Crossing Bodily, Social, and Intimate Boundaries: How Class, Ethnic, and Gender Differences Are Reproduced in Medical Training in Mexico

Abstract

Bodies are useful instruments for understanding the reproduction of inequalities. In this article, we investigate why and how bodily, social, intimate, and physical boundaries are crossed and what this can tell us about individual and social bodies. We unpack how seeing and being seen, touching and being touched, or feeling and being felt are conditioned in very particular ways by the broader political economy. Participants in this ethnographic research in Mexico used the term manitas to describe how they trained their senses (hands, ears, eyes) during medical practice; how they learned through practice on the bodies of less‐agentive populations (female, raced, or impoverished); and how they crossed intimacy, structural, and physical boundaries through what we term somatic translation: seeing others’ bodies with their own. Manitas was developed unconsciously by doctors, never explicitly taught or learned in practice, reproducing social difference. These forms of learning highlight a friction between the violence of knowing and the importance of touch as a legitimate mode of care. This form of tactile and sensorial learning entails not only a form of boundary crossing that is medically useful, but it is also a form of boundary crossing that surfaces social inequalities by taking advantage of them. [hospital ethnography, anthropology of reproduction, embodiment, social boundaries, Mexico]

Operating at the Edge of Il/legality: Systemic Corruption in Mexican Health Care

“…Our work builds upon medical anthropological perspectives of Mexican health care. Medical anthropologists have observed how Mexican medical students and residents practice on the bodies of “less agentive populations (including female, racialized, and impoverished),” thus reproducing social difference (Smith‐Oka and Marshalla 2019; see also Smith‐Oka 2015). What is missing from analyses of (micro)aggressive person‐to‐person interactions is how corruption is a systemic (not just individual) problem in the Mexican health care system.…”