Previous studies have highlighted the importance of understanding the subjective illness experience. Stroke, as the second highest cause of death and highest cause of adult morbidity internationally, is no exception. However, the research to date has significant gaps. Lay understandings of stroke in low and middle income countries remain poorly understood, and very few studies have explored the links between experience and the context in which they occur. These gaps in knowledge have resulted in insufficient attention being paid to the relevance of local contexts in the implementation of international and regional recommendations for stroke. The study presented in this thesis explores the experience of stroke in Central Aceh, Indonesia. It drew on phenomenology and ethnography and used a range of qualitative methods. People with stroke and their carers were involved in the examination of stroke understandings, its causation and mechanism, the impact of stroke on their lives, and actions taken to remediate the symptoms. This information was complemented with an in-depth study of healers, within the context of the health systems through which they operate. Further information on current social, religious and cultural practices was gathered through participant observation. The study revealed that lay understandings occurred within a range of explanatory models. Also highlighted was the complex relationship between the understanding of the condition, the impact on the family, and the health seeking behaviour. All were influenced by the specific context and an attempt to regain a homeostatic balance in life; within the person, with others, and with the supernatural. The results of this study demand critical interrogation of the international guidelines both for stroke and for policies to promote access to health personnel at the primary care level.

This dissertation was motivated by the misrepresentation of, and apparent lack of knowledge about, indigenous medicine in Mozambique. This consequently raised the need to reveal the epistemologies of health, illness and healing; rewrite the historiography; and develop the knowledge of and about this medicine. The dissertation analyses illness representation and the political economy of health. The thesis defended is that indigenous medicine is a form of medical knowledge and practice that represents its illness, therapy and efficacy according to specific epistemological foundations, rooted in the local society and culture yet it has been misrepresented by local discourses, agencies and practices that battle to control health resources, knowledge and power in Mozambique. Within this, biomedical health paradigms, bodies, and representations have been imposed onto an imagined Official National Health Service (ONHS) whilst people, on the other hand, represent, legitimise, and seek therapy simultaneously in different epistemologies and practices of medicine within the therapeutic landscape creating a Contextual National Health Service (CNHS). This political economy of health is contingent on historical, socio-economical, political and geopolitical productions and constructions of health and efficacy within Mozambique's public health field. Research and health development needs to rewrite the historiography of indigenous medicine based on ethnographically sensitive material and linguistic competence. The construction and justification of this argument is made in seven chapters. The study was carried out in Maputo City and Manhiça district and relied on participant observation. It also uses a mixture of other qualitative methods which encompassed formal and informal interviews, documenting of life histories, desk review, and participatory learning for action (PLA).

This dissertation focuses on the formation and governance of international clinical research collaborations in the field of regenerative stem cell medicine, and analyzes these processes against the background of the current transition to a multipolarizing scientific world system. The empirical point of departure of this study is an ethnographic analysis of the establishment of a trans-continental academia-centered clinical trials infrastructure, between researchers based in China, Hong Kong and the USA. Field research was carried out in mainland China and Hong Kong amongst scientists, clinical researchers, medical entrepreneurs, government regulators and patients, between April 2010 and May 2011. The dissertation contributes to debates on the processes and challenges that surround the global distribution of evidence-based medicine clinical research standards, and the study of science and globalization in the context of the emergence of new scientific, economic and geopolitical center regions in the world, with a particular focus on literature that comments on the scientific ascent of the People's Republic of China. The dissertation reveals that the global diffusion of evidence-based clinical research standards, in regenerative stem cell medicine, is accompanied by the surfacing of vital forms of resistance and the creation of novel transnational spaces of alter-standardization, in which less rigorous, physician-based forms of experimental clinical practice are endorsed, publicized and tried to be legitimized. The dissertation uncovers, furthermore, that the creation of internationally standardized research zones, in the clinical stem cell field, is not necessarily a stable or constant process. The implementation of internationally recognized standards can be highly temporary and depends upon activation in specific situational contexts. Multiple modalities of experimental clinical practices continue to exist side by side to each other. Another line of theorization in this study focuses on the contemporary dynamics of global scientific multipolarization, and explores the empirical and theoretical implications of this trend for international clinical research collaborations. The dissertation argues that a new mode of clinical research partnerships may gradually be emerging. Processes of collective financiering and joint-innovation are giving rise to changing patterns of labour division, decision-making, benefit sharing, profit sharing and revised forms of ownership regarding inventions and research data. Based on a reflective engagement with postcolonial approaches to the study of science and technology, the dissertation concludes that new analytical perspectives are required, through which the empirical transformations and impact associated with the move toward a multipolarizing science system, can be captured in a more nuanced, and comprehensive manner.

Thirty patients at a Tucson respiratory clinic were questioned to elicit data to yield an ethnography of asthma. The methodology involved one structured, open-ended interview per patient. The patients ranged in age from 24 to 82; a range of demographic, sociocultural, and medical variables were represented. Two themes, control and limitation, surfaced as the key issues in the construction of meaning attached to the experience of asthma. Asthmatics feel a loss of control over their lives, which they see as being shaped--to some degree--by the limitations that asthma incurs. The sensation of losing control causes fear or panic, a common emotion among asthmatics, according to informants. The need to take medication on a daily basis is seen as an important symbol in the development of patients' conceptions of their illnesses. The influence of dominant cultural values on the expression of asthma is discussed, and an understanding of the effect of asthma on the daily lives of Americans is offered.

No description available.

This thesis presents an anthropological study of ordinary people's views about the body in general and the reproductive system in particular, based on two case studies carried out in Britain and in Brazil. I discuss the meanings of lay and biomedical images of the body and identify the ways the researched groups reinterpret the biomedical view of the body anatomy and physiology. Through the analysis of ethnographic material on time, space and domestic organisation in four shantytown groups in Porto Alegre, Brazil and in three different groups in London, UK, I point out the dwelling peculiarities of the different groups and suggest there is a relationship between embodied experiences of time/space and knowledge of the reproductive system. These arguments lead to a more general phenomenologically theorised view of gendered and status-framed bodies, consequently situating this work in the interface of Medical Anthropology and a more general socio-cultural Anthropology.

Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2008. Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-119).

No description available.

This thesis explores the concept of healing used by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and survivors as a conceptual tool to address and redress the legacy of residential schools. Using public testimony and selected interviews, I explore how the TRC’s statement-gathering process is perceived and experienced by survivors. This thesis also documents the personal tensions and political limits encountered during the implementation of a globalized, institutional process of truth-telling applied to resolve diverse and localized ‘traumas’ experienced by students enrolled in dozens of residential schools. This approach illustrates the inherent shortcomings of a top-down approach to solving residential school issues, drawing on the public testimonies of survivors to identify tensions between a national process and survivor-led and community-based alternatives for healing. Despite its intention to create a forum that allows survivors to tell their story about residential schools, the TRC has also, often, been used as space of political activism and social critique. Survivors have used the public testimonial spaces offered by the TRC to both critique the Canadian government’s commitment to reconciliation and also to demand more effective forms of redress, which have subtly shaped and transformed the TRC during its mandate. Thus, while I draw attention to institutional practices, ideologies and power relations shaping the TRC, I also emphasize how people perceive, engage and transform the process as a result.

Thesis--University of Washington. / Vita. Another copy has number: Thesis 27068. Bibliography: leaves [285]-297.