Description
Medical Materialities investigates possible points of cross-fertilisation between medical anthropology and material culture studies, and considers the successes and limitations of both sub-disciplines as they attempt to understand places, practices, methods, and cultures of healing. The editors present and expand upon a definition of ‘medical materiality’, namely the social impact of the agency of often mundane, at times non-clinical, materials within contexts of health and illness, as caused by the properties and affordances of this material. The chapters address material culture in various clinical and biomedical contexts and in discussions that link the body and healing. The diverse ethnographic case studies provide valuable insight into the way cultures of medicine are understood and practised.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: A Genealogy of Medical Materialities Timothy Carroll and Aaron Parkhurst
Part I: Flesh and Fluid
2. Of flesh and mesh: Time, materiality and health in surgical recovery Rebecca Lynch
3. From attitudes to materialities: Understanding bowel control for colorectal cancer patients in London Ignacia Arteaga
4. The life course of labia: female genital cutting in Somaliland Caroline Ackley
5. On ‘Being the Problem’: The Ontological Choreography of the Infertile Male Rebecca Williams
Part II: Infrastructures of Care
6. Blood, Lungs and Passports Aaron Parkhurst
7. ‘Time for Tea’: Tea Practices and Care in a British Hospice Sophie Duckworth
8. Regenerative Medicine Event’: Cells, Soybeans, and a Repurposing of Ritual in Japan Jesse Bia
9. The Form that Flattens Kelly Fagan Robinson
Part III: Health Publics
10. On Becoming a Vegetable: Life, Nature and Healing for a Hylozoic Cult Roland Littlewood
11. Making the Body Local: The suburban shitizen David Jeevendrampillai
12. Of smoke and unguents: Health affordances of sacred materiality Timothy Carroll
13. How photographs ‘empower’ bodies to act differently Dalia Iskander
Responses
14. Response: Medical materialities, (post)genomics and the biosocial Sahra Gibbon
15. Response: Medical materialities, collections & artefacts Graeme Were
