Older people who suspect impending memory loss face an intensified gaze of others during moments of forgetfulness. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with individuals contemplating cognitive decline in Israel, I analyze how "significant others" can become "signifying others." Through three ethnographic vignettes, I explore regimes of gaze around forgetful moments. Building on Goffman's dramaturgy and anthropological work on aging and cognitive change, I argue that dementia functions as a specter shaping everyday interactions through "vernacular diagnosis," where informal assessments position momentary lapses within decline trajectories, prompting responses including protective laughter, strategic concealment, and orchestrating what can be known about oneself.
In this article, we explore the transformation of masculinity among Chinese men throughout their infertility journey, focusing on the interplay of "gang" (hardness) and "rou" (softness) dimensions of masculinity. We documented the embodied experiences and diverse practices of Chinese men with infertility, revealing how cultural factors shape their masculinity. Our research indicates that the "gang" and "rou" aspects of masculinity in men with infertility are not mutually exclusive binaries but are interwoven and dynamically transformed within specific life contexts. This demonstrates the multifaceted possibilities and malleability of masculinity in the face of modern societal change and individual life experiences.
How do women make miscarriage memorable when pregnancy loss is common yet weakly recognized? Drawing on interpretative phenomenological analysis of 24 interviews with Javanese Muslim women, this article examines how fetal naming and non-naming shape grief, personhood, and moral responsibility. Naming sustained remembrance through prayer, family narratives, and ultrasound images, while some women refused it when biomedical language framed loss as absence or bodily cleansing. These practices were shaped by access to care, household relations, religion, and bureaucratic recognition. The article argues that naming constitutes a politics of memory across biomedicine, kinship, religion, and the state.
After what most Kenyans experienced as the "end of Covid" in 2021-22, material remains of anti-epidemic measures, biological traces such as long covid, and memories of deaths persisted. While infection itself left few visible material traces, paraphernalia of its control - masks, tests, handwashing stations, and routines - proved more durable, although often losing or changing their function and meaning. This paper examines Covid-19 residues in western Kenya, their state and use, the meanings people assign, and how they disappear or sediment among leftovers of other epidemics, shaping future pathways unpredictably. We reflect on the afterlives of epidemics in Kenya and elsewhere.
This article is about how melioidosis, a historically little-known infectious disease, came to be constructed as an object of evidence and rendered visible within global health. I consider the production of knowledge on melioidosis in Thailand, focusing particularly on spaces of scientific research and policy, and examining the social relations required to make the disease visible at both a national and international scale. My research demonstrates how barami, a social capital distinct to Thai culture, is cultivated alongside scientific knowledge in ways that give prominence to the researchers involved while magnifying the disease and its research sites.
This is the afterword to the Special Issue "Interrogating Speculative Futures: The Politics of Imagining Futures with(out) Chronic Illness."
In 1992, Singapore banned live poultry markets (LPMs) How has this veterinary and public health policy transformed how Singaporeans qualify chickens as healthy food? Drawing on archival research and fieldwork with consumers, vendors and veterinary officials, we show that consumers lost knowledge and skills used to evaluate the safety and quality of poultry. In contrast with many anthropological studies of food safety regulation, the prohibition of LPMs did not inspire resistance or alternative food movements but led to the emergence of new forms of consumer trust in expert veterinary authority, poultry vendors, and supermarket brands.
We introduce the empirical papers in this special issue, each of which presents a different mode of speculation in the context of living with, and caring for, chronic conditions: "educated guesswork" about covid reinfection, "ambivalent speculations" in learning to live "at risk" with Barrett's Esophagus and "retrospective speculation" in pressure ulcer prevention. We reflect on how they together contribute to current thinking on the politics of time in health and medicine, and wider conversations in medical anthropology and beyond, about chronic illness as both a lived everyday reality and part of an unfolding, unpredictable collective future.
In the UK's National Health Service pressure ulcers are considered mostly avoidable, but they develop in large numbers. This problem is hard to resolve, due to uncertainty around which particular (in)actions caused the ulcer. I argue that hospital staff's practices of navigating this uncertainty are based on "retrospective speculation": the practice of assessing the past to anticipate and intervene on the future. In contrast to dominant narratives that frame pressure ulcers as failure, I argue that "retrospective speculation" provides space for hospital staff to reassess where responsibility for prevention lies in the context of high pressures on the health service.
Anthropologists studying biomedicine have often analyzed the profession as a disciplinary arm of the state. This approach risks misrecognizing the complexity of state-physician-society relations, and the political agency of doctors. In this commentary, I analyze contributions of the articles in this special issue on East Asia in the context of other work on medicine and state power.
