Abstract

Biomedical Entanglements is an ethnographic study of the Giri people of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the indigenous population’s interaction with modern medicine. In her fieldwork, Franziska A. Herbst follows the Giri people as they circulate within and around ethnographic sites that include a rural health center and an urban hospital. The study bridges medical anthropology and global health, exploring how the ‘biomedical’ is imbued with social meaning and how biomedicine affects Giri ways of life.

Franziska A. Herbst is a researcher at the Department of Palliative Medicine, Universitätsklinikum Erlangen.

“Biomedical Entanglements is a worthwhile contribution to medical anthropology, to the anthropology of hospitals, to the anthropology of ‘things’ like X-ray machines, and to the anthropology of ever-present cultural syncretism and creative blending of systems and traditions.” · Anthropology Review Database

“This is the kind of ethnography that I look for when suggesting texts for my graduate students to read in 'Reading Medical Ethnography'… The work reveals the diverse ways in which biomedicine, biomedical institutions and formal biomedical roles are incorporated and interpreted in this setting.” · Julie Park, University of Auckland