A decade of overlapping crises - pandemic, austerity, and non-Western migration - reshaped public healthcare in Greece, with COVID-19 an institutional catalyst accelerating pre-existing exclusions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in four public hospitals in Attica, I examine doctors' discourses and practices under compounded crisis governance. The analysis suggests a specifically Greek configuration of conditional humanitarianism, in which structural constraints and ethno-religious perceptions shape uneven forms of care beneath universalist rhetoric. Doctors navigate these contradictions in ways that may reproduce, negotiate, or challenge exclusion, while institutional exhaustion and cultural hierarchies shape encounters with racialized patients. Hesitations and counter-voices reveal internal tensions.
Drawing on Li Shen's Memoir of Illness and Treatment as core ethnographic material, I develop a topological agency framework to examine how Chinese families integrate heterogeneous medical resources amid a fragmented health care landscape. I identify two core topological operations: temporal folding, which activates intergenerational embodied knowledge, and spatial stretching, which crosses hospital-home boundaries to build family-centered care. Grounded in Confucian family ethics of xiao (filial piety) and ci (parental kindness), I recenter the family as a collective agent, challenge the individual-centered paradigm, operationalize topological theory, and offer a localized perspective to inform global scholarship on medical pluralism.
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.
