Keio University Medical Anthropology Study Group

May 30, 2024

In this lecture, we will have presentations from Prof. Alexandre White, a medical sociologist from Johns Hopkins University, and Prof. Li Zhang, an anthropologist from the University of California, Davis. Prof. Alexandre White has researched the social impacts of epidemics, both past and present, and the financial and value systems created by different international responses to various infectious diseases. In this session, he will discuss the fundamental changes in the economic support structure, centered on the World Bank, during a pandemic. Prof. Li Zhang has received numerous awards for her research on China's one-child policy and the social and psychological impacts of political and economic changes. More recently, she has been conducting research on policies concerning aging. In this session, she will discuss the rise of psychotherapy in China and mind-body dualism. We will welcome medical anthropologists Prof. Akinori Hamada (The University of Tokyo) and Prof. Makoto Kurata (Tokyo Medical University) as commentators.

9:00-10:15

Prof. Alexandre White's Presentation: Necrofinance: The Valuation of Life under Pandemic Financing

What are the roles of capital markets and complex financial products in global health management? In 2017, in response to the widely seen failure of the global community to respond fast enough to the West African Ebola Virus epidemic (2013-2016), the World Bank developed a novel financial product aimed at providing swift financing to prevent the rapid spread of epidemic crises. The World Bank has aimed to utilize global bond markets to finance aid delivery to epidemic stricken regions through the creation of a pandemic bond instrument- the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF). This is the first time that capital markets have been used to affect the rate of epidemic spread. This strategy was designed to circumvent the deadly delays and false promises of country pledges to support epidemic response and provide funding within a matter of days. However, when faced with the 2018-2019 Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo the largest set of funds, a potential $150 million from the new ‘pandemic bond’ has contributed nothing to the effort to control the spread of the disease.

This chapter explores the history of catastrophe financing products and the contemporary history of international epidemic response to discern the roots of the PEF. Examining both the previous West African Ebola Virus Epidemic (2013-2016) as well other recent epidemics I demonstrate which assumptions of epidemic threat undergird the World Bank’s PEF structure and how it breaks from previous frameworks of pandemic threat appraisal such as the World Health Organization’s Public Health Emergency of International Concern designation. Drawing upon the theories of Achille Mbembe, Jean Baudrillard and others this paper examines the roots of pandemic speculation and locates its role within the larger ecosystem of global infectious disease control.

10:15-11:30

Prof. Li Zhang's Presentation: Of Visceral/Somatic Practices in Healing

Psychological and mental health has become a prominent concern for many urban Chinese professionals and middle-class families in recent years as they experience heightened stress and grapple with distress of various kinds in a rapidly changing and extremely competitive society. Chinese therapists and clients however do not follow Western therapeutic models blindly, rather they engage in bentuhua--a process involving a great deal of modifications and hybridizations in practice so as to address the clients’ cultural sensibilities and social milieu. One of the most innovative bentuhua efforts that has the potential to reshape global psychotherapeutic practices in a positive way is through re-envisioning the body/mind relationship and remaking healing practices an integral approach beyond a deeply-trenched binary thinking. Many Chinese psy practitioners seek to integrate the bodily and mind aspects through tiyan and ganshou by involving one’s bodily sensation and affective organs while working with their clients. Based on my ethnographic case study on therapist Cai and his workshops, I show that this holistic approach combining talk therapy and mobilization of soma and senses is more effective and preferred among Chinese clients. I suggest that the Chinese experience might contribute to an integrated global psychotherapy beyond the mind and body dichotomy.

