By Parismita Singh Who is the reader and who the reviewer? A question taken seriously by the graphic novel Lissa. The reader (or so it seems to the me) is […]
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Things Anthropologists Can Do With Comics
by Stacy Leigh Pigg Comics, says literary scholar Hillary Chute (2011: 112), are “about bodies – about locating them in space and time.” Comics engage the body regardless of their theme, and this kind of engagement inspires the project that is Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution. In the book’s Foreword, George […]
Review – Lissa: A story about medical promise, friendship, and revolution.
by Lochlann Jain For several years I taught course based largely on graphic novels at Stanford – twice in a medical anthropology graduate seminar and once for undergraduates at the Stanford school in Paris (we took a field-trip to the famous international festival for bande dessinee in Angouleme). As teaching devices, graphic novels provide an […]
Authors’ Response
by Coleman Nye and Sherine Hamdy We are simply thrilled to have Lissa so thoughtfully reviewed by this amazing group of scholar-artists. We want to first thank each of the reviewers for so generously reflecting on this project and for considering it on its own terms. Their responses are more than we could have hoped […]
Book Review: Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community
Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community weaves the threads of formalized research methods, participant observation and personal relationships into a beautifully written argument for local psychological models of health and well-being. The book focuses on cultural psychology in Mae Jaeng, a town of approximately 50 households, north of Chiang Mai in […]
Book Review: Chasing the Cure in New Mexico: Tuberculosis and the Quest for Health
On March 24, 1882, the German bacteriologist Robert Koch announced to the Berlin Physiological Society that he had isolated the cause of tuberculosis: a rod-shaped bacterium visible only under a microscope. With Koch’s discovery of a bacterial etiology for tuberculosis, hopes ran high among both physicians and sufferers that a cure would soon follow. But […]
Book Review: A Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering
Human suffering has long been a focus of anthropological attention. However, suffering can be difficult to grasp conceptually. In A Passion for Society, Ian Wilkinson and Arthur Kleinman provide readers with a historical and cultural overview of human and social suffering. In doing this, they call for critical reflection on the practice of social science, […]
Book Review: Transplanting Care: Shifting Commitments in Health and Care in the U.S.
This book is, itself, suffused with care. Care—as logic, as politics, as mode of practice, and as a medium of relations both situated and situating—has captivated the scholarly imagination in recent years. In this ethnography of organ transplantation and its caregiving in the United States, Laura Heinneman illuminates the crucial yet often-invisible informal care work […]
Book Review: Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine and Contemporary Life
Research in health communication often situates news media as a translation tool, which, if applied to good effect, can shape how citizens access and understand health information. This common view describes how journalists, exercising privileged access to medical scientists, physicians, and other health officials, both render and diffuse biomedical knowledge into news that any individual […]
Book Review: Culture and PTSD: Trauma in Global and Historical Perspective
It’s remarkable how far we have come from a view of psychiatry and mental illness shaped by Foucault and from a critical medical anthropology in which anthropologists wrote as angry outsiders, critics of what they perceived to be the dominant medical paradigm. Critical medical anthropology still has an important place at the table; anthropologists are […]
