- Institute of Social Anthropology
Lerchenweg 36
PO Box 999
3000 Bern 9
Janina Kehr
Bern University, Institute of Social Anthropology, Faculty Member
- Medical Anthropology, Anthropology of the State, Public Health, Euro-Zone Crisis, Anti austerity Protests, Health Activism, and 28 moreMichel Foucault, Global Health, Biopower and Biopolitics, Tuberculosis and Infectious Disease, Social Medicine, Welfare State, History of Medicine, Tuberculosis, Spain, Migration (Anthropology), Tuberculosis (Anthropology), Spanish Indignados (Occupy), Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), European Spring, Indignados, 15 M, 20th century France, Twentieth Century Germany, Migration And Health, History, Anthropology, Sociology, Critical Theory, Social Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Computer Networks, Databases, and Softwareedit
In the past 20 years, the hospital has become a privileged field site for medical anthropologists. But what is a hospital? Is it only an architectural formation that allows for the practice of contemporary biomedicine? A space permeable... more
In the past 20 years, the hospital has become a privileged field site for medical anthropologists. But what is a hospital? Is it only an architectural formation that allows for the practice of contemporary biomedicine? A space permeable and clearly delimited, structured and open, unpredictable and opaque, medical and non-medical, the modern hospital constantly undergoes rapid technological and economic change. It harbours the traces of past medicines and produces memories and emotions for those who have resided, worked there or supported close ones undergoing treatment and care. This special issue approaches the research object « hospital » by linking specific hospital places to the professional practices exercised in its realms, be they medical, nursing, bureaucratic or managerial. Taken together, the contributions incite to study hospitals not only as ethnographic field sites, but also as singular anthropological locations, in order to understand how each hospital exists in its particularity – for patients, professionals and families – and how it arranges medicine and care. In the degree that we detach our ethnographic view from the problems specific to hospital medicine, it becomes possible to apprehend the productions and proprieties of hospitals as such.
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La récente épidémie de maladie à virus Ebola en Afrique de l'Ouest a constitué un moment paroxystique dans la visibilité mondiale de l'effondrement des hôpitaux en Afrique. Abandonnés par les soignants au plus fort de la crise, certains... more
La récente épidémie de maladie à virus Ebola en Afrique de l'Ouest a constitué un moment paroxystique dans la visibilité mondiale de l'effondrement des hôpitaux en Afrique. Abandonnés par les soignants au plus fort de la crise, certains hôpitaux comme le Redemption Hospital de Monrovia ont fermé. Des corps sans vie ont été oubliés devant des portes closes pendant que la prise en charge s'opérait dans les centres de traitement de Médecins Sans Frontières. À Paris, à la suite des attaques terroristes du 13 novembre 2015, les hôpitaux publics ont été célébrés pour leur réponse extraordinaire déployant dans la nuit une véritable "médecine de guerre", une "mobilisation exemplaire" grâce au courage des soignants et l'efficacité du plan blanc. Le caractère exceptionnel de ces événements suscite la sidération et la peur, mais aussi la célébration d'une image victorieuse de la biomédecine hospitalière occidentale — capable de technicité, d'efficacité et de solidarité tandis que cette même médecine hospitalière montre son impuissance et sa dangerosité en Afrique de l'Ouest. Au-delà de ces exemples extrêmes, le fonctionnement quotidien des hôpitaux face à des crises et changements majeurs – économiques aussi bien que sanitaires – fait l'objet de fortes critiques, en Afrique comme en Europe. En Afrique subsaharienne, les hôpitaux publics subissent de longue date un ensemble de contraintes matérielles, financières et morales considérables, résultant en des soins coûteux et de piètre qualité. En Europe, les politiques d'austérité récentes s'ajoutent au « New Public Management » et transforment la pratique médicale dans les espaces cliniques. En somme, comme piliers des systèmes de santé contemporains, les hôpitaux sont contestés pour l'imperfection de leurs capacités de soin et sont soumis à des évaluations permanentes en même temps qu'ils sont héroïsés comme symboles phares du progrès médical et de la prolongation des vies. Ainsi, de Yaoundé à Boston et de Madrid à Delhi, les hôpitaux incarnent des tensions entre excès – de modernité, de médicaments, de technologies diagnostiques, de mesure – et rareté – soulignée par l'austérité, l'audit, et le contrôle. Ces tensions et nouveaux défis appellent à revisiter l'institution hospitalière dans le monde, comme objet anthropologique et comme site emblématique à travers lequel se cristallisent les enjeux liés à l'économie politique et morale de la santé publique contemporaine.
