This paper is about a process of a nascency of new doctors, and how it is possible to approach this topic from the viewpoint of social anthropologist. As a starting point, I use actor-network theory, which is one of the social science paradigms focusing on materiality. I consider it (on the basis of work by Bruno Latour and other scholars, who are dealing with this field), to be a remarkable actor in matters connected with human action, and thus an appropriate subject for an anthropological inquiry. Since the topic concerns medicine in the Czech Republic nowadays, I contribute to the knowledge of medical anthropology, which does not have such a strong academic base here as in the Anglo-Saxon world. Special attention is dedicated to a detailed description of activities leading to the formation of the text of this thesis. Reflexivity, on which I put emphasis, shall serve as the foundation of the context of genesis of an anthropological knowledge and also to describe the ethical concerns of the research. The main methods are observation and semi-structured in-depth interviews with twelve informants, who were medicine students or medicine faculty graduates.

Socioeconomic and citizenship barriers prevent farmworkers from accessing public health care; thus, grassroots organization members and health care practitioners collaborate to create community health clinics that provide care for farmworkers and low-wage immigrant workers. Such community clinics are known as parallel health care systems, yet the concept's existing literature lacks comprehensive studies on the parallel systems operating within farmworker communities. To fill this research gap, I conducted nine semi-structured interviews to collect the perceptions of key community stakeholders involved in providing accessible health and financial aid to farmworker communities in Florida. I analyzed the interviews through the qualitative grounded theory method to identify which factors participants perceived as determining farmworker health outcomes, their explanations for why parallel medical systems emerge, and the differences and similarities between their answers. I found that the participants understood large-scale social structures to be influencing farmworker health outcomes. Furthermore, the participants described parallel health care systems as bridging structural gaps caused by the government's social abandonment of farmworker communities and health inequality. While the participants all similarly employed a structural framework to discuss farmworker issues, differences in perception arose during conversations of farmworker agency, the ambiguity of a "two-tiered health care," and proposed solutions. This study's findings contribute to the existing literature's observations on parallel health care systems, elaborate on the government's negative treatment of farmworkers during the COVID-19 pandemic, and generally highlight the voices of key community stakeholders currently working with farmworker communities.

The majority of South African citizens experience inadequate healthcare due to underfunding, mismanagement, staff shortages, and infrastructure problems. Before a healthcare system was created, the sick turned to traditional herbal healers for care. South Africa’s Zulu healers possess specialized knowledge of local plants and medicine thought to have physical and spiritual healing properties. The country’s increasing reliance on Western biomedicine has created a current concern from indigenous medicine conservationists regarding the future of this kind of knowledge. In order to assess the effects of Western medicine on traditional healing practices, I collected data on the various uses of traditional medicine, the frequency in which it is used relative to Western medicine, and how it is maintained in the community. The data identified the various uses and potential problems of Western medicine and Zulu traditional herbal practice in helping the community. The traditional herbal healers revealed close connections between the informational, spiritual, physical, and cultural components of the practice that characterize its livelihood and practice for generations to come. This information allows for a greater understanding of how culture and medicinal knowledge can be entwined together and the positive or negative effects of biomedicine interacting with traditional medicine to help solve sicknesses in not only South Africa, but potentially in our global community.

Following cultural anthropological inquiry, this dissertation examines the adoption of shamanic healing techniques into Western medicine and the resultant hybrid modality of health care fostered by two disparate healing traditions. As the U.S. populace increasingly turns to alternative forms of healing in conjunction with, or in lieu of, conventional Western medicine, shamanic healing has been added to the list of recognized non-conventional therapies. Shamanism, once prevalent throughout most of the world in various cultural forms, is purported to be the oldest healing modality, dating back to the Upper Paleolithic in Siberia. Historical excoriation and extermination from religious and political dogma have plagued shamanic cultures for centuries while their healing practices have been rebuked by Western concepts emergent from the Scientific Revolution--whereupon the Cartesian Split and a corporeal view of the body transformed the field of medicine. In the United States, over the last decade, a new and growing subculture of health care practitioners, including "Western" educated medical practitioners, is seeking out shamanic training for personal and professional development. This study examines how the adoption of a healing paradigm borne out of indigenous cultures oriented toward communal living and local economies is adapted to a Western culture steeped in individualism, commercialization, and commodification. Through surveys, interviews, and ethnographic research, the investigator provides numerous examples and analysis of the practice of shamanic healing techniques in medical clinics, health care centers, and hospitals. In particular, this study will focus on the shamanic training of health care practitioners, their motivations, the manner in which they incorporate shamanic healing techniques into their treatment protocols, as well as patient/colleague/administrative responses and institutional barriers. A comparative analysis provides discussion on both the metamorphosis of shamanic healing traditions appropriated within a biomedical framework as well as the influence of spiritually-based healing practices upon the established medical culture in the United States today. Through the lens of highlighted individual experiences, the investigator offers insight into an emerging hybrid healing modality embedded in cultural contrasts that also serves as a catalyst for the renegotiation of the meaning of healing.

