Medical Anthropology at the Intersections: Histories, Activisms, and Futures ed. by Marcia C. Inhorn and Emily A. Wentzell (review)

Taking the passing of three pathbreaking medical anthropologists as a moment for reflection, in this volume prominent medical anthropologists take stock of their discipline and its relationships with others. The first section, “Histories,” traces the intellectual genealogies of medical anthropology and its largely productive associations with the fields of feminist technoscience studies, medical history, and international and area studies. The second section, “Queries,” explores medical anthropologists’ engagements with global public health, mental health, genetics, and genomics. These encounters often meant turning an anthropological lens—at time critically—on these disciplines and their impact in broader social contexts. Finally in the third section, “Activisms,” the long-standing concern of using anthropological research to improve living conditions is considered in tandem with the contributions of disability studies, public policy, and gender, LGBT, and sexuality studies.

Throughout, the contributors employ a productive reflexivity to reflect critically on the subjects of concern in medical anthropology. For example, in his chapter, “That Obscure Object of Global Health,” Didier Fassin interrogates the concept of “global” to “unveil the dialectic of spatial expansion and moral normalization” and “health” to highlight the “tension between the worth of lives and the value of life” (p. 96). Carving out a critical space between scientific detachment and moral involvement is a central theoretical and political challenge rather unique to the subdiscipline of medical anthropology, Fassin claims. After all, political anthropologists, he suggests, would not aim to be “missionaries of democracy” (p. 114), but medical anthropologists often are concerned with improving medical care, biomedical and otherwise.

The contributors have seriously pondered the future of medical anthropology, and their prescriptions are a thread that runs throughout the volume. In particular, all have suggestions for how medical anthropology can have a larger influence on other fields and health concerns writ large. To synthesize many complex arguments and contexts, they argue that medical anthropology’s most important contribution is its commitment to achieving a deep knowledge of how local conditions and concerns filter global processes shaping health.

Related to this, all are engaged with how to continue analyzing the tensions between the particular and the universal to avoid reductionist understandings of individuals and populations. In this respect, the importance of medical anthropologists’ engagement with the biological and neurological sciences is another imperative throughout the book. For Margaret Lock, this could be done by tracking postgenomic thinking into the public domain and an attention to local social worlds of genetic testing. For his part, Arthur Kleinman, writes that in this new era of neuroscientific research, the anthropology of mental health needs to take a biosocial orientation.

The scholar most engaged with medical history, Lynn Morgan, reveals that she was drawn to interdisciplinary inquiry to adequately explain an empirical question in the present: how to contextualize a human embryo-collecting project now archived at Johns Hopkins dating from the early twentieth century (p. 41). Framing her questions anthropologically, as concerning the relationships between the embryo and fetal subjectivity, between embodiment and personhood, she follows American discourses and practices surrounding the consumption of Chinese embryos from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Nineteenth-century missionaries to China published derisive commentaries on the apparent lack of concern Chinese showed for dead newborns and which indicated the Chinese lack of civilization. In the early twentieth century, Western anthropologists were collecting Chinese embryos for the racial claims they might make about human difference and development. What unites these two characterizations of Chinese embryos, she argues, are processes of that production of knowledge of human difference through the consumption of embryos. Morgan then draws a continuity between these narratives and contemporary American discourses that express disgust with how Chinese populations supposedly deal with human embryos and abortions but not with the Westerners who travel to China in increasing numbers to take advantage of stem cells treatments that use fetal tissue. Thus, by...