The first part explores men’s care relations in the context of their extended family relations, including the emergence of sons-in-law in care. The second part widens the perspective to include the domain of work and related policies to understand how men reconcile care and work. The third part situates men’s caregiving in the broader societal context, including attention to the author’s novel notion of ‘care literacy’. The structure provides specialists across relevant fields – such as well-being, masculinity, gender relations and care systems – greater flexibility in accessing relevant sections. Further, the design of parts and chapters supports the book’s use as teaching material in undergraduate and graduate courses.

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This volume draws on research from across Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and Africa, providing surprising contrasts and consistencies of experience. As the pandemic has shifted from urgency to chronic unpredictability, everywhere people have struggled to make sense of state actions in infection control, testing strategies and the roll out of vaccines, and to remake social life. The contributing authors illustrate with poignancy how chronic social problems and pandemic effects have worked bidirectionally, compounding multiple inequalities and exacerbating, for some, despair and disassociation. They also demonstrate the ingenuity of communities – of Indigenous ways of knowing and providing care in some settings, and elsewhere, the power of robust local community networks and informal innovations. While this book exposes the pandemic’s exploitation of deep structures of state and societal neglect, and describes the resultant morass, it also illustrates the determination and imaginations of caring communities to withstand Covid’s harms.

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Based on field research conducted in the Washington D.C. area, Navigating the Cultures of Health Care and Health Insurance takes a mixed methods, qualitative and quantitative approach to the study of foreign patients’ utilization and assessment of health care in the US. Through interviews with both health care providers and patients, attitudes towards US health insurance and medical treatment are compared for migrants from three countries with very different cultural backgrounds and health insurance systems: Germany, India and Japan.

Combined with an in-depth literature review, historical and contemporary surveys of health care across countries and analysis of health-related terms in the media, the results of this research indicate that foreign patients’ barriers to good health care persist despite access to health care services and insurance coverage, and reveal recurring transnational care seeking patterns, such as bringing medicines from abroad, delaying treatment for medical visits, insurance juggling and more. By describing their difficulties in integrating into the US health care system, the migrants in this study show the challenges and the potential for improvements in providing the care that migrants need in their new home.

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While arguing against the separation of the biological and the social in the study of human and non-human life, it remains important to unfold the consequences of their discursive separation. Based on examples from Botswana, Denmark, Mexico, the Netherlands, Uganda, the UK and USA, the volume explores what has been created in the space between ‘the social’ and ‘the natural’, with a view to rethink ‘the biosocial’. Health topics in the book include diabetes, trauma, cancer, HIV, tuberculosis, prevention of neonatal disease and wider issues of epigenetics. Many of the chapters engage with constructions of health and disease in a wide range of environments, and engage with analysis of the concept of ‘environment’. Anthropological reflection and ethnographic case studies explore how ‘health’ and ‘environment’ are entangled in ways that move their relation beyond interdependence to one of inseparability. The subtitle of this volume captures these insights through the concept of ‘health environment’, seeking to move the engagement of anthropology and biology beyond deterministic projections.

Biosocial Worlds brings together state-of-the-art contributions to critical anthropological reflection on, and ethnographic exploration of, human and non-human life in the light of our changing understandings of biology and what it means to be human.

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