Duoethnography as Transformative Praxis: Conversations about Nourishment and Coercion in the COVID-Era Academy.

This article introduces the feminist praxis of duoethnography as a way to examine the COVID era. As a group of diverse, junior, midcareer, and senior feminist scholars, we developed a methodology to critically reflect on our positions in our institutions and social worlds. As a method, duoethnography emphasizes the dialogical intimacy that can form through anthropological work. While autoethnography draws on individual daily lives to make sense of sociopolitical dynamics, duoethnography emphasizes the relational character of research across people and practices. Taking the relational aspects of knowledge production seriously, we conceptualized this praxis as a transformative method for facilitating radical empathy, mobilizing our collective voice, and merging together our partial truths. As collective authors, interviewers, and interlocutors of this article, the anonymity of duoethnography allows us to vocalize details of the experience of living through COVID-19 that we could not have safely spoken about publicly or on our own.

Cultures of Nutrition: Classification, Food Policy, and Health.

Nutrition policymakers frequently treat their knowledge of nutrition as acultural and universal. We analyze food guidelines in Mexico and Guatemala to draw attention to embedded, but often unrecognized, cultural values of standardization and individual responsibility. We suggest that nutrition policy would be improved by attending to the cultural values within nutrition science, and that nutrition guidelines should attend not only to other people's cultures but to what we are calling "cultures of nutrition." We conclude by offering an example of an adaptive approach to policy-making that may be useful for handling situations where many different cultures of nutrition collide.

Reworking the Social Determinants of Health: Responding to Material-Semiotic Indeterminacy in Public Health Interventions.

Both public health experts and medical anthropologists are concerned with how health is shaped by environmental forces. This creates an important cross-disciplinary alliance, yet crucial differences in how the two disciplines tend to evaluate health remain. In this article, I compare public health's "social determinants of health" framework with anthropological interest in the sociality of health and illness. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in Guatemala's highlands, to unpack (1) "the social," (2) "determinants," and (3) "of health." Ultimately, I show how the social determinants framework is deployed in ways that risk undermining its stated health justice goals, and highlight the benefits of an approach that does not know what health is ahead of doing research and which works closely with communities to respond to the effects of its own intervention. The article argues for the need to rework the emphasis on social determinants to make space for health's material-semiotic indeterminacy.

Whose Global, Which Health? Unsettling Collaboration with Careful Equivocation.

The recent push for multidisciplinary collaboration confronts anthropologists with a long-standing ethnographic problem. The terms we have to talk about what we do are very often the same as the terms used by those with whom we work, and yet we are often doing very different things with these terms. I draw on over a decade of "awkward collaboration" with scientists working in highland Guatemala to explore how challenges of equivocation play out in research focused on improving maternal/child nutrition. In the interactions I describe, epidemiologists undertake ethnography, anthropologists study scientists, and a Mam-Spanish translator works for projects organized around English-language funding structures and aspirations. I detail situations in which methods, interests, and goals coalesce and diverge to argue for the importance of careful equivocation, a research technique attuned to unsettling binaries that does not result in sameness or unity. I offer suggestions for how this technique might productively reshape the emerging global health imperative to work together. [global health, controlled equivocation, co-laboring, material-semiotics, Guatemala].

El reciente impulso a la colaboración multidisciplinaria confronta a los antropólogos con un problema etnográfico de larga data. Los términos que tenemos para hablar acerca de lo que hacemos son muy a menudo igual que los términos usados por aquellos con quien trabajamos, y sin embargo con frecuencia estamos haciendo cosas muy diferentes con estos términos. Me baso en una década de "colaboración extraña" con científicos trabajando en la zona montañosa de Guatemala para explorar cómo los retos de equivocación se desarrollan en la investigación enfocada en mejorar la nutrición materno/infantil. En las interacciones que describo, los epidemiólogos emprenden etnografía, los antropólogos estudian a los científicos, y un traductor mam­español trabaja para proyectos organizados alrededor de estructuras y aspiraciones de financiación en el idioma inglés. Detallo situaciones en las cuales métodos, intereses y metas coalescen y divergen para argumentar la importancia de la "equivocación cuidadosa", una técnica de investigación en sintonía con binarios inquietantes que no resulta en la uniformidad o la unidad. Ofrezco sugerencias sobre cómo esta técnica podría remodelar productivamente el imperativo global emergente para trabajar conjuntamente. [salud global, equivocación controlada, co­laborar, material­semiótica, Guatemala].

