They fear us, we are contagious...” (2025)

Politiche della disabilità. Poliomielite, appartenenza di gruppo, e attivismo in Sierra Leone [Disability politics. Poliomyelitis, group belonging, and activism in Sierra Leone].

AM Rivista della Società italiana di antropologia medica/ Journal of the Italian Society for Medical Anthropology, 2020

Book Review of Diana Szántó, Politicising Polio: Disability, Civil Society and Civic Agency in Sierra Leone, Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore, 2020, pp. 313.

La donna, l'Altro, la differenza

AM. Rivista della Società italiana di antropologia medica, 2020

AM. Rivista della Società italiana di antropologia medica fondata da Tullio Seppilli è una testata semestrale della Fondazione Angelo Celli per una cultura della salute (Perugia).

Spettri che non spaventano: Un pensiero critico per l’autismoRECENSIONI

RIVISTA DELLA SOCIETÀ ITALIANA DI ANTROPOLOGIA MEDICA Fondazione Angelo Celli per una Cultura della Salute -Perugia Fondazione Angelo Celli per una Cultura della Salute -Perugia AM 2020 FONDATA DA TULLIO SEPPILLI, 2020

Recensione al Volume: Enrico Valtellina (curatore), L’Autismo oltre lo sguardo medico. I Critical Autism Studies, Erickson, Trento, 2020, 196 pp.

Il pescatore di immagini. La mancata rivoluzione simbolica dei disability studies

AM Rivista della Societá Italiana di Antropologia Medica, 2020

AM. Rivista della Società italiana di antropologia medica fondata da Tullio Seppilli è una testata semestrale della Fondazione Angelo Celli per una cultura della salute (Perugia).

Ermeneutica dell'intensità. Guttuso e de Martino

AM. Rivista della Società italiana di antropologia medica, n. 50, 2020

Entangled narratives: Encountering political subjectivities of people with albinism in Tanzania. AM Rivista della Società Italiana di Antropologia Medica/ Journal of the Italian Society for Medical Anthropology, 50: 145 - 169.

AM Rivista della Società Italiana di Antropologia Medica/ Journal of the Italian Society for Medical Anthropology, 2020

After the spread of media news about the attacks against people with albinism in Tanzania, humanitarian activism and media debates have accelerated the emergence and production of discourses about people with the condition in the country. Victimhood,deservingness and equivalence of albinism with disability represent three of the most recurring media and humanitarian narratives. Based on data collected over 19 months of fieldwork in Tanzania, the present article explores how discourses and ideas about albinism have circulated among and been reformulated by people with albinism to deconstruct shared conceptions of normalcy and affirm their agency in the Tanzanian public arena. The ethnographic material shows in which multiple ways the intertwinement of global actions and everyday practices related to albinism have strengthened already-existing political subjectivities, (re)shaped political claims, and articulated ideas of (dis)belonging.

Esperienze per un uso sociale della ricerca a TrasiMemo. Diversità e disabilità

AM Rivista della Societá Italiana di Antropologia Medica, 2020

AM. Rivista della Società italiana di antropologia medica fondata da Tullio Seppilli è una testata semestrale della Fondazione Angelo Celli per una cultura della salute (Perugia).

Analisi Istituzionale nella formazione universitaria degli educatori e delle educatrici

RIVISTA DELLA SOCIETÀ ITALIANA DI ANTROPOLOGIA MEDICA Fondazione Angelo Celli per una Cultura della Salute -Perugia Fondazione Angelo Celli per una Cultura della Salute -Perugia AM 50 / dicembre 2020 FONDATA DA TULLIO SEPPILLI, 2020

Il presente contributo descrive un’esperienza di formazione accademica con un grup-po di studenti frequentanti le lezioni di Pedagogia Speciale nell’ambito del Corso di Laurea in Scienze dell’Educazione. Abbiamo perciò esplorato come l’Analisi istituzio-nale e, in particolare, la Socioanalisi possano rivelarsi pratiche feconde per indagare da un lato il concetto di disabilità come costruzione sociale (anche in accordo con i Disability Studies) e, contestualmente, analizzare le implicazioni di docenti e studenti nella definizione della conoscenza in ambito universitario, anche in relazione ai rap-porti di potere rispetto a chi convenzionalmente detiene la parola (conoscenza) e chi è invece ne è destinatario.