In France, the treatment of migrant patients is haunted, but not overdetermined, by colonial practices of cultural essentialism and othering. Taking tuberculosis care in a public hospital as an example, I show how colonial hauntings... more
In France, the treatment of migrant patients is haunted, but not overdetermined, by colonial practices of cultural essentialism and othering. Taking tuberculosis care in a public hospital as an example, I show how colonial hauntings surface in racialized patient–physician encounters and diagnostic practices. Colonial hauntings exist on two levels of awareness: on the level of the articulated, where physicians critique contemporary and historical politics toward immigrants, and on the level of the unarticulated, where, physicians − as they search to practice a caring medicine − unconsciously reproduce colonial forms of knowing and treating migrant patients as racialized others.
Geographical divisions between North and South are coming increasingly undone in the field of global health. Settings in the global North, such as Berlin, are becoming linked up to those in the global South in manifold ways. In this... more
Geographical divisions between North and South are coming increasingly undone in the field of global health. Settings in the global North, such as Berlin, are becoming linked up to those in the global South in manifold ways. In this article, I show through discourse analysis and ethnographic research how tuberculosis and its meanings have been transfigured in Western Europe through the worldwide circulation of the disease and its definition as a global health epidemic returning to the North from the South through global migration routes. I then draw attention to the ways in which public health professionals in Berlin make sense of locally implemented economic processes of debt and austerity that have been in effect since the early 2000s. Such processes of indebtedness and privatisation render the strong public health infrastructures that characterise the global North increasingly fragile, and are comparable to the structural adjustment policies that have been imposed upon countries in the global South. I argue that economic processes of austerity in Berlin complement the meaning of TB as an immigrants’ disease, while older meanings of TB as a disease of poverty resurface.
This chapter engages ethnographically with the ways TB control is practiced and problematized in France. TB control is part of a larger state apparatus, where republican dilemmas and paradoxes, characteristic of French politics, as well... more
This chapter engages ethnographically with the ways TB control is practiced and problematized in France. TB control is part of a larger state apparatus, where republican dilemmas and paradoxes, characteristic of French politics, as well as pragmatic arrangements, characteristic of public health, occur: differing treatments despite an ideal of equality; and the conditioning of preventive actions by an inegalitarian social and political system with conflicting priorities of inclusion and exclusion. With this chapter, I contribute to understanding the social, political and medical stakes and dilemmas of tuberculosis control in a low-burden country, in which tuberculosis exists primarily as an immigrant’s disease.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Through an ethnographic exploration of tuberculosis control in one of France’s poorest regions, Seine-Saint-Denis, I interrogate the relationships between public health planning and interventions in conditions of multiple precarity. I... more
Through an ethnographic exploration of tuberculosis control in one of France’s poorest regions, Seine-Saint-Denis, I interrogate the relationships between public health planning and interventions in conditions of multiple precarity. I show that the encounter between the feasible and the fantastic in the realm of public health generates feelings of absurdity and futility among medical professionals, characteristic of disease control in the precarious present. Precarity is neither a social and economic condition per se, nor is the link between disease and precarity static. It is a dynamic process of political inclusions, exclusions and inequalities, which differ substantially within the unequal spheres of precarious lives. The contradictions in tuberculosis control that I describe are thus not only characteristic of French public health, but of global public health today, where illusions in disease control encounter the exclusionary realities of social life.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Tuberculosis and HIV co-infection came to figure as one of the major global health problems at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with multiple attempts to tackle this intricate issue on epidemiological, clinical, and public... more
Tuberculosis and HIV co-infection came to figure as one of the major global health problems at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with multiple attempts to tackle this intricate issue on epidemiological, clinical, and public health levels. In this article, we propose thinking beyond the practical problems caused by co-infections in order to explore medicine’s epistemological attachment to the idea of single diseases, using TB/HIV as an analytical lever. We retrace how TB/HIV co-infection has been problematised in public health discourses since the 1990s, particularly in WHO reports and international public health journals, and show that it has been mainly discussed as a complex biosocial phenomenon in need of more resources. The epistemological interrogation of the concept of co-infection itself – as an entangled object of two or more diseases with different histories and social, political, and scientific identities – is largely missing. To elaborate on this gap, we look at the translational processes between the two diseases and their communities, and suggest concrete historical and ethnographic entry points for future research on this global health phenomenon.
