In recent years, first feminist considerations, and now concerns with HIV/Aids have led to new approaches to the study of sexuality. The experience of puberty, explorations with sexuality and courtship, and the pressure to reproduce are a few of the human tensions central to this volume.

Technologies of Sexuality, Identity and Sexual Health highlights the complex ways in which sexuality is expressed and enacted through local ideologies, global identities and material cultures, and their influence on people’s sexual health and well-being. Its impetus is the renewed interest in technology and the ‘social life of things,’ including pharmaceuticals, expanded sexual and related surgery, the growing exploitation of markets for sexual and contraceptive products, and the ...

Disclosure is a frequently used but rarely interrogated concept in health and social welfare. Abuse, disability, sexuality and health status can be ‘disclosed’ to peers and professionals, and on some occasions, disclosure is a requirement and not a choice. This innovative collection examines the new social and political implications of disclosure practices in health and illness.We make our identities and our connections with others by sharing life stories, experiences and innermost...

This collection examines enduring and topical questions in sexual and reproductive health in a range of contemporary Asian cultures. Beliefs and practices surrounding conception, pregnancy, birth, and confinement are studies in culturally specific contexts in Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Important and widely applicable health issues are also addressed, including the perception and management of HIV/AIDS, experiences of menopause and the interacti...

The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology provides a contemporary overview of the key themes in medical anthropology. In this exciting departure from conventional handbooks, compendia and encyclopedias, the three editors have written the core chapters of the volume, and in so doing, invite the reader to reflect on the ethnographic richness and theoretical contributions of research on the clinic and the field, bioscience and medical research, infectious and non-commun...

Cancer Entangled explores the shifts that took place in Denmark around the millennium, when health promoters set out to minimize delays in cancer diagnoses in hope of improving cancer survival. The authors suggest a temporal reframing of cancer control that emphasizes the importance of focusing on how people – potential patients as well as health care professionals – experience and anticipate cancer before a diagnosis or a prediction has been made. This argument compellin...

This collection, the first of its kind in Australia, illustrates the richness of data and analysis born of the anthropological study of contemporary white Australian society.The studies presented here deal with diverse settings and events, ranging from a community's responses to a bushfire in rural NSW to the messages encoded in a male strip show in Adelaide. Work and leisure, family life and institutional relationships, natural disaster and culturally manipulated violence, the par...

This volume brings together two parallel fields of interest. One is the understanding among psychologists and other social scientists of the limits to psychometric measurement, and the challenges in generating information about quality of life and wellbeing that enable comparison across time and place, at both individual and population levels. The second is the interest among anthropologists and others in the lived experience of chronic illness and disability, including the unpredictable f...

Unique local transformations of the practice of established religions in Asia and the Pacific are juxtaposed with the emergence of new religious movements whose incidence is growing across the region. In Flows of Faith, the contributing authors take as their starting point questions of how religions manifest outside their cultural boundaries and provide the basis for new social identities, political movements and social transformations.With fresh insights into the globaliz...

This essential collection on maternal and child health focuses on the rites of giving birth from a cross-cultural perspective. The distinguished list of contributors describe the many customs surrounding birth through infancy, highlighting a wide range of variation in practices across cultures. They discuss attitudes and techniques in childbirth, the interaction between human evolutionary form and birthing procedures, the influence of societal factors that differentiate Western from non-We...

Reproductive Boundaries examines the shifting boundaries of prenatal care in Switzerland, focusing on the Pregnancy Support Center's innovative psychosocial model. By redefining the territory of care, the Center extends its reach beyond the medical domain, exemplifying the reproductivization of life, the increasing organization of various life aspects through a reproductive lens. The book explores how this approach challenges traditional borders between medical and psychosocial ca...

An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting new introduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusing on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies bring about radical changes to societies at large, cultural anthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician and medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the thesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusive product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned...