Judith Farquhar

Margaret M. Lock

A theoretically sophisticated and cross-disciplinary reader in the anthropology of the body.

Reading the Anthropology of Material Life

Beyond the Body Proper

Medical knowledge and technology have been sufficiently advanced for surgeons to perform thousands of transplants each year. This text traces the discourse since 1970 that contributed to the locating of a new criterion of death in the brain.

Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death

Twice Dead

Varieties of Medical Experience (Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care)

East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan

"Bringing together an anthropology of predictive medicine with a social study of science, and discussing recent biological discoveries as well as crucial public health problems, "The Alzheimer Conundrum" offers an insightful approach to the uncertain boundaries between aging and dementia, and brilliantly revisits the philosophical theme of the normal and pathological. Evocatively written, it is a major contribution to the understanding of one of the most perplexing and tragic issues of our time."--Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study ""The Alzheimer Conundrum" is a must-read for all who are interested in how society and researchers frame the investigation of Alzheimer's disease and its effects on the aging global population. Lock has woven the individual threads of the scientific discussion and debate about dementia into a magnificent tapestry, prompting us to question our assumptions and perceptions. A compelling book."--Carol Brayne, University of Cambridge ""The Alzheimer Conundrum" is an eye-opening analysis of the tangles of diagnoses and treatments for Alzheimer's as they are experienced by clinicians, researchers, patients, and their families. Lock's nuanced exploration of the risk and uncertainty surrounding genetic knowledge about the brain brings the anthropology of medicine and science to an entirely new and unsurpassed level."--Emily Martin, author of "Bipolar Expeditions" "A riveting plunge into the genomics and neuroscientific epidemiology of this much-feared disease, Margaret Lock's "The Alzheimer Conundrum" convincingly shows why scientists are unlikely to untangle the causes of Alzheimer's disease anytime soon. This superb contribution to science studies exposes the existential dilemma we all confront: what will our globalized societies do to care for our rapidly aging populations?"--Rayna Rapp, New York University "This book is an excellent treatment of the intricacies of Alzheimer's disease--what it is, what it isn't, what it might be--and deals with its genetic, diagnostic, and predictive uncertainties. In thoroughly exploring the current state of Alzheimer's, the book sheds light on what makes most diseases complex."--Kenneth Weiss, Pennsylvania State University

Entanglements of Dementia and Aging

The Alzheimer Conundrum

Margaret Lock

Arthur Kleinman

Veena Das

Professor Arthur Kleinman

"Social Suffering" takes in the human consequences of war, famine, depression, disease and torture, problems that result from what political, economic and institutional power does to people. Experts have joined together to investigate the cultural representations of.

Social Suffering

Pamela Reynolds

Mamphela Ramphele

Remaking a World completes a triptych of volumes on social suffering, violence, and recovery. Social Suffering, the first volume, deals with sources and major forms of social adversity, with an emphasis on political violence. The second, Violence and Subjectivity, contains graphic accounts of how collective experience of violence can alter individual subjectivity. This third volume explores the ways communities "cope" with—endure, work through, break apart under, transcend—traumatic and other more insidious forms of violence, addressing the effects of violence at the level of local worlds, interpersonal relations, and individual lives. The authors highlight the complex relationship between recognition of suffering in the public sphere and experienced suffering in people's everyday lives. Rich in local detail, the book's comparative ethnographies bring out both the recalcitrance of tragedy and the meaning of healing in attempts to remake the world.

Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery

Remaking a World

Margaret Lock explicitly compares Japanese and North American medical and political accounts of female middle age to challenge Western assumptions about menopause. She uses ethnography, interviews, statistics, historical and popular culture materials, and medical publications to produce a richly detailed account of Japanese women's lives. The result offers irrefutable evidence that the experience and meanings—even the endocrinological changes—associated with female midlife are far from universal. Rather, Lock argues, they are the product of an ongoing dialectic between culture and local biologies. Japanese focus on middle-aged women as family members, and particularly as caretakers of elderly relatives. They attach relatively little importance to the end of menstruation, seeing it as a natural part of the aging process and not a diseaselike state heralding physical decline and emotional instability. Even the symptoms of midlife are different: Japanese women report few hot flashes, for example, but complain frequently of stiff shoulders. Articulate, passionate, and carefully documented, Lock's study systematically undoes the many preconceptions about aging women in two distinct cultural settings. Because it is rooted in the everyday lives of Japanese women, it also provides an excellent entree to Japanese society as a whole. Aging and menopause are subjects that have been closeted behind our myths, fears, and misconceptions. Margaret Lock's cross-cultural perspective gives us a critical new lens through which to examine our assumptions.

Margaret M. Lock

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