This article examines state - doctor relationships in East Asia through an anthropological lens, arguing that states and medical professions are mutually dependent. Despite divergent modern histories, East Asian societies remain shaped by Confucianism and traditional medicine, which continue to influence governance and health systems. The authors argue that scholarship has insufficiently addressed the complexities of state - doctor relations in nation-building and public health, proposing an anthropology of medical politics to fill this gap. Drawing on ethnographic studies from China, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, the issue explores how medical professionals negotiate state power, market pressures, and professional identity.
Drawing on three multispecies cases in Palestine-Israel - the fallow deer, the griffon vulture, and the free-roaming dog - this article depicts veterinary governance as constitutive of the settler state. Specifically, the article identifies three interrelated but distinct technologies of veterinary power: biopolitics, enacted through population management and selective reproduction; pastoral power, exercised through intimate care and detailed surveillance; and necropolitics, manifested in practices of extermination. The article argues that veterinization advances and naturalizes the state's settler ecologies. In Palestine-Israel, this dynamic is especially visible in the state's peripheral regions, in territories it has occupied since 1967, and along the Gaza border.
Veterinization, catalyzed by worries about rabies in colonial Britain, has reconfigured dog-human relations beyond spaces of ill(health). Tracking human-dog relations across India and the UK, in this article, we argue that veterinization's reach is enabled by its "species reductionism," and that the ramifications for human and animal health as well as wellbeing have not been entirely positive. Our analysis points to the need for circumspection about current paradigms of interspecies health and calls for the rethinking of health beyond anthropocentrism.
Long covid involves diverse chronic physical and cognitive symptoms with poorly understood mechanisms and limited treatment options. Many affected individuals turn to community groups for support. Drawing on ethnographic research with the Long Covid Choir, a patient-run online singing and support group, in this paper I examine how participants use overlapping sensory experiences to cultivate belonging, foster biosocial solidarity, structure care, and counter isolation. Through shared auditory and visual practices - collective breathing, guided mindfulness, and gentle stretching - the choir cultivates multi-sensory connection. These activities foster digitally mediated social intimacy for individuals who face significant barriers to in-person participation.
This prose poem explores a nonbinary and transmasculine experience with total hysterectomy salpingectomy/ooporectomy as a gender-affirming procedure as well as treatment for stage four endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and multiple fibroids. In addition, it discusses ancestral lines, namely matrilineal afflictions with ovarian disease and corrective partial hysterectomies. It draws connections between nonbinary identity and transmasculinity and cisgender womanhood and motherhood. The piece uses symbolism to discuss death, grief, dysphoria, and pain to address the lived reality of transition, the death of a mother and the death of a body.
In 2018, wild boars (Sus scrofa) infected with classical swine fever in Japan became the focus of veterinary intervention for the first time. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the oral vaccine distribution project and rethinking biosecurity, this article examines the possibility and limits of relating to wild animals in the era of unpredictable infectious disease. The implementation of "wild vaccination" demonstrates that the practical limitations of the vaccine drove veterinization. Yet this was not a unidirectional expansion of veterinary power; rather, it constituted a process of re-learning veterinary expertise, enacted in novel alliances with hunters.
Academic and media accounts have neglected Romani women's issues with infertility. Historically, they have been discriminated against and stereotyped as hyperfertile, which excluded them from narratives on women's struggles with reproductive health. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in France, this article makes visible the neglected issue of infertility. It argues that structural vulnerability dramatically restricts Romani women's access to health care and makes reproductive technologies unattainable. The article shows how structural vulnerability is felt and lived and how precarious living conditions, bureaucratic obstacles, and limited access to health care intersect to produce "undiagnosed lives" among rightful migrants and European Union citizens.
This article analyses the Tamil COVID-19 memes as artifacts of humor and social commentary during Tamil Nadu's first pandemic wave. Drawing on a corpus of WhatsApp memes, cross-verified on Facebook and Instagram, we trace how Tamil cinematic iconography and anthropomorphism articulated health anxieties and negotiated therapeutic authority between Siddha and biomedicine. Using visual ethnography, we identify two narrative logics, namely, dissonance (skepticism, satire) and congruence (pragmatic coexistence). Framed by encoding and decoding, carnivalesque inversion, and performative health communication, we argue that memes do not merely reflect sentiment, rather, they actively stage reasoning about care and pluralist health imaginaries.
Media and humanitarian discourses surrounding violence against people with albinism in Tanzania have fostered forms of biosocial relatedness and public recognition. Yet albinism does not consistently consolidate into a stable biosocial identity. Drawing on ethnographic research with Farida, Baraka and other interlocutors with albinism, this article ethnographically develops the concept of "modalities of enfleshment" to attend to how albinism is lived through shifting interpretations and embodied experiences. In this paper, I argue that the condition offers a case study for understanding how bodymind differences are continually revalued across and shaped by biomedical, disability, socio-cultural, economic, political, and institutional domains and practices.
