Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: This special issue brings together work on the "biomedicalization" of Brazilian bodies, examining the way biomedical techniques are taken up across the divergent structural constraints afforded by private and public health in Brazil.Biomedicalization -or "technoscientific interventions in biomedical diagnostics, treatments, practices, and health to exert more and faster transformations of bodies, selves, and lives" 1 -forms an assemblage that is both global and highly local.Our aim is to interrogate this phenomenon from Brazil.The authors, writing from Brazil, Europe, and North America, share a long-standing commitment to analyzing the specific local biologies 2 -and local politics -of Brazilian approaches to health and the body.They probe the incursion of biomedical technologies within richly depicted social worlds, revealing quotidian violence (particularly where women's bodies are concerned), exceptional forms of care within conditions of precarity, and the intersections of kinship, class, work, and the symbolic capital afforded by biomedical consumption in Brazil.They share a commitment to critically engaging with biomedical conceptions of disease and illness, destabilizing the body as a stable referent (implicitly grounded in a biomedical ontology), analyzing health as a deeply relational, situated, and political process.3 The articles draw on critical theory and science and technology studies, 4 departing from a practice of medical anthropology subservient to biomedical concerns.They reveal the vitality of Brazilian anthropology of medicine and anthropological studies of medicine in Brazil.We believe that the main obstacle to the wider circulation of Brazilian studies in medical 1 CLARKE, Adele et al.
Authors: Ilana Löwy, Emilia Sanabria
Language: Portuguese
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2304449713