Noi LI Chiamiamo Ragazzi Le Violente Ingenuita Discorsive Del Babytalk Spunti Per Un Analisi Dei Processi Comunicativi Nei Servizi Per Disabili Intellettivi

Società Italiana di Antropologia Culturale, 2020

They Fear Us, We Are Contagious…" "Homo Chernobylus" as a Potentially Disabled Person and His/Her Defense Strategy «Ci temono, siamo contagiosi…». L'"homo chernobylus" come persona potenzialmente disabile e la sua strategia di difesa Valentina Brandazza Femminile disabile. Il corpo medicalmente "neutralizzato" delle donne nella narrazione commerciale contemporanea: verso l'integrazione della disabilità o la disintegrazione della femminilità plurale? Disabled Feminine. The Medically "Neutralised" Women's Body in Contemporary Commercial Narrative: Towards the Integration of Disability or the Disintegration of Plural Womanhood? Giorgio Brocco Entangled Narratives. Encountering Political Subjectivities of People with Albinism in Tanzania Narrazioni complesse. Incontro con le soggettività politiche delle persone con albinismo in Tanzania

The Defensive Strategies of Czech and Ukrainian Residents in the Ukraine against the Effects of the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident

Český lid, 2016

The text focuses on the theme of health care and amateur treatment in the extreme conditions of increased radiation after the explosion of the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant. It reconstructs the plight of the population from the accounts of residents living near the Chernobyl power plant, some of whom resettled in the Czech Republic, and analyses the relationship of the new state of affairs for folk healing. The text shows the logic of the adaptation mechanisms of the group of people to the new circumstances and their mobilization of the cognitive potential in the conditions in which professional aid and biomedicine, which they commonly used, failed. Besides the traditional practices of folk treatment, innovations based on scraps of information gathered from the mass media, reading, knowledge of a healthy lifestyle, the application of extreme medical cures devised by doctors through experimentation, assert themselves under extreme conditions. Other than the information on the application of specific methods and procedures, the text shows the process of how 'human wisdom' on health and disease is formed and adapts to a new, in this case extreme, situation. In an individualized, complex society, these ideas are distinctly private, flexible and situational.

Nuove e vecchie influenze: Antropologia medica e gli approcci post- e decoloniali [New and Old Influences: Medical Anthropology and Post- and Decolonial Approaches]

AM Rivista della Società Italiana di Antropologia Medica/Journal of the Italian Society for Medical Anthropology, 23(53): 167 - 196, 2022

Over the past 40 years, post- and de-colonial ideas have developed and emerged from the circulation of the works of various intellectuals within the humanities and social sciences. These include the writings of Franz Fanon, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe and Edward Said. Research conducted by other scholars, some part of Subaltern Studies, such as Gayatri Spivak, and others belonging to the sphere of Black feminism, such as Sylvia Wynter and Françoise Vergès, fall within this strand of study. Out of these influences, medical anthropology and other cognate disciplines within the so-called “medical humanities” have produced, developed and refined various epistemological and methodological approaches that, not only can be defined as ‘critical’, but must be framed within the theoretical impulses inaugurated by post- and decolonial analyses. After introducing some of the guiding lines of this strand of ideas and knowledge, as they have been absorbed by current anthropological and sociological deliberations, this article identifies—incompletely and selectively—some of the multiple research avenues that have arisen at the intersection of post- and decolonial approaches and the reflections circulating within medical anthropology. More specifically, the three lines of research examined here regard: (1) the analysis of post- and decolonial subjectivities in relation to changing conceptions of health, disease, and disability; (2) the critical study of humanitarian and global health interventions; and (3) the examination of indigenous and non-Western systems of care and healing practices.

