Vincanne Adams

• University of California, San Francisco

This chapter details the ways that a small maternal child health NGO, which began its work in the Tibet Autonomous Region, China and now works in hill and high mountain regions of Nepal, has established a model for integrated healthcare delivery and support, called the “Network of Safety.” Specifically, this chapter discusses some of the challenges...

The conceptual and practical work done by social medicine and global health have often overlapped. In this paper, we argue that new efforts to apprehend ‘the social’ in social medicine offer important insights to global health along five lines of critical analysis: (1) reconfigurations of the state and new forms of political activism, (2) philanthr...

This special section critically examines the paradigms and values that undergird the ever-expanding field of global health. The richly textured ethnographic think pieces presented here tackle problems of evidence and efficacy as complex forms of ethical and theoretical engagement in contexts of neoliberalism, war, technological innovation, inequali...

Purpose This report from the field details the ways that one small maternal child health NGO, which began its work in Tibet and now works in the mountain communities of Nepal, has established a model for integrated healthcare delivery and support it calls the "network of safety." Description It discusses some of the challenges faced both by the NGO...

Efforts to augment accountability through the use of metrics, and especially randomised controlled trial or other statistical methods place an increased burden on small nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) doing global health. In this paper, we explore how one small NGO works to generate forms of accountability and evidence that may not conform to...

There is a growing interest in studies that document the relationship between science and medicine - as ideas, practices, technologies and outcomes - across cultural, national, geographic terrain. Tibetan medicine is not only known as a scholarly medical tradition among other Asian medical systems, with many centuries of technological, clinical, an...

Processes of recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans were slowed by privatization of institutional public resources meant to help people return and rebuild. This article explores the specific relationships among private-sector corporations contracted by the government to help with recovery, market logics used in recovery to build stock portfolios of r...

Data from this multiyear qualitative study of the effects of Hurricane Katrina and flooding in New Orleans suggest differences in how the elderly cope with disaster. At the time of the disaster, the elderly of New Orleans were at greater risk than other groups, and more elderly died than any other group during the storm and in the first year after....

There is a growing interest in studies that document the relationship between science and medicine - as ideas, practices, technologies and outcomes - across cultural, national, geographic terrain. Tibetan medicine is not only known as a scholarly medical tradition among other Asian medical systems, with many centuries of technological, clinical, an...

Many New Orleans residents who were displaced in 2005 by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the subsequent levee failures and floods are still displaced. Living with long-term stress related to loss of family, community, jobs, and social security as well as the continuous struggle for a decent life in unsettled life circumstances, they manifest what w...

karaoke bars he and his Western clients will be allowed because of the "OK" sign (taken from the name karaoke) above the doorways at those bars where the mostly Han Chinese proprietors allow foreigners in.2 He enjoys these bars more than anything else in Tibet; he frequents them with his Tibetan friends who run the trekking and tour agencies throug...

One defining quality of our current moment is its characteristic state of anticipation, of thinking and living toward the future. Anticipation has epistemic value, a virtue emerging through actuarial saturation as sciences of the actual are displaced by speculative forecast. It is a politics of temporality and affect. Key dimensions are: injunction...

With advances in medical technology, the potential uses for human blood have proliferated, and in turn, so has the demand for blood. Blood and blood products circulate in a medical marketplace as a `good' that can be bought and sold to meet various health and commercial demands. Nevertheless, its point of origin — or `production' — remains the indi...

Recent shifts in the global health infrastructure warrant consideration of the value and effectiveness of national public health campaigns. These shifts include the globalization of pharmaceutical research, the rise of NGO-funded health interventions, and the rise of biosecurity models of international health. We argue that although these trends ha...

A variety of shifts emergent with globalization, which are reflected in part by nascent programs in "Global Public Health," "Global Health Sciences," and "Global Health," are redefining international public health. We explore three of these shifts as a critical discourse and intervention in global health diplomacy: the expansion in non-governmental...

This exploration of a Himalayan Sherpa ritual engages contemporary cultural anthropology debates concerning ethnographic essentialism, positivism, and so-called postmodernist approaches. The author notes a parallelism between Buddhist Sherpa ritual processes that call upon patrons to engage in mimesis with idealized images of themselves and ethnogr...

This article takes as its starting point the outbreak of the SARS epidemic in 2002-2003 in the People's Republic of China (PRC) to ask pertinent questions about the politics of identity in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), and to connect these issues to the circulation of, as well as the social and economic value placed on, Tibetan medicines withi...

A review of the purpose and history of postcolonial science studies. Main points are to link the local and global, to respect historical and political context, and to recognize the work of making science travel as part of the work of making science.

Procedures of Informed Consent are considered a high priority for international biomedical research. However, informed consent protocols are not necessarily transferable across cultural, national or ethnic groups. Recent debates identify the need for balancing ethical universals with practical and local conditions and paying attention to questions...

In the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) of the People's Republic of China (PRC) maternal mortality ratios remain among the highest in the world. Although traditional Tibetan medical theory, practice, and pharmacology include information on maternal and child health care, Tibet is one of the few societies in the world that does not have traditional b...

Efforts to conduct Western clinical research in non-Western medical settings with little or no familiarity with such methodologies are on the rise, but documented accounts of the ways that biomedical science requires negotiation and translation across cultures are not plentiful. This article adds to this literature through analysis of an NICHD-fund...

Social theorists have explored the ways in which quantification serves as an instrument of governance in the modern state, whether tied to concerns of population size and quality or to problems of social behavior. Biopolitics are as visible in the modern socialist states as they are in free-market democratic states, and they are perhaps nowhere mor...

The ambiguous terrain of 'fact-making' in biomedical clinical research is explored by way of an investigation of the criminalization of Tibetan medicine and Tibetan medical practitioners who participate in the global pharmaceutical pursuit of new medical products. Transcultural encounters between biomedical research interests and Tibetan medical pr...

Cystic echinococcosis (cystic hydatid disease) is caused by the common parasite Echinococcus granulosus. It has been found on 5 continents, including portions of the northern United States and Canada.(1) The characteristic cysts are usually located in the liver (60%-75%), lung (15%-25%), and the remainder of the body (10%-15%), most commonly the br...

During field research in 1998, a Tibetan medical doctor accompanied me to Lhasa's book market in order to help find some medical texts of which I had become aware. Working through my imperfect Tibetan and his equally strained English, we found some books at a street side stand along the way. One that caught my eye was published in the "new" book st...

Social Suffering. Arthur Kleinman. Veena Das. and Margaret Lock. eds. Berkeley. University of California Press, 1997. 404 pp.

Tibetan refugees and Western activists note that if universal human rights standards were enforced in China, Tibetans would suffer less and come closer to political independence. This article explores potential problems of universalism and individualism in human rights discourse by examining understandings of the body and suffering among Lhasa Tibe...

Despite nearly 40 years of involvement in tourism and its heavy demands for wage labor, Nepalese Sherpas have found ways to reconstitute traditional productive relations in their new economy. This article takes a cultural approach to tourism capitalism. Sherpa reciprocal labor in the form of kinship, and other types of exchanges, has been reconstit...

Since medical ideologies and socio-economic systems are interdependent, anthropologists have described the tendency of people in developing countries to become more committed to Western medicine as they become more involved in capitalist production. This paper examines the interdependence of socio-economic and medical systems by suggesting explanat...