Over the next few months, we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Today, we are excited to bring you our interview with Amand Führer and Julia Vorhölter!

What is the motivation for republishing the article “The Rebel Body: The Subversive Meanings of Illness “?

Amand: In many ways, it is a foundational document for Liberation Medicine, even though it does not mention the term. Also, it raises questions that are still relevant today and speak especially to debates taking place in social medicine, like the need for better structural competency for physicians.  

Julia: In 2024, when we were organizing the workshop on which this Special Issue is based, I reread ‘Death without Weeping’ – Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ seminal monograph on her work in Brazil. And I thought ‘wow, there is so much in here, so much ethnographic detail combined with a powerful voice of analysis and political critique; anthropologists today don’t write books like that – with more than 600 pages – anymore’. Seth Holmes suggested we also read the ‘Rebel Body’ and when I did I had a very similar reaction. To be honest, I was surprised how well the article spoke to current issues and debates despite having been written in the early 90s. I think in our focus on contemporary scholarship and current trends and turns, we sometimes tend to forget the work of our foremothers (and -fathers).

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

Amand: My professional identity is a bit situation-dependent: Most of the time I see myself as a social medicine researcher, but I also have a background in social anthropology and medicine, and I work as a psychotherapist as a side hustle. My research gravitates around the topic of health equity and its mechanisms – e.g. why are poor children in Germany sicker than rich children, or how does living in shelters affect the health of refugees?

Hereby, I am most interested in dialog between empirical research and theory development, to improve our understanding of the mechanisms that connect social inequities to poor health.

Julia: Over the last few years, I have worked on three research projects – on psychotherapy in Uganda; on sleep, sleeplessness, and sleep medicine in Germany; and on the digitalization of health and elderly care in the former coal-mining region of Saxony-Anhalt – all of which are situated in the field of psychological, medical, and political anthropology. My work has centred on three overarching questions: How do understandings of and approaches to care change in relationship to emerging technologies, new forms of knowledge, and shifting economic and political orders? How do people – those affected and those trying to offer professional support – struggle with moments of crisis in which they are confronted with the limits of their own, or another person’s, body, mind, and agency? And how do they try to instigate positive change and imagine new futures despite their experiences of past injustices, broken body-minds, and collapsing life worlds?

What drew you to this project?

Amand: I’ve been talking about the social determination of health with medical students for many semesters – how the circumstances under which our patients live shape their health and, rather strongly, dictate if they can live healthy long lives, or sick and short ones. In such discussions, one problem that always comes up is that there are many fragments of theory used in social medicine, but students are yearning for a more comprehensive framework that provides some sort of bigger narrative on equity-oriented health. A second problem is that in routine medical training students almost never encounter examples of what a medicine, that takes the structural forces shaping health seriously, could look like in practice. What does it mean for medical students and physicians to make a preferential option for the poor?

With Liberation Medicine, I had the gut feeling that it might have this function: Provide a framework that is both theoretically grounded and practically applicable.   

Julia: I think right from the start, our project was motivated by the idea of bringing together social scientists with medical students, scholars, and practitioners. And like Amand said, the concept of Liberation Medicine seemed to really speak to a broad range of people from different disciplines and across the theory-practice divide. Maybe one reason is that the concept is both critical, but also hopeful. Much of contemporary medical anthropology is ‘dark anthropology’ (to use Ortner’s 2016 term); but the idea of Liberation Medicine, at its core, is a hopeful one, a ‘concrete utopia’ as we argue in our introduction. In the ‘Rebel Body’, Nancy Scheper-Hughes argues that suffering, when politicized and heard rather than medicalized and silenced, can be a powerful driver of change, but that patients, doctors and critical observers need to work together to achieve this.   

What was one of the most interesting findings?

Amand: In the workshop that was the basis of the special issue, I was impressed that the term Liberation Medicine created a strong pull for people from different disciplines: Medical anthropology, social medicine, clinical medicine, health activism and other fields. Also, it spoke to students as well as early career scientists and more established researchers alike. As Julia said, it looked like Liberation Medicine can be a uniting banner for various perspectives that want to engage medicine as a tool for social change.  

Julia: I was struck by the creativity with which the workshop participants and the authors in our Special Issue put the concept of ‘Liberation Medicine’ to use. And I liked the powerful ethnographic stories it inspired – about a couple from a marginalized setting in India seeking hospital care (Dasgupta), about medical activists in Germany (Mair), about those wounded in political protests in France (Jacob Pinto), about doctors trying to provide meaningful care despite a crumbling health system in Spain (Aragon Martin) and about two convicts doing mental healthcare work in an LA prison (Bourgois). In all those stories, the authors see solidarity amidst crisis, suffering, and injustice.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

Amand: I have just finished reading a book by bell hooks (Teaching to Transgress). It crossed my path when one of my students asked me if I have it (shout out to Larissa!), which I didn’t. But then, the title sounded so interesting that I bought it and read it in one go.

Julia: Over the semester break, I read Angela Garcia’s ‘The way that leads among the lost’, which I found deeply moving and have been thinking about a lot since. At the moment, I am reading Octavia Butler’s ‘Kindred; it’s a profound reflection on the possibilities and limits of individual agency in systems of oppression. 

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

Amand: For health care providers: Cultivate an openness to understand illness as a form of protest, as a way of denying to continue under these circumstances; and find ways to responsibly answer to this protest.

Julia: For medical anthropologists (and other social scientists): tune your attention to more-than-suffering and violence and be open to an attitude of ‘more-than-critique’ when analyzing help-seekers, help-providers, and the politics and forms of care that (can) unfold amongst and between them, in the medical realm (and beyond).