Antropologia medica nella crisi ambientale. Determinanti biosociali, politica e campi di causazione

Archivio antropologico mediterraneo, 2020

Venire a patti con l’“anormalità” Percorsi di risignificazione tra i malati di Hiv in Tigray

AM Rivista della Società Italiana di Antropologia Medica, 2021

In Tigray region, Hiv constrains in a decisive way the life of those affected by the virus. While intervention policies and care pathways, supported by government institu-tions, can be perceived as channels by which disciplinary practices are implemented, at the same time the experience of the sickness could breaks with embedded social norms. The needs to come to terms with the virus redefines the existential paths of the subjects, where the bodily experience of suffering, opening to new possibilities to act hitherto precluded, could generate counter-narratives capable to renegotiate the perception of Hiv.

Trapianti, spiriti, possessioni. I “fenomeni post-trapiantali” alla luce dell’etnopsichiatria e dell’antropologia medica

AM - Rivista della Società italiana di antropologia medica, 2023

"Post-transplant phenomena” constitute a set of personality changes involving the re-cipient patient following a heart transplant. The main explanatory hypotheses offered in the medical literature can be traced back to the biomedical paradigm and, in a final analysis, to a “one-universe” ontology. The purpose of the present analysis is to offer instead an explanatory possibility from a “multiple universe” ontological dimension, from the theoretical tools of critical-interpretive medical anthropology and ethno- psychiatry. The anthropological category of “spirit possession” thus becomes central to reinterpreting these clinical episodes by reformulating the bond between donor and recipient through the formula of “mimetic empathy”.

Cervinkova, Hana, Buchowski, Michal and Uherek, Zdenêk (eds.) (2015) Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Intersections, 2019

Book Review Cervinkova, Hana, Buchowski, Michal and Uherek, Zdenêk (eds.) (2015) Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 267 pages. 'Rethinking ethnography in Central Europe', co-edited by one Polish and two Czech anthropologists and published by Palgrave Macmillan, is one of the two selections of papers presented at an anthropological conference in Prague in 2014. 1 The two-day event, 'Rethinking Anthropologies in Central Europe for Global Imaginaries', was a regional reunion of the anthropological discipline in a collaboration of scholars from the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. The wider framework of regional cooperation that brought about the conference was provided by the International Visegrad Fund, a major force promoting and supporting regional networks in various segments of life in Central Europe. The 34 conference papers tackled the theme of anthropology in Central Europe; post-socialism; transnational migrations and mobilities in general, urban anthropologies, and capitalism in post-socialist states. The 11 papers in the book are preceded by an introduction and followed by a brief afterword, notes on the contributors, and an index. 'Rethinking ethnography' is invisibly complemented by six other of the conference papers published in an English language special issue of Cargo, the journal of the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (Cervinkova et al., 2014). The Cargo journal issue and the edited volume under examination are both end products of the same regional anthropological initiative. The main focus of the book is on field-based anthropological research related to Central Europe, whereas papers in Cargo interrogate anthropological practice in the region. The editors of the volume, and Michal Buchowski in particular, had manifested a long time interest in and concern for the position, development, and international connectedness of anthropology in the former socialist states of Central Europe (Buchowski, 2004; Cervinkova, 2012). He has turned his attention to a sensitive issue claiming that Western academia has defined the dominant view on Central Europe (Buchowski, 2004) in English language works issued by prestigious Western publishing houses. There has been a long dialogue going on between representatives of anthropological centres in the East and the West over this issue (Buchowski, 2004; Hann, 2005), and consequently, one may consider this example of regional cooperation manifest in 'Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe' an attempt of empowerment and decolonization through the creation and fortification of regional academic networks. The introductory chapter by Cervinkova and Buchowski continues along the same line of ideas with an inquiry into the historical notion of Central Europe, and the