Discussion:

Akinori Hamada (The University of Tokyo)

Makoto Kurata (Tokyo Medical University)

Speakers:

Alexandre White (Johns Hopkins University)

Alexandre White, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Johns Hopkins, Department of Sociology. He earned a B.A. in Black Studies from Amherst College, an MSc. in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a PhD in Sociology from Boston University. He is jointly affiliated with the Department of the History of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine and is a Director of the Center For Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins. His work examines the social effects of infectious epidemic outbreaks in both historical and contemporary settings as well as the global mechanisms that produce responses to outbreak. His published work in the field has demonstrated how differences in the perceived threat of deadly diseases have provoked anomalous responses to outbreaks. White has published extensively in social science journals on the topics of racism, slavery and medicine including in the journals, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Theory and Society and Social Science History. He is the editor of the volume Global Historical Sociology of Race and Racism and has published in medical journals such as the British Medical Journal, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet. His current book project Epidemic Orientalism: Race, Capital and the Governance of Infectious Disease is forthcoming from Stanford University Press explores the historical roots of international responses to epidemic threats.

Li Zhang (The University of California-Davis)

Li Zhang (Ph.D. Cornell 1998) is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Davis. Broadly speaking, her research concerns social, political, and psychological repercussions of the market reform and profound transformations in contemporary China. She is the author of two award-winning books: Strangers in the City (Stanford 2001) and In Search of Paradise (Cornell 2010), and the co-editor of Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar (Cornell 2008) and Can Science and Technology Save China? (Cornell 2019). Her most recent book, Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (UC Press 2020), received an Honorable Mention of the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. Currently, she is working on a new project that explore aging, care, and the digital divide in China. She was a 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and the President of the Society of East Asian Anthropology (2013-15). She served as Interim Dean of the Division of Social Sciences (2015-17) and Chair of Anthropology Department (2011-15) at UC Davis.

Commentators:

Prof. Akinori Hamada (The University of Tokyo)

Associate Professor, Department of Cross-Disciplinary Cultural Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo. He conducts socio-anthropological and medical-anthropological research on life, aging, illness, death, and ceremonies, centered on fieldwork in the cocoa-farming rural areas of southern Ghana. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, he has also been exploring Japan's responses and experiences. His publications include "The Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals and Health Insurance" (Fukyosha, 2015), "The Medical Anthropology of Infectious Diseases" (Seidosha, 2024), and he has edited "The Ethnography of Redistribution" (Yushokan, 2019) and "COVID-19 and Anthropology" (Suiseisha, 2021).

Akinori HAMADA is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tokyo. His main research interests include the distribution of pharmaceuticals and the effect of introducing public health insurance in Southern Ghana. From 2020, he is also exploring COVID experiences and responses in Japan from a medical anthropological perspective. He translated several books, including the works of Marilyn Strathern, Micheal Taussig, and Annemarie Mol.

Prof. Makoto Kurata (Tokyo Medical University)

Professor, Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, Tokyo Medical University. He conducts medical anthropological research on the interpretation and manipulation of illness experiences and the acceptance of the concept of "disability" in Samoan society in the South Pacific. He is also developing educational methods to introduce cultural anthropological thinking into medical education. His major publications include "The Creation of Body Image in Dementia Care: The Depiction and Reification of Alzheimer's-type Dementia through Diagnostic Imaging" (in "Imagining the Body [Vol. 2]: Toward the Future of Body Image," edited by Manami Yasui and Laurence Marceau, Rinsen Shoten, 2022), and "Forms of Coexistence Surrounding 'Disability': A Case Study of an Early Intervention Program by the Disability Support NGO Loto Taumafai in Samoan Society" (in "The Anthropology of Intersection and Coexistence: Minorities and Mainstream Society in Oceania," edited by Kazuhiro Kazama, Nakanishiya Publishing, 2017).

Makoto KURATA is a Professor in the School of Medicine at the Tokyo Medical University. He conducts anthropological research on the interpretation and manipulation of the illness experience and the acceptance of the concept of “disability” in the Samoan society. He is also developing educational methods to introduce cultural anthropological thinking into medical education.

Moderator: Junko Kitanaka (Graduate School of Human Relations, Keio University)

Contact: Junko Kitanaka junko.kitanaka@keio.jp < mailto:junko.kitanaka@keio.jp >