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Pasquini, Mirko, 1991
(författare)
The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room
2021
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Urgency in a hospital Emergency Room (ER) is not a self-evident state. Urgency is made, by establishing priorities, distributing attention and material resources, and deciding who and what needs to be attended to first – and, simultaneously, who and what has to wait. The process of determining urgency is known as “triage” (from the French verb, trier, “to choose”). This thesis is about the vicissitudes of triage in an Italian ER. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, the thesis explores what happens when urgency is at stake; when it is contested and caught up between different, and frequently conflicting, perspectives. It explores how urgency is determined in practice, and shows how triage always is a vulnerable process of negotiation guided by economies of attention. How is urgency actually shaped in interactions between patients, their families and friends, and the ER staff? The different chapters explore how time in the ER is created through shifting registers of attention, and how attention in the ER is affected by widespread economic and social precarity, and neoliberal national policies of governance. It discusses how triage increasingly is structured by attitudes of mistrust; and also by potential or real outbreaks of violence. Addressing the particular positioning of the ER as a thick space of conjunction between neoliberal state politics and people's increasing need for care and recognition, the thesis aims to contribute to medical anthropology literature by analyzing triage not as a neutral medical way of sorting, but as a practice that actively creates difference. It explores both the limits of triage, and how those limits can spark improvisation and creative reinvention.
3.
Björktomta, Siv-Britt, 1962
(författare)
Om patriarkat, motstånd och uppbrott – tjejers rörelse i sociala rum
2012
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation focuses on some young girls and their family relations. My aim has been to investigate how some of those girls with foreign background who in media, government documents and project descriptions have come to be categorized as “vulnerable girls in patriarchal families” – what has come to be termed honour-related violence and oppression, HRV – describe their situation themselves. The selection consists of eleven girls between 16 and 20 years old who have expressed that they live with restrictions and control of their social life and their sexuality. This means that it is the girls’ subjective experiences that have defined their vulnerability and delimited the selection. The core of the study comprises (family) relations, with gender and generation as dimensions of power. The study moves within two fields of tension, one of which deals with generation and concerns the relation between parental authority and children’s dependence and vulnerability. The other field deals with gender and concerns conflicts between men’s domination and women’s subordination. The theoretical basis consists of theories of patriarchy together with Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and symbolic violence, which provide an understanding of the context that the interviewees found themselves in. Central for this understanding is how norms and values are transferred from the older to the younger generation. For a deepening of the habitus concept, theories are used from emotion sociology about the coupling between feelings, cognition and action, which become useful in the analysis of the girl’s self-reflections, their relations to their parents, and regarding their space for action. The experience described by the interviewees concerned areas such as gender and sexuality, generation, dominance and power, violence, ethnicity, culture and religion, but in the interviews there was also a bodily and emotional dimension. This dimension emerged during the analytical work as increasingly significant for understanding the whole. The families’ norms and values can be described as traditional values in three areas: (1) a strong sexual morality together with control of women’s sexuality; (2) norms of honour, meaning among other things that great emphasis was placed on the family’s honour, which was symbolized by the daughter’s virginity; (3) gendered practices that were concretized in the interviews through the fact that the man was seen primarily as the family provider while the household and children were the woman’s responsibility. The patriarchal family formations that the interviewees described I will understand as variations of patriarchy formed within transnational social spaces in a late modern society. The idea that a daughter’s virginity is the symbol of the family’s reputation and honour meant that the interviewees, in a special way, had to shoulder the burden of being cultural symbols and boundary markers – with moral implications – between the “Swedish” and the “non-Swedish”. Resistance against the boy-friend ban and the virginity requirement was presented by all the interviewees. They lived a double life. Through various strategies the girls tried increasing their space for action, and when the resistance became visible – when the boundary transgressions were discovered – the father made use of his resources of power. Patriarchy was manifested in different ways within the families, and how the power was exercised had importance for the resistance’s form and expression, but it also emerged that these factors relate to each other in a dynamically changing interaction. The resistance influenced the power in many ways as well. An important distinction between the families concerned violence. In five families, there were accounts of actual physical violence, and in another family there had been threats of physical violence. The interviewees found themselves at the intersection between a patriarchal field and a field characterized by a more free view of sexuality and with strong discourses of equality and children’s rights. It was within these frameworks that their movements and resistance played out. A result that has emerged during the analytical work is the father’s position and significant function as a point of reference in the girls’ narratives – the father’s authority and power were taken for granted in virtually all the families. Another result is that through the diverse expressions of patriarchy the emotional ties between father and daughter existed in the great majority of the families. Parallel with emotional dependence between father and daughter, most of the girls wanted more emotional closeness, a closeness that could also promote a dialogue and better communication. The relation between mother and daughter emerged as complex and contradictory.
4.
Moksnes, Heidi
(författare)
Mayan suffering, Mayan rights: Faith and citizenship among Catholic Tzotziles in Highland Chiapas, Mexico
2003
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the construction of citizenship by a group of highland Mayas in Mexico. The ethnographic focus is on liberation theological Catholics in the Tzotzil-speaking municipality of San Pedro Chenalhó in highland Chiapas. Through their religious affiliation and their political association Las Abejas, the Pedrano Catholics form one of the important blocs of what is today a deeply factionalized municipality. Fieldwork was carried out in two periods for a total of fourteen months in 1995 and 1996. Complementary work was conducted during a month-long visit in 1998. The fieldwork focused on the daily life, Sunday services and meetings of Pedrano Catholics. Informal interviews were also made with church members, catechists and other leaders. The study shows how Pedrano Catholics are reinterpreting the signification of the poverty and suffering that all Pedranos hold is characteristic of their lives as indigenous peasants. The converts are creating a collective identity that transcends the ethnic group and defines them as part of a universal humanity. Simultaneously, through a "moral theology of suffering," their poverty is defined as a distinguishing experience that is contrary to the will of God, and which brings them and other indigenous peasants closer to God and his grace. Evoking Christian ethics and international human rights regulations, the converts denounce their predicament and demand rights in a discourse directed at Mexican authorities as well as national and internatonal civil society. Thereby, Pedrano Catholics have developed a form for exercising active citizenship in the Mexican nation-state. This endeavor is found to be shaped by an ongoing concern among Pedranos: the construction of cohesive social collectivities that uphold alliances with patron deities for protection. The Catholic church groups and their confederate-like coordination on municipal level are structured similarly to the earlier calpul community in Chenalhó. Both levels of the Catholic community are also constituted as the entities by which the converts uphold an alliance with God that assres his guardian protection. Thus, while the Pedrano Catholic community is part onf an escalating factionalization and disintergration of Chenalhó, it provides a space where Pedrano society can be reconstituted, offering a sense of coherence and unity. At the same time, the Catholic group is constituted as part of a broader community of Catholics, and recognizes clergy of the Catholic Church as religious and political authorities. Thus, it is argued that the Catholic group exemplifies a broad change in the Maya highlands, from "closed" corporate communities to translocal, moral communities.
