119 subscribers
Go offline with the Player FM app!
Podcasts Worth a Listen
SPONSORED


1 Understanding the Elegant Math Behind Modern Machine Learning 1:14:43
Andrew McDowell, "Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Manage episode 422803840 series 2421499
Each year in India more than two million people fall sick with tuberculosis (TB), an infectious, airborne, and potentially deadly lung disease. The country accounts for almost 30 percent of all TB cases worldwide and well above a third of global deaths from it. Because TB’s prevalence also indicates unfulfilled development promises, its control is an important issue of national concern, wrapped up in questions of postcolonial governance. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement with a village in North India and its TB epidemic, anthropologist Andrew McDowell tells the stories of socially marginalized Dalit (“ex-untouchable”) farming families afflicted by TB, and the nurses, doctors, quacks, mediums, and mystics who care for them. Each of the book’s chapters centers on a material or metaphorical substance - such as dust, clouds, and ghosts - to understand how breath and airborne illness entangle biological and social life in everyday acts of care for the self, for others, and for the environment.
From this raft of stories about the ways people make sense of and struggle with troubled breath, McDowell develops a philosophy and phenomenology of breathing that attends to medical systems, patient care, and health justice. He theorizes that breath - as an intersection between person and world - provides a unique perspective on public health and inequality. Breath is deeply intimate and personal, but also shared and distributed. Through it all, Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India (Stanford UP, 2024) traces the multivalent relations that breath engenders between people, environments, social worlds, and microbes.
Andrew McDowell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University. He has a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from Harvard University. His research interests focus on care, contagion, pharmaceuticals, diagnosis, and inequality in North and Western Indian social worlds entangled with tuberculosis. His work has appeared in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Ethos, and The Lancet among other venues.
Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
1214 episodes
Andrew McDowell, "Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Manage episode 422803840 series 2421499
Each year in India more than two million people fall sick with tuberculosis (TB), an infectious, airborne, and potentially deadly lung disease. The country accounts for almost 30 percent of all TB cases worldwide and well above a third of global deaths from it. Because TB’s prevalence also indicates unfulfilled development promises, its control is an important issue of national concern, wrapped up in questions of postcolonial governance. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement with a village in North India and its TB epidemic, anthropologist Andrew McDowell tells the stories of socially marginalized Dalit (“ex-untouchable”) farming families afflicted by TB, and the nurses, doctors, quacks, mediums, and mystics who care for them. Each of the book’s chapters centers on a material or metaphorical substance - such as dust, clouds, and ghosts - to understand how breath and airborne illness entangle biological and social life in everyday acts of care for the self, for others, and for the environment.
From this raft of stories about the ways people make sense of and struggle with troubled breath, McDowell develops a philosophy and phenomenology of breathing that attends to medical systems, patient care, and health justice. He theorizes that breath - as an intersection between person and world - provides a unique perspective on public health and inequality. Breath is deeply intimate and personal, but also shared and distributed. Through it all, Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India (Stanford UP, 2024) traces the multivalent relations that breath engenders between people, environments, social worlds, and microbes.
Andrew McDowell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University. He has a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from Harvard University. His research interests focus on care, contagion, pharmaceuticals, diagnosis, and inequality in North and Western Indian social worlds entangled with tuberculosis. His work has appeared in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Ethos, and The Lancet among other venues.
Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
1214 episodes
All episodes
×
1 Manu Pillai, "Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity" (Allen Lane, 2025) 1:02:51

1 Anna Lise Seastrand, "Body, History, Myth: Early Modern Murals in South India" (Princeton UP, 2024) 44:07

1 Janam Mukherjee, "Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2015) 1:00:46

1 Violent Majorities 2.3: Long-Distance Ethnonationalism Roundup (LA, AS) 46:52

1 Paul G. Keil, "The Presence of Elephants: Shared Lives and Landscapes in Assam" (Routledge, 2024) 57:15

1 Esha Niyogi De, "Women's Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia" (U Illinois Press, 2024) 1:16:44

1 Material Religion, Assemblage, and the Agency of Things in South Asia 49:33

1 Raheel Dhattiwala, "Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002" (Cambridge UP, 2019) 56:28

1 Preetha Mani, "The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method" (Northwestern UP, 2022) 55:40

1 Claire C. Robison, "Bringing Krishna Back to India" (Oxford UP, 2024) 49:24

1 Tahir Kamran, "Chequered Past, Uncertain Future: The History of Pakistan" (Reaktion Books, 2024) 1:00:53

1 Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, "Mission Bengal: A Saffron Experiment" (HarperCollins India, 2020) 1:08:28

1 Alpa Shah, "The Incarcerations: Bk-16 and the Search for Democracy in India" (OR Books, 2024) 42:47

1 Sunila S. Kale and Christian Lee Novetzke, "The Yoga of Power: Political Thought and Practice in India" (Columbia UP, 2025) 54:58

1 Divya Kannan, "Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 36:02
Welcome to Player FM!
Player FM is scanning the web for high-quality podcasts for you to enjoy right now. It's the best podcast app and works on Android, iPhone, and the web. Signup to sync subscriptions across devices.