Making, Living, Moving in the Anthropology of Health

Abstract (English)

The anthropology of disease and disability has considerably advanced from medical and psychological approaches that emphasized the abnormal and stigmatizing aspects of disease and disability to one that consider lives that involve making and ability, living and experience, and moving in terms of mobility and affects. Moreover, the field considers the heritage of disability, often in terms of colonial, institutional, and isolating contexts, as well as the future perspective that includes listening and receiving, and improvisation. The field moves away from approaches that emphasize disease and disability as only to be seen in terms of stigma. It further considers problematic relations between global indicators of the existence of disease and disability, that uniquely define quantitative measures of elimination, as is the case of leprosy, and critically considers narrow ethical positions that impact the quality of life, as is the case in living with spina bifida and hydrocephalus.
The conveners of the session draw from their research with indigenous peoples in Europe, South America and Africa, especially from areas as broad as the heritage and futures of leprosy and spina bifida & hydrocephalus in the context of medication and technology, bodily management and from indigenous people, such as exploring the integration of Mapuche ancestral health principles into modern bioethics and public health frameworks, contributing to the 2030 health objectives. Additionally, the panel will address the Atacameño people's struggle for cultural preservation amid extractive industries in northern Chile.
The session will also open to plural ways of expressing culture and examining the possibility of visual and auditory narratives as other than traditional written ways of academic communication in the anthropology of health. Finally, the session is interested to opening alter-native anthropological theories of health and disease. Since Robert Murphy (1987) opened the discussion that disability should not be merely understood as stigma but rather as liminal, it opened up for new ways of emphasizing disability as in-between and opening it up rather than closing it off. This also opens the road again to engage academic work with experience, skill, and spirituality.