The doctor's political body

Doctor-patient interactions and sociopolitical belonging in Venezuelan state clinics

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2260682
AutoresAmy Cooper (0000-0003-0661-6044)
Ano2015
Volume42
Fascículo3
Páginas459-474
Data de publicação2015-08-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAmerican Ethnologist (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/amet.12141
OpenAlexW2140331272
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas23
Referências citadas55

Patients of Venezuelan state clinics ascribe meanings to doctor-patient interactions that reverberate beyond the immediacy of the clinical encounter to shape political subjectivities. They seek not just medical goods and services from clinical interactions but also expressions of recognition, respect, care, and solidarity from doctors. I argue that patients who had long resented what they saw as the Venezuelan state's broken promises to use national oil wealth to provide for its citizens now read its efforts to address sociopolitical inequalities in the bodily dispositions of its medical workers. Combining anthropological approaches to doctor-patient interactions and to medical embodiment, I show how doctors' embodied practices can render biomedical encounters politically significant for patients, activating or foreclosing a sense of sociopolitical belonging. In doing so, I demonstrate how sociopolitical orders are constructed and challenged through the intimacies of biomedical practice

Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Immediacy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Solidarity · State (computer science · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology · Law · Medicine · Public Health and Social Inequalities