Showing papers by "Margaret Lock published in 1998"

Pragmatic Women and Body Politics

Abstract: Introduction Margaret Lock and Patricia Kaufert 1. Remembering Amal: reflections on birth and the British in Northern Sudan Janice Boddy 2. Resistance and embrace: Sudanese rural women and systems of power Ellen Gruenbaum 3. Not only women: science as resistance in open door Egypt Soheir A. Morsy 4. Inscribing the body politic: women and AIDS in Africa Brooke Grundfest Schoepf 5. Barren ground: contesting identities of infertile women in Pemba, Tanzania Karina Kielmann 6. Wives, mothers, and lesbians: rethinking resistance in the US Ellen Lewin 7. The consequences of modernity for childless women in China: medicalization and resistance Lisa Handwerker 8. Perfecting society: reproductive technologies, genetic testing and the planned family in Japan Margaret Lock 9. An ethnography of the medicalization of Puerto Rican women's reproduction Iris Lopez 10. Situating resistance in fields of resistance: Aboriginal women and environmentalism John D. O'Neil, Brenda D. Elias and Annalee Yassi 11. Women, resistance and the breast cancer movement Patricia Kaufert 12. Selective compliance with biomedical authority and the uses of experiential knowledge Emily K. Abel and C. H. Browner 13. The mission within the madness: self-initiated medicalization as expression of agency Mark Nichter References.

Menopause : lessons from anthropology

Abstract: Objectives In North America and Europe, it is usually assumed that biological changes associated with the end of menstruation and the onset of specific diseases commonly associated with the postmenopausal condition are universal. Using an anthropological approach in which menopause is understood as a concept that is historically and culturally produced, an argument is made for additional systematic investigation of what protects the majority of women from distress at menopause, and what factors contribute to a healthy old age. Method Survey research based on questionnaire responses, together with open-ended interviews and textual analyses, were used. Results Differences are demonstrated in postmenopausal experiences and symptom reporting in Japan as compared with Canada and the United States. Reporting of hot flashes and nights sweats is significantly lower in Japan. These findings, together with the well established figures about greater longevity and lower incidence of heart disease, breast cancer, and osteoporosis in Japan, compared with North America, indicate that cultural and biological variables act in concert to produce this variation. Theories about the evolution of menopause and demographic data on aging are also discussed. This data challenges the widely held assumption that populations of postmenopausal women only recently have come into existence because of cultural and technological interventions. Conclusions Postmenopausal women have been present in human populations since homo sapiens first evolved. Culturally mediated life styles affect both the menopausal experience and the health of women as they age. Additional investigations are needed.

Breast cancer: Reading the omens

Abstract: La nouvelle technologie des tests genetiques permet de deviner notre passe, et, sous la forme des genes, de transformer cet heritage en augure du futur. L'A., traitant la question du cancer du sein en relation avec le concept de risque, considere que, meme si les tests genetiques permettent de speculer de facon plus precise qu'auparavant sur la probabilite d'etre touche par le malheur, une dimension relevant specifiquement de la divination subsiste dans ces previsions. En cherchant a eviter l'infortune, on cree de nouvelles ambiguites et incertitudes. D'autre part, la puissance de cette nouvelle technologie, encourage a nous concentrer sur un style de raisonnement pour lequel les Europeens et les Americains ont un fort penchant : un reductionnisme biologique, sous la forme du determinisme genetique. En centrant l'attention sur le facteur genetique, d'autres facteurs (environnemental, social, politique) qui contribuent au developpement du cancer sont occultes, incitant a interpreter cette maladie comme relevant entierement de l'infortune personnelle.

Anomalous Ageing: Managing the Postmenopausal Body:

Abstract: Discourse in EuroAmerica in connection with menopause is selectively naturalized, with specific consequences for practice, deflecting attention away from non-biological aspects of ageing. The medicalized discourse of North America is compared with that of contemporary Japan, where emphasis is focused predominantly on social rather than biological change. Following Latour and Haraway, it is argued that culture and nature are not dichotomous. Further, both biology and culture are contingent. `Local biologies', that is, subjective experience constituted from culturally informed knowledge, expectations and practices, are in part shaped by physical sensations and symptoms, that differ quantitatively in Japan and North America. This difference influences - but does not determine - the production of discourse and medical responses to this stage of the life cycle. Situated cultural practices of creating culture/nature boundaries are sites for moral and political disputes, which in turn influence subjective experi...

Deadly Disputes: Hybrid Selves and the Calculation of Death in Japan and North America

Abstract: ORGAN TRANSPLANTATION IS USUALLY ADVOCATED UNEQUIVOCALLY as a life-saving technology, one that should be supported unreservedly through donation of organs by the public and appropriate financing of the surgery involved in their procurement and transfer from donor to recipient.' In Europe and America ttention has been focused on organ donation as the \"gift of life,\" but, with the notable xception of a few philosophers, bioethicists, and certain physicians, little attention has been given to the way in which the idea of what constitutes death had to be broadened and reconceptualized inorder that major solid organs might be made available for transplantation. In Japan, by contrast, debate about the new technological death, \"brain death\" (as opposed to death due to cardiopulmonary demise), has constituted the major bioethical problem for the past twenty-five years. This debate, actively pursued in media, legal, political, medical, and literary circles, has been so vituperative that there has, until very recently, been a moratorium on transplants hat make use of organs obtained from brain-dead onors. It would seem that here is little room for ideological posturing in connection with the recognition ofdeath; I suspect hat most people raised in contemporary EuroAmerica believe that death is a rather easily definable point of no return about which there can be little argument. Japan, like most countries in Europe, Australasia, nd North America, is a predominantly secular society and similarly driven by principles of rational order and scientific progress, principles that are evident in many aspects of the health-care systems of these countries. How then can this remarkably different reaction to the development ofa \"life-saving\" technology best be accounted for? No one needs to be reminded that there is no lack of technology or expertise in the Japanese medical world; in fact, more use is made of biomedical technology in Japan than in any other country. Nor is there a shortage of economic resources. So culture must be at work, we assume, causing a reluctance to accept a reworking of what the Japanese understand torepresent death. However, one might equally well ask what cultural forces were at work to permit he apparently easy EuroAmerican