Embodied Belonging: In/exclusion, Health Care, and Well-Being in a World in Motion.

In this introduction, we propose the notion of 'embodied belonging' as a fruitful analytical heuristic for scholars in medical and psychological anthropology. We envision this notion to help us gain a more nuanced understanding of the entanglements of the political, social, and affective dimensions of belonging and their effects on health, illness, and healing. A focus on embodied belonging, we argue, reveals how displacement, exclusion, and marginalization cause existential and health-related ruptures in people's lives and bodies, and how affected people, in the struggle for re/emplacement and re/integration, may regain health and sustain their well-being. Covering a variety of regional contexts (Germany/Vietnam, Norway, the UK, Japan), the contributions to this special issue examine how embodied non/belonging is experienced, re/imagined, negotiated, practiced, disrupted, contested, and achieved (or not) by their protagonists, who are excluded and marginalized in diverse ways. Each article highlights the intricate trajectories of how dynamics of non/belonging inscribe themselves in human bodies. They also reveal how belonging can be utilized and drawn on as a forceful means and resource of social resilience, if not (self-)therapy and healing.

Im/mobilities and dis/connectivities in medical globalisation: How global is Global Health?

The interdisciplinary, politically contested field of Global Health has often been described as a consequence of, and response to, an intensification of the mobilities of, and connectivities between, people, pathogens, ideas, and infrastructure across national borders and large distances. However, such global mobilities and connectivities are not as omnidirectional and unpatterned as the rhetoric of many Global Health actors suggests. Instead, we argue that they are suffused by a plethora of institutional, national, and global political agendas, and substantially shaped by transnational and postcolonial power relations. Furthermore, the configurations that are typically subsumed under the category of Global Health represent only a minor part of the range of im/mobilities and dis/connectivities that are essential for understanding transformations of epidemiological patterns, health care infrastructures, and the responses to health-related challenges in a globalising world. In order to broaden such a limiting analytical perspective, we propose to expand the analytical focus in studying Global Health phenomena by paying close attention to the myriad ways in which particular im/mobilities and dis/connectivities constitute medicine and well-being in global and transnational settings. Pursuing a conceptual shift from studies of 'Global Health' to studying 'medical globalization' may carve out new analytical ground for such an endeavour.

Caught in transition: the struggle to live a 'normal' life with HIV in Tanzania.

According to global health discourses, antiretroviral treatment (ART) enables ever more people living with HIV to resume a 'normal' life: a return to health and the reconstruction of social relations. Based on 15 months of fieldwork in Tanga, Tanzania, I explore the extent to which patients 'on the ground' have experienced the shift of HIV from an acute and rapidly deteriorating condition to a 'normal chronic' condition. Drawing on semistructured interviews and participant observation in treatment centers and private households, I juxtapose the discourse of health care providers on 'normalcy' with patients' narratives of everyday life with HIV. I argue that in the context of severe poverty and persistent stigmatization, the transition to normalcy suggested by health care providers during treatment preparation has been difficult for many patients to achieve. Their social quandaries and moral dilemmas suggest that ART introduces new uncertainties into their lives, which keep them trapped in a state of 'permanent transition.'

'I am also a human being!' Antiretroviral treatment in local moral worlds.

The experiences and practices of antiretroviral drug consumers in Tanzania are shaped by economic scarcity, limited state-provided social welfare, and fragile kinship-based solidarity. Embedding antiretroviral therapy (ART) in patients' 'local moral worlds' brings further existential dimensions to the fore that articulate closely with the priority the treatment acquires in their lives. An exemplary case study of a middle-aged HIV-positive man suggests that dignity, social recognition, and belonging may be of central interest and temporarily overshadow patients' concern for mere survival. A stronger focus on patients' moral concerns contributes to a better understanding of the complex dynamics that prevent HIV-positive people from becoming the 'pharmaceutical selves' that are promoted during treatment enrolment. Moreover, it is indispensable to account for the lived experiences of patients struggling with what too readily has been termed a 'chronic disease'.

"We are just supposed to be quiet": the production of adherence to antiretroviral treatment in urban Tanzania.

This article investigates the implementation of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in urban Tanga, Tanzania. First, the enrollment procedures of the national treatment program and medical professionals' techniques to produce adherent patients are examined. Second, exemplary case studies of patients and their families are explored to depict varying responses to the increasing medicalization of everyday lives through the therapy's rigid treatment regime. I argue that the observed disciplinary power exerted on users of antiretroviral medicines throughout treatment preparation and surveillance contrasts with the emergence of 'therapeutic citizens' as described in the wake of ART introduction in other African settings. There are also frictions between propagated biomedical truths and 'rational' lifestyles, on the one hand, and patient reasoning on the other; the latter being strongly influenced by perceived gender roles, economic constraints, and the struggle to maintain mostly kinship-based support networks.