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How people speak of hunger extends beyond statements about food adequacy; people's remarks may reflect experiences of poverty and feelings of vulnerability, and may be used to request help. In this article, we build on the idea of idioms of distress to conceptualize hunger talk as expressing more than an empty belly. We draw on ethnographic data gathered in two settings in South Africa: one a peri-urban area under traditional jurisdiction in the Eastern Cape Province; the other an inner-city suburb of the largest city, Johannesburg, in Gauteng. Hunger-related idioms of distress help illustrate the complex interplay of social, economic, and cultural factors, and allow people to speak of various affective and material aspects of their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A formal Gender Dysphoria classification— as outlined in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders— is a prerequisite for the reimbursement of both gender‐affirming medical care and transgender mental health care in the Netherlands. Gender Dysphoria and its conceptual precursors have always been moving targets: moving due to research, policy, care practices and activism both within and outside of medicine. This raises the question of what Gender Dysphoria is exactly. To elucidate this question, we turn to the people who use the concept in clinical practice to come to a diagnosis and treatment indication: mental health professionals working in gender‐affirming medical care and transgender mental health care. Using a material semiotics approach, we reflect upon how Gender Dysphoria is done in clinical practice. Based on an analysis of seventeen practice‐based interviews with clinicians as well as an examination of clinical guidelines and texts, we describe four modes in which Gender Dysphoria is ordered. These modes of ordering illustrate that Gender Dysphoria is not one, but multiple. We illustrate how in the mode of isolating, Gender Dysphoria is something which is carefully isolated from mental disorders, while in the modes doing the future and narrating, Gender Dysphoria is done as a continuous and predictable object of care. Such orderings of Gender Dysphoria potentially conflict with a fourth mode of ordering: the doing of diversity in transgender health care. The study's findings provide empirical insights into how transgender health care is currently done in The Netherlands and provide a foundation on which ethical debates on what good transgender health care should entail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the experiences and motivations of young volunteers engaged in the development domain of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Uganda. While promoting various family-planning projects, volunteers deftly navigated human-rights discourses of international donors, norms of religious leaders, and development narratives of national policymakers as they attempted to advance their own life projects. Through the creation of new narratives and their agency, the volunteers translated, reformed, and re-presented Global North development discourse as part of a situated theorization on development problems. Simultaneously these educated, middle-class youth embraced the discursively vague field of family planning as the likeliest avenue for social mobility by becoming "big" within national and local patrimonial and patriarchal systems. Although such family-planning programs do seem to allow some volunteers to achieve their goals, they paradoxically reproduce the patriarchal systems that gender-equality NGOs aim to dismantle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the experiences and motivations of young volunteers engaged in the development domain of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Uganda. While promoting various family-planning projects, volunteers deftly navigated human-rights discourses of international donors, norms of religious leaders, and development narratives of national policymakers as they attempted to advance their own life projects. Through the creation of new narratives and their agency, the volunteers translated, reformed, and re-presented Global North development discourse as part of a situated theorization on development problems. Simultaneously these educated, middle-class youth embraced the discursively vague field of family planning as the likeliest avenue for social mobility by becoming "big" within national and local patrimonial and patriarchal systems. Although such family-planning programs do seem to allow some volunteers to achieve their goals, they paradoxically reproduce the patriarchal systems that gender-equality NGOs aim to dismantle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gisli Palsson, Nature, Culture, and Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 234 pp. What do Manhattan spit parties, Innuit genomics, Nim Chimpsky, and Icelandic fishing have [...]

In the early 2000s, massive economic and technical resources accompanied the framing of HIV as a humanitarian and global health crisis in much of the Global South. These resources and framing combined to produce and enhance a wide range of HIV-related structures, skills, and knowledge with afterlives that have exceeded the crisis period in Kenya and elsewhere. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among HIV support groups in Nairobi, Kenya, conducted in the decade that followed the declared crisis period, we examine how local providers of HIV care and services understood the crisis and crisis narratives and practices. We highlight the consequences of after-crisis financial cutbacks, including anxiety, redundancy, financial hardship, and the devaluation and underutilization of expertise and care infrastructures. We argue that the structures, knowledge, and skills developed through engagements with international aid have complex afterlives, often concealed for lack of funding and forced dormancy. Our research examines strategies deployed by actors on the ground to continue offering services and support in the wake of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Musulmanes, Musulmans au Caire, a Teheran, Istanbul, Paris, Dakar Parc de la Villette Pavillon Paul Delouvrier Paris, France May 19-November 14, 2004 Urban Islam Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT) [...]

Emily Margaretten, Street Life Under a Roof youth homelessness in South Africa. Urbana 1L: University of Illinois Press (hb US$85-9780252039607; pb US$25--9780252081118). 2015, 213 pp. In Street Life Under a [...]