As a COVID long-hauler, I inhabit a liminal space of intractable uncertainty with regards to diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and prognosis. COVID infections have blurred the boundary between the two kingdoms of the well and the sick. A new biosocial identity has emerged from the collective experience of long Covid on a global scale, where we exist ‘betwixt and between’ yet belong to neither kingdom.
Medical Anthropology
Waiting to Be Seen – How I Spent My Time in a Pain Treatment Center as a Patient
I am hospitalized while I am typing this, waiting to be seen for cervical vertebral disease, which is causing a daily numbing sensation in both hands. The wait time in the hospital provides me with a perfect chance to do autoethnography—to observe how I, as a patient, experience the medical system. I find that waiting is one of the main themes in my hospitalizing experience. The medical system dehumanizes me by means of turning me into a bed number and I have to take actions to be human again while waiting in the system.
Understanding My Mom’s Unorthodox Healing Practices
Sheets of newspaper cover a portion of the floor of our house in Manila, and on top of those thin pieces of paper sits a white candle, a box of matches, a metal spoon, and a metal basin filled with water. The doors are locked. We’re huddled around the basin, and the room plunges into silence. Rest assured, this is not some scene from a B-rated supernatural horror movie. This is just what happens whenever anyone in my family gets sick. We call an albularyo—Tagalog for witch doctor or folk healer—to come and conduct either tawas or hilot depending on the degree of illness. All my life, I’ve never really understood nor tried to understand why my mom rarely sends us for check-ups, opting instead for tawas, hilot, and the occasional pharmaceutical drugs we self-medicate ourselves with. That is, until I took an Introduction to Anthropology course, where I encountered the term “structural violence” and the whole world of medical anthropology.
Boob Boxes: Post-Mastectomy Prosthetics and the Artifice of Breast Cancer
I chose to go flat. But I almost wasn’t allowed to. This is largely due to the unacknowledged psychological tension that underlies deeply gendered illnesses: that it is possible to have one’s gender or sex taken away by disease or disability; literally eaten by cancer and its aftermath. The sick person is then framed as one who has been robbed of the “natural” trappings of motherhood, wife-dom, and feminine sexuality. The aesthetics of breast cancer therefore remained fixated on a loss of idealized womanhood.
The one thing that changed everything: Complex illness & the functional fallacy of a singular cause
When I asked my research participants what they felt had caused theirs or their patient’s schizophrenia, it was often put down to one thing or another, rather than one thing and another:
"It was because of this one bad acid tab”
“It was hereditary”
“It was the trauma”
... But when it came to the solution, it tended to be a multitude of things.
BONUS EPISODE: ‘The scariest word in the English language: a public lecture on schizophrenia’
In this public lecture, Gabrielle Carey and Julia Brown hope to achieve at least two things. First, to humanise and reduce fear around the condition of schizophrenia (a heavily neglected social issue in Australia). Second, to show how two disciplines (literature and anthropology) can complement each other in the name of better communicating lived experiences of difficult subject matter.
Ep. #34 Knowledge Making: Emma Kowal talks Indigenous health care, difference & genomics
“A lot of what individual white anti-racists, as I called them, but also the broader policy frameworks are struggling with is the question of how do we enact Indigenous equality; how do we make the lines on the graphs that we draw of Indigenous versus non-Indigenous; how do we make those lines converge and ‘close the gap’, while maintaining Indigenous difference?”
Inedia with a Grain of Salt
Author: Michael Rose, recently awarded his PhD from ANU. He would be thrilled to hear about any postdoc, writing or teaching opportunities that you might have going. You can contact him at michael.rose@anu.edu.au. You can check out his latest publication here. Dispatches from a breatharian December One weird Christmas, long before my time at the Australian National University, … Continue reading Inedia with a Grain of Salt
Just ‘Cause You Feel It, Doesn’t Mean…
I once went with my mum to have our Auras read. We were living in Malaysia and curious about traditional healing practices. Our individual Chakras revealed some energy blockages. Of course, the sincere beliefs of one person can tap into another’s vulnerability or tendency toward superstition; we walked out with an excessive amount of Tourmaline … Continue reading Just ‘Cause You Feel It, Doesn’t Mean…
#Dis-comfortable
Author: Julia Brown There are few human conditions that people fear or misunderstand more than schizophrenia, and it is likely to be the 'uncomfortable' and 'unknown' factors that make most people turn away from it. Unless you have considered the condition philosophically or experienced it directly or through other people, you might, at best, label it as … Continue reading #Dis-comfortable
The Familiar Strange 