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This volume showcases the work of leading anthropologists, sociologists, bioethicists, and fertility specialists, providing insight into the moral and ethical negotiations people undertake in their quests for children, the provision of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in low-income settings, and challenges for appropriate professional practice of serving culturally and linguistically diverse patients. The third phase of […]

In Mental Disorder: Anthropological Insights, Nichola Khan offers readers an ambitious overview of the anthropology of psychiatry and mental health. The book aims to “bridge the gap between research and teaching,” and thus is explicitly intended for pedagogical use. As someone who teaches in this area, I know that to attempt to introduce students to […]

Aiwah Ong’s Fungible Life replies to a difficult question for social and cultural anthropology: what is an “Asian” form of science? Ong follows the answers given to this question by biologists who work in Singapore at a place called “Biopolis,” a hub for scientific research that presents itself as “the Asian City of Life.” After […]

The number of undocumented migrants dying and disappearing while crossing into the United States has increased dramatically over the past 20 years. Contributing to this rise are U.S. government initiatives that have pushed undocumented border crossers into hostile and desolate desert terrain by intensifying enforcement at more urban crossings. Migrant Deaths in the Arizona Desert […]

Hervé Guibert was one of France’s most prolific and important writers. An author of 30 books, novels, and screenplays, he was also an actor and a filmmaker and still found time to work as a photographer and critic for Le Monde. Guibert’s literary and artistic output is all the more remarkable because he died shortly […]

Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s highly anticipated book Pharmocracy: Value, Politics, and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine is a rich, multilayered look at the pharmaceutical industry in India. In five densely argued chapters plus an Introduction and Conclusion, Sunder Rajan provides an insightful analysis of the regimes of value of the Indian pharmaceutical industry as it has become […]

Slum Health: From the Cell to the Street, edited by Jason Corburn and Lee Riley, is a passionate appeal for providing better health care to residents of the world’s poorest urban communities. Using a bold mix of quantitative public health methodologies, as well as social theory, the editors and contributors describe why the health of […]

Mothers on the Move brings together two fields of research that usually are discussed without much connection to each other: migration and reproduction. By following Cameroonian mothers in their efforts to forge families as they move back and forth between Cameroon and Germany as students, spouses, and workers, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg brings into focus migration and […]

There is something quite poetic about Harris Solomon’s Metabolic Living, even while the topic of metabolic illnesses would appear fairly unromantic to most. From small kitchens in fishing villages to corporate offices in food manufacturing plants, Solomon takes the reader on a vivid, engaging, critically driven ethnographic journey that humanizes metabolic illnesses in Mumbai, India. […]