Powerless science? Science and politics in a toxic world

n/

Changing cartographies of health in a globalizing world

Anthropologists have described, often in eloquent detail, local destruction of opportunities to lead a healthy life (the social determinants of health) attendant on the macroscale economic processes conveniently described as ‘globalization’. Recent reorganizations of production and finance redraw maps both literal and metaphorical of the inequalities that affect health. I argue that it is essential to focus attention on the common origins of such local destructions in new modalities and power structures of global capitalism, and in doing so to focus on what William Robinson has described as a shift from ‘territorial’ to ‘social cartographies’. These include a number of cross-border ‘emerging markets’ or bidding wars that are relevant to health and its social determinants. The article sets out three propositions about how the social science of health disparities should respond to globalization, emphasizing possibilities for research on globalization and health that draw on the complementary perspectives of anthropology and political economy

Abortion in Asia: Local dilemmas, global politics

n/

No smoking within nine metres of discipline limits

I seek to open the social practice of smoking to anthropological enquiry that has been largely caught up in the agenda of cessation – to the point that it is difficult to examine it outside this frame without being accused of advancing the interests of Big Tobacco. Analysis has also been foreclosed by adherence to frames that privilege rationality. Smoking behaviour becomes understandable and translatable via explanations of addiction or ignorance: it is rational for the addict to source her drug, and rational for the smoker ignorant of its harms to continue smoking. Equally, using a rational frame anthropologists might explain smoking practice in relation to pleasure – if they are not wedded to a cessation agenda – as maximising pleasure might also be rational, as might any practice if only one can understand the agent’s motivations. I argue for an anthropological analysis of smoking that permits more than translation

Mestizo genomics: Race mixture, nation, and science in Latin America

n/

Life in crisis: The ethical journey of Doctors Without Borders

n/

The new Arab man: Emergent masculinities, technologies, and Islam in the Middle East

n/

Mapping senses of place in an urban drug scene

n/

Patients and agents: Mental illness, modernity and Islam in Sylhet, Bangladesh

n/