Down but not out...

I've been under the weather recently, but I haven't dropped out completely. Meanwhile, I've found some other neat contextualizing articles. (Apparently, I'm way more into the reading/researching part of this than I am the writing...)

First, take a look at Why Nation-States and Journalists Can't Teach People to Be Healthy: Power and Pragmatic Miscalculation in Public Discourses on Health by Charles L. Briggs (Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego). This was published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly September 2003, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 287-321, and if you can log on to AnthroSource, you can read it in pdf form. As usual, for the non-"elites" out there, I'm pasting the abstract below.

This article analyzes how Venezuelan public health officials collaborated with journalists in producing information about cholera in January December 1991. It uses Michael Warner's (2002) observation that such public discourse involves a contradiction: it must project the image of reaching an actually existing public at the same time that it creates multiple publics as it circulates. The analysis explores the language ideologies that hide complex sets of practices, networks, and material conditions that shape how public discourses circulate. At the same time that epidemiologists targeted poor barrio residents, street vendors of food and drink, and indigenous people as being "at high risk," health education messages pictured women in well-equipped kitchens demonstrating cholera prevention measures. The gap between these ideal audiences and the discrepant publics created by their circulation limited the effectiveness of prevention efforts and created a substantial chasm between public health institutions and publics they sought to reach, [public discourse, epidemics, health education, social inequality, Latin America]

Another titillating tidbit (available on AnthroSource) is Claiming Respectable American Motherhood: Homebirth Mothers, Medical Officials, and the State by Christa Craven in Medical Anthropology Quarterly June 2005, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 194-215. Again, the abstract:

Based on ethnographic research regarding public policy and grassroots organizing for midwifery in Virginia, this article explores how medical discourses around appropriate health care practices intersect with state discourses about what practices are considered "respectable" versus "pathological" for its citizens. In recent legislative debates about the legalization of direct-entry midwifery, medical officials have extended their criticism of midwifery and homebirth to mothers who resist state-sanctioned childbirth practices. This article examines how medical officials challenge the respectable mothering practices of homebirthers by linking them with women they deem pathological child abusers, negligent mothers, and drug users and placing them outside the cadre of "normal" American mothers who acknowledge the "logical" and "natural" superiority of biomedical childbirth practices. I also address homebirth mothers' responses, which assert that their political advocacy for midwives is a respectable mothering practice because they are responsible citizens who desire what they deem the best care for their children.

So good...