Medical Anthropology Collection

In this book, the reader will find a careful and thorough theoretical reflection on the epistemological, ethical, and institutional limitations that affect the field of mental health. This text reflects the outcome of more than thirty years of research, during which the author has devoted himself to problematizing the intersection between mental health, the social sciences, and human rights. Each of the chapters in this book reveals, in some way, the different forms of coercion that permeate the field of mental health.

This book presents an ethnographic study of people who use drugs and attend the hygienic consumption rooms (SCH) in Barcelona. Guided by medical anthropology and the biographical method, the text analyzes the health-illness-care processes of SCH users and everyday life within these facilities. This analysis contributes to developing proposals to improve social policies and harm-reduction strategies aimed at the studied population.

"The book you have in your hands approaches a complex and relevant issue: the social organization of gender and power. It does so by focusing on a very specific domain, that of mental suffering during adolescence and early youth. Thanks to the deep and attentive perspective of the ethnographic analysis carried out by the author, the terms of these two elements are inverted: mental suffering is represented as a moment-or a series of moments-while adolescence and early youth are seen as a space. These elements are studied in themselves and, at the same time, also serve as a privileged site of observation for drawing conclusions and proposing lines of reflection that go beyond their initial boundaries." (From the foreword by Jokin Azpiazu)

The Old Guard of Feminist Anthropology presents the work of four anthropologists from the first generations-Teresa del Valle, Dolores Juliano, Virginia Maquieira, and Verena Stolcke-who combine in their work both anthropological discipline and feminist commitment. As one of them points out, anthropology helps them try to understand the world they live in, and feminism is the most effective tool to transform it.

This book is an exercise in freedom: the freedom to explore our stories in an intimate, sincere, and profound way. These lived and professional narratives serve to reveal, tell, or bring to the public sphere what has been overlooked. One common element throughout the volume is the centrality of the body and emotions in the argumentation, combining lived experience with clinical and academic practice. Ultimately, it is a dialogue between different forms of knowledge that presents motherhood not as a phenomenon reducible to biology, but as complex and plural.

The term reset evokes the feeling of a restart, a pause, or a stand-by that has shaken our lives since the beginning of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As often happens, restarts foster uncertainty; they carry both hopes and precautions. They are ambiguous in terms of temporality, as the act of restarting can easily be confused with what is already being restarted. They are both limit and threshold, and as such, they engulf past, present, and future. This book was written from the perspective of the reset in a collective manner, incorporating 48 reflections developed during the peak of the pandemic, between April 14 and May 11, 2020, in different countries.

Diagnostic procedures are emblematic of medical work. Scholars in the field of social studies of medicine identify diverse dimensions of diagnosis that point to controversies, processual qualities and contested evidence. In this anthology, diagnostic fluidity is seen to permeate diagnostic work in a wide range of contexts, from medical interactions in the clinic, domestic settings and other relations of affective work, to organizational structures, and in historical developments. The contributors demonstrate, each in their own way, how different agents 'do diagnosis', highlighting the multi-faceted elements of uncertainty and mutability integral to diagnostic work. At the same time, the contributors also show how in 'doing diagnosis' enactments of subjectivities, representations of cultural imaginaries, bodily processes, and socio-cultural changes contribute to configuring diagnostic fluidity in significant ways.

The purpose of this book is to provide elements for reflection on communication, education, and health from the perspective of the human and social sciences. Such reflection is more vital than ever, given the enormous expansion of media, such as television and technologies 2.0, which make access to health knowledge ubiquitous. The origin of this book lies in the meeting held in September 2015 at the Menorca School of Public Health on "Education, Health Promotion, and Communication: Perspectives from History and the Social Sciences." The different chapters stem from the research work of various disciplines-Social Anthropology, Communication Studies, History of Education, and History of Medicine-allowing for a broad and varied view of the complex factors involved in health education and communication processes.