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Health Unbound assembles a collection of ethnographic studies on health-environment relations, illustrating how disease, harm and wellbeing emerge in novel ways as health becomes unbound from biomedical approaches. The authors discuss a range of topics including climatic medicine, medical pluralism, pesticides, air pollution, vernacular epidemiologies and medicinal foodways, writing from locations in Africa, Europe, Latin America and Asia. In doing so, they generate original insights into the variegated and troubled landscape of health and medicine today.
This is a timely and important edited collection that sheds light on the changing ways in which health and environments are being considered and addressed by anthropology in the context of rapidly evolving and intersecting crises.
— Sahra Gibbon, University College London
Janina Kehr is Professor of Medical Anthropology and Global Health at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. She directs the research network Health in Society and the research group Health Matters, working on inequalities, colonial hauntings, moral economies and environmental effects of biomedicine and public health.
Ciara Kierans is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University, Denmark. She works at the intersections of health and environment and is Principal Investigator of FILTERSCAPE - Filtering Futures: Contaminant Flows, Landscape Governance and the Making of New Anthropological Knowledge for Planetary Health (ERC AdG 2025-2030).
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Foreword. Binding and Unbinding
Harris Solomon
Introduction. At the Limits of Medicine: Health-Environment Relations in Anthropology
Ciara Kierans and Janina Kehr
Chapter 1. Climatic Medicine Redux
Bharat Jayram Venkat
Chapter 2. Breathing the Burden: The Social and Political-Economic Conditions of Air Pollution Exposure in Langas
Serena Saligari
Chapter 3. At the Limits of One Health: The Trivial Dynamics of Antimicrobial Resistance
Jens Seeberg, Eimear Mc Loughlin and Mette Vaarst
Chapter 4. Covid-19 and Indigenous Health Responses at the Margins of Biomedicine: A Critique of Modernity’s Civilising Project?
Laura Montesi
Chapter 5. Beyond Biomedicine: Reframing Care with Medicinal Foodways and Brain Food
Nancy N. Chen
Chapter 6. Medical Pluralism, Chronic Kidney Disease and the Limits of Biomedicine in Sri Lanka
Upul Wickramasinghe
Chapter 7. The ‘Good Enough’ Evidence of Exposure: Public Health Knowledge of Toxicity in the Making
Nolwenn Bühler
Chapter 8. Chemical Metonymies: Chlordecone and Differential Gradations of Activism for Health, Social and Environmental Justice in Martinique
Giorgio Brocco and Aminata Cécile Mbaye
Chapter 9. Ordinary Toxicity and the Slow Violence of the Chemical War in Cambodia
Eve Bureau-Point
Conclusion
Ciara Kierans and Janina Kehr
Index