Issues

Current Issue: Preview of Books Received, Part Two

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In this special feature on the blog, we’re highlighting recent book publications that have been submitted for review to Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. This week, we are pleased to present a short overview of Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives, a volume of works edited by Ruth J. Prince and Rebecca Marsland. This book addresses the experience of African public health initiatives from numerous vantage points. Published by the Ohio University Press, a paperback version was released in December 2013. You can learn more about the book here: http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Making+and+Unmaking+Public+Health+in+Africa.

Book cover image via the Ohio University Press website.

Book cover image via the Ohio University Press website.

Prince and Marsland’s edited collection was the result of a 2008 workshop at the University of Cambridge hosted by the Centre of African Studies and the Department of Social Anthropology. Africa has long served as an “arena” for discussions about global health, human rights, and humanitarian aid, but the notion of health-for-all is complicated against a backdrop of African state formation, international interventions, and transnational policies.

This text explores what public health means for clinical professionals, patients, government officials, and citizens throughout Africa. Instead of generalizing what the meaning of public health to these groups might be, this book aims to establish a rich, complex anthropology of African public health that weighs the importance of politics, culture, and local understanding to the definition and delivery of public health initiatives. The volume covers topics in numerous countries including Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania, and takes a blended historical-anthropological approach to studying public health.

These brief summaries are intended to give our readers a glimpse into the newest academic publications that we’re excited to discuss in our journal and with our followers on social media. For a full list of books that have been submitted for review at CMP, click this link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9383-x. This page also has information regarding the submissions process for authors who’d like their academic releases reviewed in the journal, as well as information for those interested in composing a review. For more information on this process, please contact managing editor Brandy Schillace.

Current Issue: Preview of Books Received, Part One

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In this special feature on the blog, we’re highlighting recent book publications that have been submitted for review to Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. This week, we’d like to give you a short overview of Sarah Pinto’s new book Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India, from the University of Pennsylvania Press (more information here: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15224.html)

Book cover image courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Press website

Book cover image courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Press website

Released earlier this year, Sarah Pinto’s book chronicles the experiences of women at a number of different psychiatric care institutions throughout Northern India. Pinto questions the poor treatment of female patients, the licensing process for mental health caregivers in these settings, as well as the overprescription of psychoactive medications to Indian women. Pinto pays close attention to the ways women in particular experience difficulty and distress as the primary caretakers of their families and households.

The goddess Parvati, whom the book is in part titled after, represents intense love for someone far away that borders on, and becomes, a form of suffering. Pinto invokes the name of this figure as a way to remind us of the mental strain that familial love can cause, especially for the Indian women at the heart of her moving ethnographic account.

These brief summaries are intended to give our readers a glimpse into the newest academic publications that we’re excited to discuss in our journal and with our followers on social media. For a full list of books that have been submitted for review at CMP, click this link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9383-x. This page also has information regarding the submissions process for authors who’d like their academic releases reviewed in the journal, as well as information for those interested in composing a review. For more information on this process, please contact managing editor Brandy Schillace.

Current Issue Highlight: September 2014 (Vol 38 Issue 3) Part One

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Welcome back to the CMP blog! For the next two weeks we will post short descriptions of our newest articles from September 2014, which includes a special section addressing medical learning in South Asia as well as other thought-provoking pieces in the cultural construction of medicine, health, and illness. These updates are intended to offer a taste of the research we’re excited to share with you through the journal.

Knowledge and Skill in Motion: Layers of Tibetan Medical Education in India
Laurent Pordié & Calum Blaikie

In this article, the authors discuss the various ways that a student can be trained in Tibetan medical practice. They argue that there is not one means of medical training for Tibetan medicine, but rather numerous means of learning that alter the way the Tibetan practitioners learn and deliver medical care. In particular, three means of learning are highlighted: traditional apprenticeship under a Tibetan medical caregiver, classroom learning through a Buddhist institute, and lastly at a Tibetan medical organization intended to educate future practitioners from poorer rural regions with fewer resources than those attending the elite Buddhist school. The argument weighs the prestige and the social acceptance of each methods of training, noting that “institutionalisation tends to relegate ‘traditional training’ to an inferior level, in particular due to its heterogeneity and the social image of rural backwardness it presents.” It also addresses how different forms of learning are legitimated by the government and local authorities, and demonstrates the shift from skill-based learning via apprenticeship towards formal, institutional learning that emphasizes education over “enskillment.”

Of Shifting Economies and Making Ends Meet: The Changing Role of the Accompagnant at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal
Katie Kilroy-Marac

Kilroy-Marac draws from her ethnographic research in Senegal to offer a vivid picture of the shift in the role of the accompagnant, an attendant who stays with mental health patients for the duration of their hospitalization. Although this attendant was in previous generations a family member of the patient, there has been a sudden rise in professional accompagnants who are paid to stay with the patient at the clinic. The author notes that the “neoliberal turn” in Senegal towards increased wealth and commodification of services is exemplified in the professional accompagnant, whose services form a monetary transaction in lieu of fulfilling a familial duty to the patient: providing work for others and freeing up families who, in the newly-bolstered economy, often have other career and personal obligations. However, the author complicates this notion by noting how much the families cherish the attendant’s work and offer them gifts outside of typical payment agreements, and how these connections can often be special between families and the accompagnants.

Upcoming at CMP

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The Many “Lives” of a Journal

Atwood D. Gaines and Brandy Schillace

As with most journals, CMP began as a print only entity, distributed by means of the traditional post. Over time, the journal entered the digital age and developed a non-print life. Now the vast majority of CMP’s subscriptions are digital and downloads of the Journal’s articles surpass 60,000 per year. And now, we happily include this blog as one of the journal’s “lives.”

Increasingly, we rely on the interconnectivity that digital platforms provide. The real-time dissemination through Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere are now facts of life are the new more rapid means of communication and contact. The CMP blog and its linked social media platforms (@CMPjournal and FaceBook) will provide insights from a millennial medical anthropology that synthesizes medical anthropology and other medical social sciences, medical history, bioethics and medical humanities. Additionally, the website facilitates easier and more direct access to submission requirements, news, and updates (and links to our issues on SpringerLink). The present issue, which features a special section, demonstrates another way CMP seeks flexibility, and offers specific guidelines for the various categories of submissions with each appearing as pages on the site.

Due to the success of the Journal over the last seven years, we now welcome some three to four times the submissions that CMP received at the start of the tenure of the present Editor-in-Chief (mid 2007). As a consequence, CMP has been moved to streamline our double-blind peer-reviewed submission process by migrating to an online tracking system. At the same time, however, we are interested in preserving personal contact with our authors and recognize the impersonality and other problems with the vagaries of digital interaction. Thus, the Managing Editor, (Dr) Brandy Schillace, will remain the primary contact for CMP. She is reachable via email, and CMP’s editorial staff will continue to guide authors through the process of submission (and resubmission).

The major changes for CMP will be its acquisition of new “lives” on the internet and in the blogosphere. This online presence will increase the Journal’s availability to our audience and authors and will also provide additional essays and invited guest posts during and between published numbers of the Journal. If you are interested in submitting to the blog (which is separate from the journal’s double-blind submission process), please contact Julia Balacko or tweet to @CMPjournal.

As we have for the last seven years, CMP will continue to engage innovative iterations of the social sciences of medicine and the medical, medical history, narratology and medical ethics and doubtless new aspects of each of these fields which the Journals seeks to synthesize and to present without boundaries or demarcations.

 

ABOUT THE BLOGGER

Atwood Gaines is Editor in Chief of CMP, Brandy Schillace is Managing Editor. Read more on the About page or the Editorial Board.

Book Release: Stevenson’s “Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic”

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Cover of Stevenson's book. Rights credited to UC Press.

Cover of Stevenson’s book. Rights credited to UC Press.

This August 2014, Margaret Elizabeth Stevenson’s book on death, illness, and the understanding of life among the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic is set to be released by the University of California Press. The volume will explore two public health crises among the Inuit– a tuberculosis outbreak in the 1950s-60s as well as a suicide epidemic that began in the 1980s and extends into today. In these circumstances, Stevenson reports on how the Inuits cope with the death of their loved ones, realizing that what constitutes “life” is more than just the physical survival of the body.

To read the first chapter of the publication and find further details about Stevenson’s work, check out the page at the university press website here: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520282940

Welcome to the Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry Website

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From all of us on the CMP Journal editorial board, we’d like to extend a few opening words as we launch our new homepage.

This website will feature important information about the article submission process to the journal, as well as detail the newest installments of the journal’s current issue. It will also feature updates on the latest publications in the field of medical anthropology and allied work in the medical humanities, as well as current events that impact our understanding of human health and illness experience throughout the world today. More extensive blog posts exploring the cultural dimensions of medicine and health will be posted to this site as well, composed both by our blog administrator as well as guest writers.

It is our hope that the website will provide an active hub for scholarly work and contemporary trends in medical anthropology and the cultural study of medicine. We thank you for visiting our site and invite you to return for continued updates!

Best wishes,

Atwood Gaines, MA, MPH, PhD

Brandy Schillace, MA, PhD

Catherine Osborn, BA, BS

Stephanie McClure, MA, MPH, PhD

Ariel Casciso, BA, MA

Julia Balacko, MA (blog editor)

Special Issue: Humanness and Modern Psychotropy

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The latest issue of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry is now up at Springer.com!

Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry

 Volume 38 ˙ Number 2 ˙ June 2014

 Special Issue: Humanness and Modern Psychotropy

Guest Editors:Michael Oldani and Stefan Ecks

Forward:

On Deep History and Psychotropy

Ben Campbell

Introduction: Anthropological Engagements with Modern Psychotropy

Michael Oldani and Stefan Ecks

Special Issue ORIGINAL ARTICLES

Promise and Deceit: Pharmakos, Drug Replacement Therapy, and the Perils of Experience

Todd Meyers

“We Always Live in Fear”: Antidepressant prescriptions by unlicensed doctors in India

Stephen Ecks

The earlier the better – Alzheimer’s prevention, early detection, and the quest for pharmacological interventions

Annette Leibing

Drugs and the Single Woman: Pharmacy, Fashion, Desire and Destitution in India

Sarah Pinto

Deep Pharma: Psychiatry, Anthropology and Pharmaceutical Detox

Michael Oldani

Commentary

Cultural Scripts: The Elusive Role of Psychotropic Drugs in Treatment

Carolyn Rouse

ORIGINAL ARTICLES

Bentuhua: Culturing Psychotherapy in Postsocialist China

Li Zhang

Review Essay

Hendricks, Ruud. Autistic Company. New York: Rodopi, 2012

Ariel Cascio

 Opinion

Keep Your Sunny Side: A Street Level Look at Homelessness

Stephen G. Frischmuth

BOOK REVIEWS

Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders. Berkely: University of California Press, Berkley, 2013.

By Darryl Stellmach

BOOKS RECEIVED

COMINGS AND GOINGS

END MATTERS