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A few months ago, the independent Spanish online newspaper El Diario published a cartoon entitled “Ebola in Madrid”. It showed a health worker, camouflaged in a green protection suit, wearing a white head shield and goggles, leaning over... more
A few months ago, the independent Spanish online newspaper El Diario published a cartoon entitled “Ebola in Madrid”. It showed a health worker, camouflaged in a green protection suit, wearing a white head shield and goggles, leaning over a patient almost completely hidden under the sheets of the hospital bed. The huge hospital room is deserted and empty, …
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease that declined significantly throughout the 20th century. Large-scale TB screening of entire populations in France and Germany has thus been replaced by active screening of risk-groups,... more
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease that declined significantly throughout the 20th century. Large-scale TB screening of entire populations in France and Germany has thus been replaced by active screening of risk-groups, particularly migrants. The article engages with its problems and practices on three levels: by looking at the way information on migrants as an at-risk group is produced through disease surveillance data; by analysing how such at-risk group data influence local screening practices; and by showing which political and medical problems arise in the field. I overturn the discussion about screening and surveillance of migrants as a risk-group by showing that it is not the stigmatisation of migrants through disease risk that is most at stake, but the invisibility of the most vulnerable among them in disease surveillance data and the way restrictive national immigration policies interfere with and subvert local screening and treatment practices targeting them. The aim of my article is to promote a pragmatic sociology of screening, while paying attention to the practical complexities, political conditions and medical ambivalences of screening and follow-up care, especially when the migrant groups concerned are socially, politically and medically vulnerable.
Research Interests:
Tuberculosis, an old infectious disease, is still of particular importance for research in medicine and society today. This is on the one hand due to its epidemiological significance in the past and its implication in the history of... more
Tuberculosis, an old infectious disease, is still of particular importance for research in medicine and society today. This is on the one hand due to its epidemiological significance in the past and its implication in the history of biomedicine; and on the other hand due to its continuing, yet sometimes misrecognized social relevance in the present. The aim of the article is firstly to reveal French conceptions of a healthy society and its public politics through a look at the tensions in everyday tuberculosis control, by taking tuberculosis as a “boundary object” and a window of analysis for social relations. Secondly, the article proposes an ethnographic approach to medicine and public health by doing an ethnography of tuberculosis treatment politics, which co-analyzes medical epistemology and public health practice. The article argues that tuberculosis is able to function as a social marker of the contemporary, as multiple and unequal social relations in medicine and public health become visible when regarding tuberculosis control politics and treatment practices.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
... Stuttgarter Fortbildungsseminar des Instituts für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung vom 8.-10. Mai 2003 in Stuttgart. Janina Kehr. ... Get PDF (53K). More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find... more
... Stuttgarter Fortbildungsseminar des Instituts für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung vom 8.-10. Mai 2003 in Stuttgart. Janina Kehr. ... Get PDF (53K). More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: Janina Kehr. ...
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Knowledge is not fixed, but instable, uncertain and evolving. In his recent book Plastic Reason (2016), Tobias Rees anthropologically investigates brain research in twenty-first-century Paris and the ‘plasticity’ of knowledge. Based on... more
Knowledge is not fixed, but instable, uncertain and evolving. In his recent book Plastic Reason (2016), Tobias Rees anthropologically investigates brain research in twenty-first-century Paris and the ‘plasticity’ of knowledge. Based on several years of fieldwork with neuronal researchers, he argues that knowledge – like the experimental systems of the natural sciences – is ‘contingent on unarticulated conceptual presuppositions’ that differ from place to place. Scientific thinking and knowledge production is, therefore, a very regional and relational, but also instable and inherently uncertain affair. For Rees, this inherent uncertainty and relationality – which he sees as a form of radical openness – is a central aspect of what (laboratory) researchers do when they produce knowledge. He thereby shows that uncertainty is necessary for new knowledge and thinking to emerge, as it ‘derail(s) yet another setup, [opens] yet another, unforeseen horizon’.
