Margaret M. Lock - Böcker

"An excellent description and analysis of East Asian medicine ...Based on fieldwork conducted in Japan during 1973 and 1974, which involved the use of a variecy of participant-observer techniques, as well as extensive reading in primary and secondary sources in Japanese and English, Lock's study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of an important dimension of life in Japan...In well-written chapters dealing with the philosophical foundations and historical development of East Asian medicine, Japanese attitudes regarding health, illness, and the human body, detailed description of kanpo clinics, herbal pharmacies, acupuncture and moxibustion clinics, shiatsu and anma clinics, East Asian medical schools as well as the interactions between various providers and patients (customers), Lock develops the cultural thesis ...In the process, she provides information on things most visitors to Japan have seen, heard, felt, and smelled but rarely understood." (Journal of Asian Studies). "Breaks important new ground . Lock discusses concrete medical practice and its cultural significance in general...rich in comparisons, engrossing to read, and analytically penetrating ...an important and absorbing book.It is an engaging account of how at least some Japanese people respond to universal problems. Most readers will obtain from it their first clear impression of what East Asian medicine actually is and does." (Journal of Japanese Studies). "Of considerable significance for comparative cross-cultural studies of medicine, of which this is the best account for a Japanese setting that we now possess." (Monumenta Nipponica). "Both Japan specialists and medical anthropologists will be stimulated, challenged, and engaged by this book." (Medical Anthropology Newsletter).

These original essays, which combine theoretical argument with empirical observation, constitute a state-of-the-art platform for future research in medical anthropology. Ranging in time and locale, the essays are based on research in historical and cultural settings. The contributors accept the notion that all knowledge is socially and culturally constructed and examine the contexts in which that knowledge is produced and practiced in medicine, psychiatry, epidemiology, and anthropology. Professionals in behavioral medicine, public health, and epidemiology as well as medical anthropologists will find their insights significant.

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.

"Social suffering" takes in the human consequences of war, famine, depression, disease, torture--the whole assemblage of human problems that result from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people--and also human responses to social problems as they are influenced by those forms of power. In the same way that the notion of social suffering breaks down boundaries between specific scholarly disciplines, this cross-disciplinary investigation allows us to see the twentieth century in a new frame, with new emphases. Anthropologists, historians, literary theorists, social medicine experts, and scholars engaged in the study of religion join together to investigate the cultural representations, collective experiences, and professional and popular appropriations of human suffering in the world today. These authors contest traditional research and policy approaches. Recognizing that neither the cultural resources of tradition nor those of modernity's various programs seem adequate to cope with social suffering in our times, they base their distinctive vision on the understanding that moral, political, and medical issues cannot be kept separate.

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.

Tales about organ transplants appear in mythology and folk stories, and surface in documents from medieval times, but only during the past twenty years has medical knowledge and technology been sufficiently advanced for surgeons to perform thousands of transplants each year. In the majority of cases individuals diagnosed as 'brain dead' are the source of the organs without which transplants could not take place. In this compelling and provocative examination, Margaret Lock traces the discourse over the past thirty years that contributed to the locating of a new criterion of death in the brain, and its routinization in clinical practice in North America. She compares this situation with that in Japan where, despite the availability of the necessary technology and expertise, brain death was legally recognized only in 1997, and then under limited and contested circumstances. "Twice Dead" explores the cultural, historical, political, and clinical reasons for the ready acceptance of the new criterion of death in North America and its rejection, until recently, in Japan, with the result that organ transplantation has been severely restricted in that country.This incisive and timely discussion demonstrates that death is not self-evident, that the space between life and death is historically and culturally constructed, fluid, multiple, and open to dispute. In addition to an analysis of that professional literature on and popular representations of the subject, Lock draws on extensive interviews conducted over ten years with physicians working in intensive care units, transplant surgeons, organ recipients, donor families, members of the general public in both Japan and North America, and political activists in Japan opposed to the recognition of brain death. By showing that death can never be understood merely as a biological event, and that cultural, medical, legal, and political dimensions are inevitably implicated in the invention of brain death, "Twice Dead" confronts one of the most troubling questions of our era.

This stimulating collection of essays is the product of face-to-face dialogues among anthropologists, sociologists, and philosopher-historians, all of whom focus their attention on the newly created biomedical technologies and their application in practice. Drawing on ethnographic and historical case studies, the authors show how biomedical technologies are produced through the agencies of tools and techniques, scientists and doctors, funding bodies, patients, clients, and the public. Despite shared concerns, these essays reveal that the authors have achieved no consensus about the objectives of their research, and the deep epistemological divides clearly remain - making for provocative reading.

Following centuries of debate about "nature and nurture" the discovery of DNA established the idea that nature (genes) determines who we are, relegating nurture (environment) to icing on the cake.Since the 1950s, the new science of epigenetics has demonstrated how cellular environments and certain experiences and behaviors influence gene expression at the molecular level, with significant implications for health and wellbeing. To the amazement of scientists, mapping the human genome indirectly supported these insights. Anthropologists Margaret Lock and Gisli Palsson outline vituperative arguments from Classical times about the relationship between nature and nurture, furthered today by epigenetic findings and the demonstration of a "reactive genome." The nature/nurture debate, they show, can never be put to rest, because these concepts are in constant flux in response to the new insights science continually offers.

Following centuries of debate about "nature and nurture" the discovery of DNA established the idea that nature (genes) determines who we are, relegating nurture (environment) to icing on the cake.Since the 1950s, the new science of epigenetics has demonstrated how cellular environments and certain experiences and behaviors influence gene expression at the molecular level, with significant implications for health and wellbeing. To the amazement of scientists, mapping the human genome indirectly supported these insights. Anthropologists Margaret Lock and Gisli Palsson outline vituperative arguments from Classical times about the relationship between nature and nurture, furthered today by epigenetic findings and the demonstration of a "reactive genome." The nature/nurture debate, they show, can never be put to rest, because these concepts are in constant flux in response to the new insights science continually offers.