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Medical technologies: flows, frictions and new socialities
- Source :
- Anthropology & Medicine, Anthropology & Medicine, 21(2), 107-112. Routledge
- Publication Year :
- 2014
- Publisher :
- Routledge, 2014.
-
Abstract
- While social scientists often highlight the way medical technologies mediate biomedical hegemony, this special issue focuses on the creative and often unexpected ways in which medical technologies are appropriated by diverse actors in homes, clinics and communities. The authors highlight key insights from twelve ethnographic case studies conducted in North and South America, Western Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. The case studies focus on, among other issues, how sperm donors in Denmark, despite being subjugated to medical surveillance, experience the act of donating sperm as liberating; how sex workers in Indonesia turn to psychoactive painkillers to feel confident when approaching clients; why some anorexic patients in the United States resist prescribed antidepressant drugs; and how adolescent sex education workshops in Ecuador are appropriated by mothers to monitor their daughters and shame their ‘lying husbands’. Hardon and Moyer conclude that studies of medical technology need to be sensitive to the micro-dynamics of power, the specificities of local markets in which medical technologies generate value, the social and intergenerational relations in which they are embedded, and their intersections with class hierarchies.
- Subjects :
- Value (ethics)
Male
Hegemony
media_common.quotation_subject
Shame
ethnography
Power (social and political)
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
Ethnography
Humans
Disease
medical anthropology
Sociology
Medical anthropology
Anthropology, Cultural
media_common
Anthropology, Medical
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Health technology
Gender studies
General Medicine
Original Papers
Anthropology
Female
cultural construction of illness
Lying
Delivery of Health Care
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 13648470
- Volume :
- 21
- Issue :
- 2
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Anthropology & Medicine
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....5242ff387555fa87f541ae174862a5c0