Whereas Rees takes brain science as an empirical example, his insights have a much wider relevance for understanding how knowledge emerges, evolves and dissolves again, so the working hypothesis behind this workshop. On the occasion of Tobias Rees’ sojourn as a ZGW academic guest, this event is designed to capitalize on his expertise and joins junior and senior researchers in the fields of history, anthropology, and philosophy to think jointly about the relevance of his conclusions for knowledge production in medical science. Presenters address how the uncertainty, instability and ambivalences of knowledge that Rees identifies in Plastic Reason play out in their own fields of research, by sharing insights from fields ranging from brain science, stem cell research, mental illness, IVF, and surrogacy
Whereas Rees takes brain science as an empirical example, his insights have a much wider relevance for understanding how knowledge emerges, evolves and dissolves again, so the working hypothesis behind this workshop. On the occasion of Tobias Rees’ sojourn as a ZGW academic guest, this event is designed to capitalize on his expertise and joins junior and senior researchers in the fields of history, anthropology, and philosophy to think jointly about the relevance of his conclusions for knowledge production in medical science. Presenters address how the uncertainty, instability and ambivalences of knowledge that Rees identifies in Plastic Reason play out in their own fields of research, by sharing insights from fields ranging from brain science, stem cell research, mental illness, IVF, and surrogacy
Research Interests:
Interdisciplinary Workshop
Graduate Campus Grant - Centre for the History of Knowledge
University of Zurich
November 11, 2015
Graduate Campus Grant - Centre for the History of Knowledge
University of Zurich
November 11, 2015
Research Interests:
Workshop
Centre for the History of Knowledge
ETH & University of Zurich
May 18-19 2016
Centre for the History of Knowledge
ETH & University of Zurich
May 18-19 2016
The last two decades have witnessed the emergence of a series of new technologies of communication. This “revolution,” as many observers termed it, has become possible due to the invention of the personal computer and the construction of... more
The last two decades have witnessed the emergence of a series of new technologies of communication. This “revolution,” as many observers termed it, has become possible due to the invention of the personal computer and the construction of the internet, a large and largely invisible socio-technical infrastructure. The digital revolution has also transformed the world of medicine and public health in significant ways. The conference has as its aim to begin an exploration of how the digital revolution is changing the daily practice of these fields. The workshop will focus on three main themes: Medicine, Media, and Surveillance / Public Health, Data, and Failure and Challenges for the Social Sciences in confronting the digital revolution. To understand how medicine and public health are practiced in a digital world, we will invite a group of medical anthropologists, medical sociologists, and historians of medicine to discussm the implications of the encounter of new technologies, data management, and the production of knowledge in the realm of clinical medicine and public health.
Research Interests:
Leben ohne Medizin, ist das vorstellbar? Heutzutage kaum mehr. Für viele Menschen ist die Beschäftigung mit dem eigenen Körper, sowie die Sorge um die Gesundheit und Krankheiten von sich und anderen ein im Alltag omnipräsentes Thema. Seit... more
Leben ohne Medizin, ist das vorstellbar? Heutzutage kaum mehr. Für viele Menschen ist die Beschäftigung mit dem eigenen Körper, sowie die Sorge um die Gesundheit und Krankheiten von sich und anderen ein im Alltag omnipräsentes Thema. Seit dem Ende der 1970er Jahre hat sich daher die Medizinanthropologie, die Vorstellungen, Praktiken und Politiken von Körperlichkeit, Gesundheit, Medizin, und Heilung untersucht, zu einem wichtigen Teilbereich der Sozial-und Kulturanthropologie entwickelt. Ging es in den Anfängen der Teildisziplin in den 30er Jahren um Magie und Heilungspraktiken in "nicht-westlichen" Gesellschaften, beschäftigt sich das Fachgebiet heute mit so unterschiedlichen Themen wie Reproduktionsmedizin, Pharmazeutika, medikalisiertem Sterben, gegenderten Körpertechniken, Infektionskrankheiten, High-Tech Medizin, alternativen Formen der Heilung und Behandlung, Krankenhauslandschaften und Gesundheitspraktiken im globalen Süden und Norden. Die LV wird, am Beispiel klassischer medizinethnologischer Studien, einen Einstieg in die Problemstellungen des Feldes vermitteln, und deren Transformation anhand aktueller thematischer und theoretischer Entwicklungen erkunden. Die LV bietet einen einführenden Überblick über das breite Themen-und Theoriespektrum der Medizinanthropologie, und nimmt zudem gegenwärtige Formen des medikalisierten Lebens und Sterbens in unterschiedlichen geographischen und ethnographischen Kontexten in den Blick.
