The social history of madness is a vibrant area of intellectual enquiry which in the past 20 years has generated an impressive series of monographs and essay collections. This volume is a scholarly addition to the literature. Although its origins lie i n a seminar series and a conference, both held at the University of Exeter, the strong focus on institutions during the long nineteenth century ...

In this comment, I build on Shiffman’s call for the global health community to more deeply investigate structural and productive power. I highlight two challenges we must grapple with as social scientists carrying out the types of investigation that Shiffman proposes: the politics of  challenging the powerful; and the need to investigate types of expertise that have traditionally been thought o...

Abstract The feminist movement in the United States like other countries has tried to establish equality for women. From the first attempts to gain constitutional right for vote, up to the current radical demands, feminists have struggled to make changes in the U.S. party politics and obtain their rights within the parties. One of the important issues in which women played a key role in party ...

abstract the feminist movement in the united states like other countries has tried to establish equality for women. from the first attempts to gain constitutional right for vote, up to the current radical demands, feminists have struggled to make changes in the u.s. party politics and obtain their rights within the parties. one of the important issues in which women played a key role in party p...

Robert LaFollette, the great progressive Senator and presidential candidate, famously argued that, ‘‘The cure for what ails democracy is more democracy.’’ One might aptly characterize Bruce Cain’s book, Democracy More or Less, as an extended rebuttal to LaFollette’s populist prescription for healing the body politic. Cain mounts a sustained assault on what he sees as the naı̈vely Whiggish optimi...

Global health research is essentially a normative undertaking: we use it to propose policies that ought to be implemented. To arrive at a normative conclusion in a logical way requires at least one normative premise, one that cannot be derived from empirical evidence alone. But there is no widely accepted normative premise for global health, and the actors with the power to set policies may use...

In a call for greater anthropological study of the body, Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) argue for examination of three, interrelated bodily forms: the body-self, the social body, and the body politic. Anthropologists of aging can most easily identify our work in the body-self when we study aging as a bodily and social experience that varies across cultural contexts (e.g. Sokolovsky 2009). The s...

All sovereign societies on earth can be put roughly into two categories: developed and under-developed countries. The developed countries, including the United States, Canada, most of west Europe countries, Japan and Australia, are all free capitalist society with a well functioned democratic government and a free market economic system. The under-developed countries, including Russia and east ...