Beyond Surgery
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A01=Anita Hannig
access
africa
Author_Anita Hannig
belonging
biomedical intervention
care
Category=JHMC
childbirth
clinics
containment
cultural bias
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ethiopia
ethnography
fistula
folklore
gender
global south
grief
healing
health
healthcare
hospital
humanitarian aid
injury
loss
medical anthropology
medicine
missions
nonfiction
obgyn
obstetrics
patients
poverty
pregnancy
recovery
religion
rural
sociology
surgery
sutures
third world
training
transgression
underdeveloped countries
women
Product details
- ISBN 9780226457291
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 24 Apr 2017
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Over the past few decades, maternal childbirth injuries have become a potent symbol of Western biomedical intervention in Africa, affecting over one million women across the global south. Western-funded hospitals have sprung up, offering surgical sutures that ostensibly allow women who suffer from obstetric fistula to return to their communities in full health. Journalists, NGO staff, celebrities, and some physicians have crafted a stock narrative around this injury, depicting afflicted women as victims of a backwards culture who have their fortunes dramatically reversed by Western aid. With Beyond Surgery, medical anthropologist Anita Hannig unsettles this picture for the first time and reveals the complicated truth behind the idea of biomedical intervention as quick-fix salvation. Through her in-depth ethnography of two repair and rehabilitation centers operating in Ethiopia, Hannig takes the reader deep into a world inside hospital walls, where women recount stories of loss and belonging, shame and delight.As she chronicles the lived experiences of fistula patients in clinical treatment, Hannig explores the danger of labeling "culture" the culprit, showing how this common argument ignores the larger problem of insufficient medical care in rural Africa.
Beyond Surgery portrays the complex social outcomes of surgery in an effort to deepen our understanding of medical missions in Africa, expose cultural biases, and clear the path toward more effective ways of delivering care to those who need it most.
Anita Hannig is assistant professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, in Massachusetts.