„Austerity kills!“ Diesen Slogan hört man heutzutage regelmässig in Anti-Austeritätsprotesten, die gegen Kürzungen in der öffentlichen Gesundheit eintreten. Was aber ist „krankmachende“, was „gesundmachende“ Politik? Auf der Grundlage... more
„Austerity kills!“ Diesen Slogan hört man heutzutage regelmässig in Anti-Austeritätsprotesten, die gegen Kürzungen in der öffentlichen Gesundheit eintreten. Was aber ist „krankmachende“, was „gesundmachende“ Politik?
Auf der Grundlage von Quellenmaterial sowie anhand aktueller Forschungsliteratur aus der Geschichtswissenschaft und der Ethnologie soll im Kolloquium erarbeitet werden, wie das ökonomisierte Verhältnis zwischen Politik und öffentlicher Gesundheit seit 1945 beschrieben und gedeutet wird. In welchen zeitlichen und gesellschaftlichen Kontexten, von wem und warum wurden und werden Staaten und ihre Politik als „krank“ oder „gesund“ beurteilt? Welche politischen Vorstellungen von staatlicher Fürsorge, Bürgerrechten und -pflichten stehen hinter solchen Narrativen? Und was verraten sie über Regierungsmechanismen und affektive Beziehungen zwischen BürgerInnen und staatlichen Institutionen im Bereich Medizin und Gesundheit?
Im Kolloquium werden zunächst relevante theoretische Texte zu „Biopolitik“ (Foucault 2004) als moderne Regierungsform diskutiert. Anschließend soll es darum gehen, das im heutigen Europa hochaktuelle Schlagwort „Austerität“ zu historisieren und in andere zeitliche Kontexte zu stellen, u.a. den der Nachkriegsjahre in England und den der sogenannten „strukturellen Anpassungspolitiken“ in Lateinamerika und Afrika seit den 1980er Jahren (Comaroff 2011; Han 2012). Schließlich wird nach den emotional aufgeladenen Staatsbildern und politischen Utopien und Dystopien gefragt, die in Debatten um das Verhältnis von Ökonomie, Gesundheit und Staatlichkeit sichtbar werden (Berlant 2011). Austerität und öffentliche Gesundheit sind dabei der Ausgangspunkt, um allgemeinere Fragen zu biopolitischen Regierungsformen seit Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts zu diskutieren.
Das Kolloquium ist interdisziplinär und verbindet Perspektiven aus dem Bereich der Ethnologie mit denen der Geschichte. Die Lektüre englischsprachiger Texte wird vorausgesetzt.
Auf der Grundlage von Quellenmaterial sowie anhand aktueller Forschungsliteratur aus der Geschichtswissenschaft und der Ethnologie soll im Kolloquium erarbeitet werden, wie das ökonomisierte Verhältnis zwischen Politik und öffentlicher Gesundheit seit 1945 beschrieben und gedeutet wird. In welchen zeitlichen und gesellschaftlichen Kontexten, von wem und warum wurden und werden Staaten und ihre Politik als „krank“ oder „gesund“ beurteilt? Welche politischen Vorstellungen von staatlicher Fürsorge, Bürgerrechten und -pflichten stehen hinter solchen Narrativen? Und was verraten sie über Regierungsmechanismen und affektive Beziehungen zwischen BürgerInnen und staatlichen Institutionen im Bereich Medizin und Gesundheit?
Im Kolloquium werden zunächst relevante theoretische Texte zu „Biopolitik“ (Foucault 2004) als moderne Regierungsform diskutiert. Anschließend soll es darum gehen, das im heutigen Europa hochaktuelle Schlagwort „Austerität“ zu historisieren und in andere zeitliche Kontexte zu stellen, u.a. den der Nachkriegsjahre in England und den der sogenannten „strukturellen Anpassungspolitiken“ in Lateinamerika und Afrika seit den 1980er Jahren (Comaroff 2011; Han 2012). Schließlich wird nach den emotional aufgeladenen Staatsbildern und politischen Utopien und Dystopien gefragt, die in Debatten um das Verhältnis von Ökonomie, Gesundheit und Staatlichkeit sichtbar werden (Berlant 2011). Austerität und öffentliche Gesundheit sind dabei der Ausgangspunkt, um allgemeinere Fragen zu biopolitischen Regierungsformen seit Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts zu diskutieren.
Das Kolloquium ist interdisziplinär und verbindet Perspektiven aus dem Bereich der Ethnologie mit denen der Geschichte. Die Lektüre englischsprachiger Texte wird vorausgesetzt.