This narrative ethnography is based on seven years of research collaboration with the Walpole Island First Nation (WIFN). The study focuses on local perceptions of risk as they relate to ecosystem integrity, human health and well-being. Discourse analysis of generic and nuanced community narratives reveals diverse yet complementary situated knowledge that are firmly rooted in Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe) cultural teachings, values and practices. Gerald Ryle and Clifford Geertz's conceptualization of thin and thick description is used to parse out the various components of what I've identified as a community genre of toxic talk. Within this model, thin description refers to observations of the surface metamorphoses of the physical environment through pollution and other anthropogenic changes. Thick description emerging from the analysis of elegies and echoes of loss and discourses of resistance illuminates the discursive tactics employed by community members to resist Western frameworks of risk analysis and re-situate the topic of environmental health within the wider interpretive matrix of structural violence. A proposed Shell refinery expansion project is used as an example of how WIFN actively mobilizes discourses via oral tradition in the struggle for environmental justice. Through the strategic use of toxic talk, the community draws attention to environmental issues while simultaneously laying bare to a wider, non-Native audience the historical scaffolding of Native issues that are part and parcel of contemporary environmental crises and their effective mediation and resolution. The 'discursive movement' from elegies and echoes of loss to discourses of resistance reframes Walpole Island residents from those who are defined by survivorship to those who embody and evoke a spirit of survivance. The dissertation concludes with a semiotic critique of the Western medical terms chemophobia and risk perception. This leads to the advancement of toxic talk as an alternative framework for acquiring a more politicized, historicized and humanized understanding of environmental concerns at Wal pole Island. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No description available.

Despite advancements in research on sexual morphology as well as increasing interdisciplinary theory on gender, medicine continues to perpetuate anti-transgender stigma in health care. Research on this topic has typically lacked perspectives from health professionals, who operate in and contribute to the environments in which patients seek care. In collaboration with Dallas non-profit Trans Pride Initiative, this study seeks to begin filling this research gap, relying on a sexual stigma framework created by Gregory Herek and applying it to anti-transgender (or gender) stigma to examine its manifestations in health care environments through narrative inquiry. The data from narrative interviews with health care professionals revealed themes of inadequate schooling on transgender competency models and health needs, difficulties in resisting gatekeeper practices while addressing mental health needs, a patient-as-expert approach amongst trans-affirming providers, and understanding of patient family dynamics as a catalyst for understanding stigma. Exploration of sexual identity prior to claiming gender identity, lacking language to explain gender experiences until encountering other LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) people, and religious trauma as restrictive to gender exploration during childhood emerged as themes amongst transgender and gender diverse participant interviews. The practical implications of these themes present issues for institutional, social, and legal change due to the pervasiveness of sexual dimorphism (and subsequent gender binary) as a means of structuring medicine, social organization, and legal systems, respectively. Still, critical gender engagement with health professionals pre- and post- licensure has the potential for profound impacts beyond addressing anti-trans stigma in health care.

As the repercussions of the nearly 50-year U.S. War on Drugs are revealing themselves to be harmful and life-threatening, especially to lower-class and minority populations, social movements aimed at drug policy reform have been on the rise. While today's generation of college students were raised on abstinence-based discourses, which constantly warned and threatened them about the dangers of drug use, these same students often change their perspective, some as early as high school, when they begin having their own experiences with drugs and engage in more drug-related conversations. As a result, many students become motivated to change drug policy and education and address the stigma associated with drug use in order to reduce drug-related harm to individuals. This thesis examines the ideas and efforts of students at a university in the southeastern United States who are actively engaged in making these changes. Based on interviews with students involved with two drug policy reform groups in 2018, this thesis highlights the role of student activism in the larger drug policy reform movement. Student activists raise awareness of the need for a critical examination of U.S. drug policy frameworks and their place in this endeavor. I argue that student activists' involvement in the drug policy reform movement is motivated by the numerous disparities they experience and observe in the dominant abstinence-based drug approach. Based on these students' perspectives, I argue for a shift towards a more holistic harm reduction education that aims to increase the quality of care and livelihood for drug users, an accomplishment they believe is inextricable from U.S. policy.

No description available.

<p>The adoption of children across international borders has emerged as an important cultural phenomenon. It shapes the way North Americans understand families, and forms relationships between sending and receiving countries. This dissertation explores the transnational adoption of children between Canada and China with a focus on the subjective experiences of Canadian women who have adopted children from China, their dreams, motivations and lived experiences of becoming an adoptive mother. Highlighting these narratives, this dissertation serves to balance critique with advocacy, and complicates the binary opposition in both scholarly and popular culture presentations of transnational adoption as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The dissertation also explores the social pressures that Canadian women endure and how gender expectations and cultural ideas of femininity depend on a woman experiencing motherhood. Through the window of transnational adoption this dissertation examines discourses about infertility, philanthropy, kinship, gender and the construction of transnational adoption as kidnap or rescue.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)