aju xim tu'n tb'inchetil aq'untl kyu'n txqan xjal, kuw in elan toj kywitz xpich'il tten chwinqlal. Aqe junjun yol nchi ajb'en qune toj qaq'une ikyxu se'n mo tza'n nchi ajb'en kyu'n xjal mo wi'xnaq'tz toj junjuntl ojtzqib'l, noqtzun aju aqe' yol nchi ajb'en toj junjuntl tumel ex junxitl nchi elpina. Aju u'j lu ntzaj qe toj laj ab'q'I te "onb'il mixti'toq b'i'n ttxolil" kyuk'il Matij ojtzqil ti'xti intoq nchi aq'unan toj k'ul te Paxil. Nchin xpich'ine ti'j junjun yol ch'ima junx kyxi'len noqtzun aju junxitl nchi elpina ex se'n mo tza'n nchi ajb'ena tu'n tten b'a'n wab'j kye ne'ñ. Toj xim lu nkub' ntz'ib'ine tumel se'n mo tza'n nchi aq'unana aqe xpich'il tten chwinqlal toj xim kue ka'yil tten chwinqlal ex ja aqe xpich'in ti'j kyaq'una matij ojtzqil ex ja in aq'unan jun miltz'ul yol Mam­español in aq'unan kyi'j junjun aq'untl nb'incha'n kyten tu'n tnam kye me'x. nkub' ntz'ib'ine junjun tumel se'nqe' ttxolil, joyb'il ex qe' xim aqe nchi qu'mante toklen "mya' b'a'n xim". Aju lun jun tumel xpich'b'il tu'n tka'yit junxitl kyten ti'xti aqe ch'ima junx kyten. Nxi' woqxenine aju tumel lu, qu'n b'a'n tu'n tajb'en te b'inchb'il tten tumel tb'inchet jun aq'untl toj k'lojin.

Counting bodies? On future engagements with science studies in medical anthropology.

Thirty years ago, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock outlined a strategy for 'future work in medical anthropology' that focused on three bodies. Their article - a zeitgeist for the field - sought to intervene into the Cartesian dualisms characterizing ethnomedical anthropology at the time. Taking a descriptive and diagnostic approach, they defined 'the mindful body' as a domain of future anthropological inquiry and mapped three analytic concepts that could be used to study it: the individual/phenomenological body, the social body, and the body politic. Three decades later, this paper returns to the 'three bodies'. It analyses ethnographic fieldwork on chronic illness, using a rescriptive, practice-oriented approach to bodies developed by science studies scholars that was not part of the initial three bodies framework. It illustrates how embodiment was a technical achievement in some practices, while in others bodies did not figure as relevant. This leads to the suggestion that an anthropology of health need not be organized around numerable bodies. The paper concludes by suggesting that future work in medical anthropology might embrace translational competency, which does not have the goal of better definitions (better health, better bodies, etc.) but the goal of better engaging with exchanges between medical and non-medical practices. That health professionals are themselves moving away from bodies to embrace 'planetary health' makes a practice-focused orientation especially crucial for medical anthropology today.

Demedicalizing Health: The Kitchen as a Site of Care.

Attention to culinary care can enrich the framing of health within medical anthropology. We focus on care practices in six Latin American kitchens to illuminate forms of health not located within a singular human subject. In these kitchens, women cared not for individuals but for meals, targeting the health of families and landscapes. Many medical anthropologists have critiqued health for its associations with biomedicine/biocapitalism, some even taking a stance 'against health.' Although sympathetic to this critique, our focus on women's practices of caring for health through food highlights dissonances between clinical and nonclinical forms of health. We call for the development of an expanded vocabulary of health that recognizes health care treatment strategies that do not target solely the human body but also social, political, and environmental afflictions.

The world in a box? Food security, edible insects, and "One World, One Health" collaboration.

Scientists in the Netherlands are cultivating edible insects to address concerns of international food security. Committed to the One World, One Health (OWOH) movement, their research aims to create a safe and effective global solution to the conjoined problems of climate change and an increasing worldwide demand for protein. Their preliminary work is promising, as it suggests that when compared to other sources of meat, insects can be an efficient, safe, and low-impact source of nutrients. Additionally, in many sites with endemic malnutrition, people find insects tasty. The problem these scientists are grappling with, however, is that insects that are easily mass-produced are not the insects people typically want to eat. This paper shows how the contingency of edibility complicates existing scientific models of travel that posit that singular objects spread peripherally outwards from a center into a globally connected, singular world. The scientists are finding that the production of successful food products necessitates that insects be constantly tinkered with: there is no "insect" that can be globally edible since "the global" itself is not a singular entity. This in turn complicates the vision of replicability and "scaling up" inherent in an OWOH vision of science. The researchers' process of moving their goods from the laboratory boxes they work with into the mealtime practices they seek to impact is compelling them to cultivate and articulate new ideals for research, methods of translation, and pathways by which goods can travel. They are finding that if they want to affect the health of "the world," they must engage with many different worlds.

The weight of the self: care and compassion in Guatemalan dietary choices.

The Public Health Nutrition (PHN) community categorizes dietary-related chronic illnesses as "noncommunicable," fixing these afflictions within individual bodies where they are best managed by individual choices. Yet within clinical encounters in Guatemala, nutritionists and patients treat eating and dieting as relational, transmissible practices. Patients actively seek nutritionists' care, asserting their self-care attempts have failed and they need support from others; nutritionists meanwhile develop treatment plans that situate "personal choice" as lying outside the control of a solitary individual. This article moves between international policy-pedagogy and patient-nutritionist interactions to examine forms of personhood, responsibility, and rationalities of choice present in body weight-management practices in Guatemala. Although nutrition discourses might appear to exemplify how institutional (bio)power manifests through internalized self-monitoring and preoccupation for one's own self, I argue that within the lived experiences of "nutrition-in-action," the self-body of the patient becomes broadly conceived to include the nutritionist, the family, and the broader community.