Historical Cupping Therapy of the Resettled Czech Community from Ukraine in the Context of Contemporary and Alternative Medicine in the Czech Republic

Prace Etnograficzne, 2019

Cupping therapy is an ancient technique of healing used for a whole spectrum of health problems in a wide range of ways, variations and methods. Besides the type of material used, the forms of application and explanation of the mechanism of the effect, the methods of its conduct differ. In addition to medical grasp of the subject, a broader and more comprehensive view of this method is also supported by a comparison of the historical variations and forms across territorial units and time horizon. For this purpose, both the historical context of cupping therapy on the territory of the Czech Republic, its archaic form captured within the community living in emigration in Ukraine and a brief overview of the current situation in the Czech Republic are depicted. The data was collected in 2008-2018 within three waves of resettled Czechs from Ukraine all over the territory of the Czech Republic.

Ode to Ecstatic Experience

2022

Mobile Entrepreneurs: Transnational Vietnamese in the Czech Republic

Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe, edited by Hana Cervinkova, Michal Buchowski and Zdenek Uherek, 2015

Alla corte del dubbio: la pandemia di Covid-19 tra vecchia guardia e nuove reclute no-vax

AM - Rivista sella società italiana di antropologia medica, 2023

In the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is anticipated that anti-vaccination activists will either disappear or change their minds in response to the virus threat. However, inequality, a sense of precarity, and fragmentary and contradictory information also spread with the disease. In this setting, mistrust and suspicion of institutions and science flourish, and opponents of vaccination feed their own ranks. Health care is negatively impacted by Covid-19, and many rights are already deteriorating. The pandemic draws attention to pre-existing exploitation and inequality while also highlighting them more clearly. In this case, positions that do not tolerate shades are triggered (for or against vaccinations, for or against the green pass, etc.). This depoliticizes the meanings of doubt, feeding conflicts and intra-class divisions. This hides the political responsibilities—of all of us—that made the Covid-19 advent extremely dramatic.

Dialoghi sull’etica Discorsi e pratiche della ricerca in antropologia

AM Rivista della Società italiana di antropologia medica / 56, dicembre 2023, pp. 155-173 Sezione, 2023

Introduzione L’esigenza di un approfondimento sull’etica in antropologia medica sorge dalla percezione di attriti, controversie e resistenze rispetto ai dilemmi imposti da nuove leggi e orientamenti normativi che interrogano la pratica della ricerca antropologica oggi. Come ha già fatto notare Veena Das in una sua concferenza (2013) «l’etica sorge nella frizione, nella relazione con l’altro che non è immediata e necessita di un aggiustamento». Ora questa frizione in antropologia medica è centrale date le esperienze etnografiche nei campi della sofferenza e del dolore derivanti dai processi di salute/malattia, dove è sempre più richiesto un parere etico, ma lo è per l’intera disciplina. L’antropologia medica – con la sua attenzione alla vulnerabilità, alla sofferenza, ai vissuti soggettivi, alla centralità della relazione, alla creazione di alleanza tra medico e paziente – è un luogo privilegiato per un discorso etico che possa aspirare sia a partecipare al dibattito bioetico contemporaneo sia a ripensare alle proprie pratiche. In Etica e antropologia medica. Tullio Seppilli e la moralità della scienza, un articolo pubblicato in questa stessa rivista, Fabio Dei mostra come già Seppilli si fosse dimostrato sensibile al problema (bio)etico che però «non si presenta mai come un problema separato. È invece possibile scorgerlo proprio nel quadro della sua complessiva sistematizzazione dell’antropologia medica; nell’intreccio, diciamo, fra le dimensioni epistemologica, storica-sociale e politica […]» (Dei 2020: 117). Si può così ben evidenziare la necessaria continuità tra etica ed epistemologia.