The book offers an original perspective on how temporalities shape the embodiment of health-related inequalities, across the beginning and the end of life. It provides empirical examples, from different places in Europe and Africa, of how technoscientific and biomedical endeavours reconfigure the temporalities of life. It also describes how time becomes a resource that is unequally distributed. By investigating health practices and lived experiences in science, institutions and governance, the authors reveal how specific temporal regimes can lead to discrimination on the basis of age, race, gender, (dis)ability and sexual orientation. This differentially shapes the experiences of ill-health, biomedical practices, the governing of bodies, biographies and the life course.

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Divided into three parts, the first part presents a comprehensive historical analysis of the socio-metabolic shifts leading to the loss of plant sovereignty in the Philippines. It scrutinizes colonial influences, urbanization, nutritional policies, scientific research programs and neoliberal marketing strategies that have paved the way for the proliferation of packaged plant-based products passed as food or medicines. The second part delves into contemporary socio-metabolic dynamics within Puerto Princesa, interweaving urban political ecology frameworks with medical anthropological perspectives. It elucidates the precarious circumstances of daily life in a boomtown, compelling individuals to invest in supplements and engage in resource-intensive multi-level marketing endeavours.

The third and final part sheds light on efforts to reclaim plant sovereignty, including a resurgence of backyard farming in response to food insecurity exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Through meticulous research and insightful analysis, Packaged Plants offers a compelling exploration of the intersectionality between health, economics and environment in the Filipino context.

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Cancer and the Politics of Care traverses new theoretical terrain through explicitly critiquing cancer interventions, their limitations and success, the politics that drive them, and their embeddedness in local cultures and value systems. It extends prior work on cancer, by incorporating the perspectives of patients and their families, ‘at risk’ groups and communities, health professionals, cancer advocates and educators, and patient navigators.
The volume advances cross-cultural understandings of care, resisting simple dichotomies between caregiving and receiving, and reveals the fraught ethics of care that must be negotiated in resource-poor settings and stratified health systems. Its diversity and innovation ensures its wide utility among those working in and studying medical anthropology, social anthropology and other fields at the intersections of social science, medicine and health equity.

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This book explores how individuals, groups and communities navigate uncertain and unequal healthcare systems, in which inherent moral judgements on human worth have long-lasting effects on people’s wellbeing. This is key reading for anyone wishing to deconstruct the issues at stake when analysing how care and chronicity are entangled with multiple institutional, economic, and other circumstantial factors. How people access the available informal and formal resources as well as how they react to official diagnoses and decisions are important facets of the management of chronicity.

In the arena of care, people with chronic conditions find themselves negotiating restrictions and handling issues of power and (inter)dependency in relationships of inequality and proximity. This is particularly relevant in current times, when care has given in to the lure of the market, and the possibility of living a long and fulfilling life has been drastically reduced, transformed into a ‘reward’ for the few who have been deemed worthy of it.

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A crosscutting theme pertains to how social unevenness and gross economic disparities are shaping global and local responses to the pandemic, and illustrate the effects of both the virus and efforts to contain it in ways that amplify these inequalities. At the same time, the contributions highlight the nature of contemporary social life, including virtual communication, the nature of communities, neoliberalism and contemporary political economies, and the shifting nature of nation states and the role of government. Over half of the world’s population has been affected by restrictions of movement, with physical distancing requirements and self-isolation recommendations impacting profoundly on everyday life but also on the economy, resulting also, in turn, with dramatic shifts in the economy and in mass unemployment.

By reflecting on how the pandemic has interrupted daily lives, state infrastructures and healthcare systems, the contributing authors in this volume mobilise anthropological theories and concepts to locate the pandemic in a highly connected and exceedingly unequal world. The book is ambitious in its scope – spanning the entire globe – and daring in its insistence that medical anthropology must be a part of the growing calls to build a new world.

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The collection of ethnographically informed research, including original theoretical contributions, reconsiders the broader relevance of CMA perspectives for addressing current global healthcare challenges from and of Latin America. It includes work spanning four countries in Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala and Peru) as well as the trans-migratory contexts they connect and are defined by. By drawing on diverse social practices, it addresses challenges of central relevance to medical anthropology and global health, including reproduction and maternal health, sex work, rare and chronic diseases, the pharmaceutical industry and questions of agency, political economy, identity, ethnicity, and human rights.

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