I. Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt & Mandy Cano Villalobos: Dolls, Detritus, and Devotion
InVisible Culture
Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
InVisible Culture
InVisible Culture
InVisible Culture
InVisible Culture
Racehorses are the result of a thousand-year-old human domestication through breeding. These practices of selective reproduction are based on the creation and manipulation of non-human kinship, which is inscribed in the genetic history of thoroughbred …
At the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the act of loading shopping carts more than usual materialized as a sensible choice for most shoppers. Yet, stockpiling was constructed in parallel to the social pathologizing of so-called panic buying. P…
Drawing from the lived experiences of female domestic workers in Ethiopia and Tanzania, this article illustrates different ways in which domestic work can be practiced and defined in both countries. It analyses women’s narratives in the present and pas…
Although the Khmer Rouge regime was responsible for the deaths of roughly 2.2 million Cambodians—and the persecution and abuse of millions more—only a handful of survivors have been able to testify at the tribunal established to prosecute former leader…
This Photo Essay explores my experience with cancer and healing using Indigenous traditional medicines. I use Photo First Voice, a form of auto-ethnography, to story my ‘living’ experience with cancer, which includes getting in touch with and honouring…
Subject to constant and pervasive suspicion, asylum seekers in the global north often must expend great energy to assert their moral agency and be perceived as ‘good’ refugees who are not only worthy of being granted asylum but also capable of becoming…
In scenes of deep poverty and precarity, intimate relationships are shaped by the moral aftermath of a life of surviving scarcity. These moral histories are riddled with interpersonal harm, experiences of harming others and being seriously harmed onese…
Anthropologists studying mental healthcare tend to do so through observational and analytic attention to how individuals experience specific clinical and cultural contexts. While narrating lived experience may serve to humanise conditions like mental i…
This research article investigates moral agency in the spaces between the methadone clinic and the inpatient psychiatric ward by exploring the ways dually-diagnosed service users move though ever-more labyrinthine networks of care. I ask: how are patie…
Child welfare is a challenging space for professionals, parents, and most of all children. The labour of care within this space is an intersection of personal histories and ongoing narratives that synthesise self, family, medicine, and the state. I exp…
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) constitutes an irritating and embarrassing problem for an estimated 11–16% of the Danish population. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how young and middle-aged people diagnosed with IBS att…
Youth mental health interventions in the UK increasingly use goal-setting procedures to shape services and measure outcomes in ways that are intended to be meaningful to service users. This research article questions this premise, departing with the et…
Encouraging women to adopt a position of their choice during birth has long been among the calls of scholars and activists challenging medicalised models of childbirth rooted in patriarchy to allow women to own their birthing experiences rather than ac…
This Special Section explores questions of method and positionality attached to moral agency in mental healthcare, which give rise to novel methodological and theoretical approaches to everyday life in the clinical and non-clinical spaces where such ‘c…
Editorial to the April issue of 2023.
This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental wo…
In this Field Note, I share my experiences of an immersive period of ethnography undertaken with river swimmers in and along the River Beane and River Lea in the county town of Hertford, South-East England, from July 2020 until January 2021. As well as…
This Review essay discusses three recent historical works about Mao-era public health, dealing with mass vaccination, anti-parisitic disease campaigns, and cholera epidemic response. The review identifies two key themes that cross-cut these works: the …
This research article seeks to understand how the cultural context of tuberculosis (TB) care in Ukraine influences healthcare workers’ perception of their patients and the choices they make in offering TB treatment. Specifically, we aim to explore heal…
This Research Article deploys the frameworks of moral injury and moral agency to explore the experiences of veteran men who completed group therapy for military sexual trauma (MST). The article analyses ethnographically how veteran men with MST experie…
Despite national and international laws and conventions legislating against girl-child marriage, the practice continues in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper adopts a qualitative method (in-depth interviews) to investigate causes and challenges associated …