Medical anthropology quarterly
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This article describes a pluralistic regime of oral health provision in a rural part of northern Lebanon, where dental care came from two main sources: professionally trained dentists and "informal" Dom dentists with Syrian nationality. Relying on a combination of interviews and ethnography, I offer a multivocal view of oral health services that incorporates data from patients and formal and informal providers. ⋯ The organization of informality was predicated on the presence of the open border between Syria and Lebanon, which favored patterns of flexible cross-border mobility. In this context, informal dentistry was not alternative, but supplementary and lateral in relation to official forms of oral health provision.
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This article analyzes tensions between aesthetics and health in medicine. The blurring of distinctions between reconstructive and cosmetic procedures, and the linking of plastic surgery with other medical treatments, have added to the legitimacy of an emerging "aesthetic medicine." As cosmetic surgeries become linked to other medical procedures with perceived greater medical necessity, health and aesthetics become entangled. ⋯ Drawing on ethnographic work on plastic surgery, as well as other studies of obstetrics and cosmetic surgery, I illustrate this entanglement of health and aesthetics within the field of women's reproductive health care in Brazil. I argue that while it would be difficult to wholly disentangle aesthetics and health, analysis of how risk-benefit calculations are made in clinical practice offers a useful critical strategy for illuminating ethical problems posed by aesthetic medicine.
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This article examines the trope of reproduction in narratives of Tibetan refugees living in Dharamsala, India. As they make sense of their personal histories, Tibetan refugees invoke a collective story that mirrors human rights literature on Tibet. Women come into contact with this literature through its incorporation into a political discourse expressed by the exile government and health institutions. ⋯ Political discourse on reproduction articulates pronatalism as a solution to the refugee community's concern with survival, and the discourse frames modernity as a site of violence through China's reproductive regulations. And yet, Tibetan refugees also employ the notion of modernity when discussing their own free reproductive decision-making, positioning modern reproductive interventions in opposition to Indian society. The article demonstrates that Tibetan refugees navigate competing figurations of modernity by expressing political resistance and affiliation through the idiom of reproduction.
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Inuit youth suicide is at an epidemic level in the circumpolar north. Rapid culture change has left Inuit in a state of coloniality that destabilized their kin-based social organization, and in spite of advances in self-governance social problems such as suicide continue. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork I carried out in Nunavut, Canada (2004-2005), including 27 interviews with Inuit between the ages of 17 and 61, I examine male youth in particular in the context of recent colonial change, gender ideologies and behavior, youth autonomy, and the family. ⋯ Many Inuit male youth are struggling with a new cultural model of love and sexuality. Inuit speak about a need for more responsible parenting. Evidence is beginning to show, however, that local, community-based suicide prevention may be working.
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This article examines an explanation circulating within a U. S. multidisciplinary pediatric pain clinic that links the neurobiology of functional pain disorders to desirable personal attributes such as smartness and creativity. ⋯ Within this narrative logic, diagnostic explanations reveal not only causal pathways but also predictive claims about recovery. By considering what is at stake when personal attributes are marshaled within a neurobiological diagnostic register that also lays out the patient's role in healing, this article complicates psychosomatic accounts of pain.