Toward critical population anthropology

Handwerker, W. Penn, ed. Births and Power: Social Change and the Politics of Reproduction. Boulder: Westview Press, 1990. 227 pp. including chapter references. $27.50 paper.

Landers, John, and Vernon Reynolds, ed. Fertility and Resources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. vii + 199 pp. including chapter references and index. $59.50 cloth.     

Revisiting black medical school extinctions in the Flexner era

Abraham Flexner's 1910 exposé on medical education recommended that only two of the seven extant medical schools for blacks be preserved and that they should train their students to "serve their people humbly" as "sanitarians." Addressing charges of racism, this article traces the roots of the recommendation that blacks serve a limited professional role to the schools themselves and presents evidence that, in endorsing the continuance of Howard's and Meharry's medical programs, Flexner exhibited greater leniency than he had toward comparable schools for white students. Whether his recommendations to eliminate the other five schools were key factors in their extinction is addressed here by examining 1901-30 enrollment patterns. Those patterns suggest that actions of the American Medical Association and state licensing boards, combined with the broader problem of limited premedical educational opportunities for blacks, were more consequential than was the Flexner report both for the extinction of the schools and for the curtailed production of black doctors.     

The critical intimacies of walking in the Abasto Shopping mall,Buenos Aires,Argentina

In recent years, scholars have focused on how affective life becomes implicated in biopolitical interventions in a variety of spaces, including spaces of consumption. Less has been said about how the emotional domain also becomes a space of biopolitics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a mall in Buenos Aires, this paper attends to this link and outlines a methodology that generates insight into the layers of intimacy that help shape these social and political spaces. What I am calling images of critical intimacy point to how these biopolitical spaces may be operating today and also what their limits appear to be.