Thesis (M.A.)--Texas State University-San Marcos, 2007. / Vita. Appendix: leaves 87-151. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 152-160).

Pain is the most frequent cause impairment and disability in the United States. It is estimated that over 97 million Americans are experiencing chronic pain, at a cost of somewhere between 50 and 100 billion dollars a year. The general purpose of this dissertation through qualitative and quantitative methods is to describe and analyze the hegemonic nature of physical therapy practice as an agent of western biomedicine in the treatment of working women with chronic pain using a Critical Medical Anthropological (CMA) lens. Chronic pain will be described, as the data will show, as a complex interaction of biological and socio-cultural factors. The examination and analysis of chronic pain through a CMA lens will provide an analysis and critique, not only western culture but also of Western/Biomedicine serving as a corrective to the biologically reductionist diagnostic and treatment approach that is characteristic of Western/Biomedicine and its agent, physical therapy. It can identify structures and power relations that create pain and foster the progression of acute pain to chronic pain. It can also expand treatment options, opportunities, and choices for patients, as well as allowing rehabilitation (physical therapy) to be more patient empowering (transformative rehabilitation), while examining the larger social/cultural causes and contributors to chronic pain. Lastly, this lens, through the analysis of chronic pain, can help to analyze and deconstruct professional medical hegemony that is characteristic of Western/Biomedicine and physical therapy.

This research attempts to account for the current popularity and use of acupuncture and other holistic therapies in Galway, Ireland. I have identified three research areas that are essential for understanding the popularity and use of holistic medical practices: visual culture, performance, and aesthetics. The visual culture of holistic medicines draws from exoticized imagery associated with Asian and Celtic/Folkloric Ireland and produces visual narratives marked with cultural syncretism. This imagery also provides the initial context in which patients and the general public begin to recognize and distinguish the status of these therapies as alternatives to biomedicine. Patient interpretations of the therapies—and their efficacy—are influenced by the images, symbols, and metaphors used in the magazine and leaflet promotions, as well as by the design of clinical spaces. Examination of the patient-practitioner interactions comprises the “performative” aspects of acupuncture and the social reality it creates. The verbal and nonverbal interactions play a significant role in constructing acupuncture as an appealing form of holistic healing, and how patients come to define it as pleasurable, naturalistic, and—curiously enough—as noninvasive. Patient interpretations of the social and bodily aesthetics of treatments contribute to the ways in which patients develop constructs of efficacy. Descriptions of bodily sensations and somatic imagery, use of metaphorical language, and the aftereffects of treatment experienced by patients all influence how patients define acupuncture’s efficacy. Research into how acupuncture is successfully constructed as a form of holistic medicine in Ireland suggests that its popularity is in part due to its alternative status, which indicates that the success of holistic healing practices in Ireland stems from the culture’s history of concurrently sustaining both biomedical and folk healing practices. We can also regard the popularity and use of acupuncture (as well as other forms of holistic therapies in Galway) as signaling an increase in economic standards of living while also embodying a means for negotiating the social stresses and pressures associated with late-Capitalist modernity. Key words. Visual and medical anthropology, Ireland, Ethnomethodology, Visual Culture, Phenomenology, acupuncture

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Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / From 1907 to 1909, the Austrian anthropologist, Dr Rudolf Pöch (1870-1921), conducted an expedition in southern Africa that was financed by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Pöch enjoyed administrative and logistical support from Austria-Hungary as well as the respective colonial governments and local authorities in the southern African region. During this expedition, he appropriated the bodily remains of more than one hundred people and shipped them to Vienna. When Pöch started teaching anthropology and ethnography in 1910, the remains became an essential part of the first ‘anthropological teaching and research collection’ at the University of Vienna.

No / Although the application of sequencing-by-synthesis techniques to DNA extracted from bones has revolutionized the study of ancient DNA, it has been plagued by large fractions of contaminating environmental DNA. The genetic analyses of hair shafts could be a solution: We present 10 previously unexamined Siberian mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) mitochondrial genomes, sequenced with up to 48-fold coverage. The observed levels of damage-derived sequencing errors were lower than those observed in previously published frozen bone samples, even though one of the specimens was >50,000 14C years old and another had been stored for 200 years at room temperature. The method therefore sets the stage for molecular-genetic analysis of museum collections.

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