnesses due to their supportive or sceptical tendency, the oppositional legal system polarised their opinions and exacerbated the perceived divide between them. Ultimately, the adversarial medico-legal process inhibits genuine dialogue between some of the key players in the MCS debate, thus impeding understanding and consensus about the condition. Article note: Address for correspondence: Tarryn Phillips, Anthropology and Sociology Group, School of Social and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Western Australia 6009, Australia, e-mail: tarryn@cyllene.uwa.edu.au

Many low- and middle-income countries experience a double burden of malnutrition and nutrition-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Existing scholarship highlights adverse impacts of neoliberalism on nutrition, including the influence of laissez-faire economics on reshaping food systems and neoliberalism's ideological emphasis on personal responsibility for healthy lifestyles. Yet how nutrition policy-makers in the Global South experience and respond to neoliberal pressures remains poorly understood. The aim of this paper is to examine how neoliberal logic is experienced, internalised and resisted by nutrition policy-makers in Fiji. Two Fijian policy analysis case studies were developed in which food marketing regulations were shelved or abandoned: restrictions on marketing of unhealthy foods to children; and restrictions on marketing of breastmilk substitutes. Eleven semi-structured interviews with nutrition policy-makers and stakeholders were conducted in Fiji that focused on these regulations. Data were analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis. Public health policy-makers experienced neoliberalisation as undermining the regulation of food marketing from two directions. From the top-down, politico-economic vested interests were perceived to obstruct effective policy interventions, and from the bottom-up, community decision-making was heavily price-driven and pro-consumer 'choice'. Participants devised strategies to redress these influences, including rearticulating the NCD problem in economic terms in order to resonate in a neoliberal climate and to empower grassroots ownership of the issue. In the effort to implement nutrition policy, public health policy-makers worked within or around the neoliberal regime, rather than directly challenging it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To draw lessons from Fiji regarding the challenges and opportunities for policy initiatives to restrict (i) food marketing to children and (ii) marketing of breast milk substitutes, to inform policy for the double burden of malnutrition.Design: Qualitative political economy analysis of two policy case studies.Setting: Fiji.Participants: Eleven key informants from relevant sectors, representing public health, economic and consumer interests.Results: This study used two policy initiatives as case studies to examine factors influencing decision-making: Marketing Controls (Foods for Infants and Young Children) Regulations 2010, amended in 2016 to remove guidelines and restrictions on marketing in the form of labelling, and the draft Advertising and Promotion of Unhealthy Foods and Non-Alcoholic Beverages to Children Regulation developed in 2014 but awaiting review by the Solicitor General's Office. Factors identified included: a policy paradigm in which regulation of business activity contradicts economic policy goals; limited perception by key policy actors of links between nutrition and marketing of breast milk substitutes, foods and beverages; and a power imbalance between industry and public health stakeholders in policymaking. Regulation of marketing for health purposes sits within the health sector's interest but not its legislative remit, while within the economic sector's remit but not interest. Opportunities to strengthen restrictions on marketing to improve nutrition and health include reframing the policy issue, strategic advocacy and community engagement.Conclusions: Restricting marketing should be recognised by public health actors as a public health and an industry policy issue, to support strategic engagement with economic policy actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rates of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are increasing globally, particularly amongst low- and middle-income countries. Critical public health scholars have argued that while political and socio-economic factors shape health outcomes within particular environments, neoliberal public health efforts tend to emphasise individual responsibility to avoid behavioural risks and ‘choose’ health. Yet there is little analysis of how these discourses about personal responsibility for NCDs are internalised, resisted or adapted by target populations in the Global South. This paper does so by examining local understandings of causal attribution for NCDs in Fiji. Data are drawn from qualitative research with outpatients, villagers and health care staff on the island of Ovalau (n = 68). Residents deem individual choices to be the principal cause of poor health outcomes. While they mention some social, historical and spiritual determinants of NCDs, community members have internalised a neoliberal governmentality, in which individuals are held morally accountable for preventing disease. Moreover, these messages about NCDs intersect with other discourses that promote personal responsibility in Fijian society - such as colonial legacies, traditional gender roles and Christianity. This local adaptation of neoliberalism reproduces historically entrenched stereotypes about Indigenous Fijians as irresponsible citizens, and obscures community recognition and response regarding the structural determinants of the NCD problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sufferers of medically unexplained conditions that are not observable in the clinic can experience multiple layers of invisibility: a lack of biomedical diagnosis; legal skepticism; political disinterest; and a loss of their prior social identity. For those with environmental sensitivities, this is compounded by literal hiddenness due to often being housebound. Drawing on an online survey of people with multiple chemical sensitivity, this article examines how the everyday experience of invisibility is mitigated by engaging with other patients online. Respondents used online forums to undertake various forms of "visibility work," including attempts to crystallize their suffering into something recognizable medically, legally, and politically, and to reconstruct an identity considered valid and deserving-although the therapeutic potential of online support was contingent on intra-group politics. This study demonstrates that online forums allow biomedicine's "invisible others" to struggle for alternative forms of recognition beyond the clinical gaze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviews are central to the health ethnographers’ toolkit. In this article, we offer a critical engagement with methodological literature coupled with reflective examples from our own research, in order to articulate the value of the ethnographic interview in health research. We contribute to literature on ethnographic interviews in two ways: by decoupling ethnographic interviews from the necessity of accompanying participant observation, and by outlining an ethnographic disposition towards interviewing. We define the seven key epistemic dispositions underpinning the ethnographic interview. These are humility, a readiness to revise core assumptions about a research topic, attentiveness to context, relationality, openness to complexity, an attention to ethnographic writing, and a consideration of the politics and history of the method. The strength of an epistemic understanding of the ethnographic interview is that it offers flexibility for developing a diverse array of interview techniques responsive to the needs of different research contexts and challenges. Ethnographic interviews, we show, contribute to the study of health through a richly explorative, responsive, contextualised, and reflexive approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the processes involved in developing international, cross-cultural research teams. Scholarship on Indigenous and Pacific Methodologies demonstrate the importance of employing methodologies that center Indigenous approaches to research and relationships. This article explores using these methodologies within research teams as a preliminary step in developing sustainable and impactful international, cross-cultural research teams. Although this is not a formal study, the article reports that the importance of building trust within research teams as an essential step in addition to building trust with communities., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.