Why are there Escalating Incidences of Confrontations in Nepali Hospitals? An Anthropological Critique

This article deals with the emerging phenomenon of confrontations and vandalism in hospitals in Nepal. It interrogates how far paternalism and commodification has become the feature of the Nepali health care sector and their interrelationships with each other. With the esoteric nature of medicine and different explanatory models of understanding illness episodes and healing outcomes, there is always a communication gap between the service providers and the patient party. The unfolding of the confrontation process creates space for and paves way for third party involvement in the conflict and negotiation process. The increasing confrontation also reflects falling trust between the service providers and the health seekers. This paper is based on information generated from a qualitative research carried out in two hospital settings in Kathmandu and Chitawan in different periods in 2019.

Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy: A Philosophical and Anthropological Critique

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality.

From social distancing to social containment

This essay develops an anthropological critique of ‘social distancing’. While the 2020 coronavirus pandemic requires us to reconfigure established forms of sociality, distancing regimes such as ‘lockdowns’ can profoundly disrupt the provision of care and support, creating practical difficulties and existential suffering. I advocate instead for strategies of ‘social containment’, outlining several of the containment arrangements people in England have developed to reconcile relational obligations with public health imperatives during the pandemic. I end by addressing some of the steps anthropologists must take when translating such ideas into policy.

Haunting rhetoric, haunted epistemology: An anthropological critique of systemics in architecture and urban studies

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Efekt ślepej plamki. Antropologia krytyczna wobec neoliberalizmu

In this article, the authors argue that critical anthropology must inevitably recognize its intrinsic aporia, which can be illustrated by the “blind spot” metaphor. They use the metaphor to point to a cognitive bias that can be described as the tendency to claim one’s own epistemological objectivity and axiological neutrality while ignoring the fact of being entangled in the object of anthropological critique. To illustrate the blind-spot effect they refer to the visible neoliberalization of Polish academia in the last decade. Their aim is to show how critical anthropologists (re)produce the entrepreneurial regimes, power relations, and mechanisms of subjugation that they critique. For the sake of their argument they use theories drawn from studies on governmentality, namely affect theory and the idea of the dispositive.

Introduction

As an emerging subfield of medical anthropology with roots in histories and geographies of colonial and international health, critical global health studies reflects both changing modes of health practice and the centering of critique as a core anthropological endeavor. This special section seeks to analyze and reflect on the meanings, valences, affects, and entailments of anthropological critique, taking the rise of global health and flourishing of global health ethnography as key sites of investigation. Each of the contributing pieces is oriented around a global health object or technology.

Mitmensch contra Dasein

This paper presents and discusses Karl Löwith’s anthropological critique of existential analytic that is formulated in his Habilitation thesis (Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen, 1928), where he develops an anthropological counter-paradigm, i. e. Mitanthropologie, in opposition to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Given the extent and the complexity of such a subject, I will limit the present inquiry to two specific topics: the Miteinandersein (Being-with-one-another) and above all the Sein zum Tode (Being-towards-death). In practice, I will first explain the basic features of Mitanthropologie together with the crucial critique that it levels at Being and Time. I will follow by outlining the importance of the Todesfrage (the question of death) within the existential analytic by means of a comparison between Heidegger’s Being-towards-death and Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto death (Krankheit zum Tode). Finally, I will expound Löwith’s objection to Being-towards-death, which is expressed in the alternative formula Freiheit zum Tode (Freedom-towards-death).

Fries, Jacob Friedrich (1773–1843)

Fries was a German post-Kantian philosopher, active chiefly in Jena and Heidelberg. He was a personal as well as a philosophical enemy of Hegel. Fries’ version of Kantian philosophy opposed the speculative idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, developing an ‘anthropological critique of reason’. Fries also emphasized subjectivity in ethics and religion. In politics he was a republican and a German nationalist. For his participation in the Wartburg Festival of 1817 (a gathering of radical student fraternities), Fries was removed from his professorship at Jena in 1820, but restored in 1824. He wrote both scholarly and popular treatises on metaphysics, logic, ethics and politics, as well as mathematics and natural science. His continuing influence early in this century was mediated chiefly by the Göttingen Neo-Kantian Leonard Nelson and by Rudolf Otto’s theory of religious experience.

Unmanaging Managed Care: The Challenges of Privatizing Medicaid in Illinois

Patients can face significant challenges when government administered Medicaid plans are transitioned to private Medicaid Managed Care (MMC). This is especially true for the homeless population, since transitioning to MMC shifts the responsibility of health insurance coverage to the individual by requiring them to “choose” their health insurance coverage and understand how the plans operate. In Illinois, enrollees are expected to use the state HealthChoice Illinois website to learn about MMC, evaluate their healthcare options, and select a MMC plan. This study provides an anthropological critique of this process. We collected data from focus groups with Medicaid enrollees, interviews with healthcare navigators, and reviews of MMC educational materials from the state of Illinois. Understanding new healthcare challenges that resulted from the transition to MMC will hopefully lead to the development of an improved educational and enrollment process.

Introduction

The Introduction sets out the epistemology of studying kinship in the Middle Ages. It proposes that investigations of medieval kinship have been frustrated because researchers have assumed that kinship is a human universal which can be retroactively and safely applied to the analysis of different times and places. It sketches David Schneider’s anthropological critique that kinship studies have been based on biogenetic and genealogical assumptions of the modern West that are fundamentally alien to the societies they seek to understand. It puts forth an alternative approach by proposing a method for identifying indigenous conceptions of kinship which can help illuminate the place of kinship within the societal cosmologies of early medieval Europe.