Stigma

Abstract

Stigma is the process by which people are discredited socially by being labeled with an undesirable or unacceptable characteristic. No systematic or cohesive bodies of scholarship on stigma exist within anthropology. Most anthropological studies of stigma have focused on stigmas associated with infectious and chronic disease, such as mental illness, addiction, HIV/AIDS, and infertility. Ethnographies describe the misery of stigma but also show how people cope and resist. Social analyses highlight how stigma both reflects and reinforces power differences and the broader social order. Evolutionary analyses explore possible adaptive benefits to stigmatization, such as avoiding contagion. Key challenges include lack of definitional clarity, inadequate tools to allow comparison or enable the study of co‐occurring stigmas that negatively exacerbate each other, and concerns that researchers who have not lived with severe stigmas lack the necessary insight to challenge conventional understandings.

Accessing heat: Environmental stigma and ‘porous’ infrastructural configurations in Ulaanbaatar

“…It moves beyond a territorialised understanding of stigma, to include diverse practices that are stigmatised on many scales throughout an interconnected urban configuration. The frame of ‘environmental stigma’ moves beyond an examination of ‘local moral worlds’ (Brewis and Wutich, 2018: 1). It requires an encapsulation of socio-cultural discursive practices, but at the same time a consideration of the minutiae of variegated urban material elements that make up these divergent spaces, elements that are under constant change – through either the combining of new materials to make a newly constructed apartment building, or the slow deterioration of buildings built many decades earlier under very different material and political circumstances.…”

“…Following Brewis and Wutich’s (2018: 1) definition of stigma as the marginalisation of someone because they are associated with something that is ‘classified as unacceptable or undesirable’, I argue that in Ulaanbaatar it is through the association with forms of infrastructural effects, or their lack, that one becomes stigmatised. Environmental stigmatisation in Ulaanbaatar is the stigmatisation of people viewed to be linked to types of actions and practices that are seen as having polluting or adverse environmental effects (Zhuang et al, 2016: 1323).…”

Stigma in African genomics research: Gendered blame, polygamy, ancestry and disease causal beliefs impact on the risk of harm

“…The first and perhaps most important of these, is that what may be called ‘stigma’, is most often a more general concern about research-related harm ( Millum et al, 2019 ). Using examples of general harm to illustrate the potential of genomics to cause stigma is inappropriate – not only because it obscures the complex processes by which stigma arises and is perpetuated ( Brewis and Wutich, 2018 ; Link and Phelan, 2001 ; Tyler and Slater, 2018 ), but also because it obscures from view the much more nuanced way in which genomics research and stigma intersect. As a result, fundamental questions are left uninterrogated and researchers are left to navigate these issues without guidance or evidence.…”

Weight stigma and eating behaviors on a college campus: Are students immune to stigma's effects?

“…Two standard ways that stigma is measured are through standardized scales to capture explicit stigma, and reaction time tests to capture implicit (internalized) stigma: as different constructs of stigma they do not need to correlate with each other to be describing stigma meaningfully (Brewis and Wutich, 2017). Measures of explicit stigma theoretically capture what people say, while measures of implicit stigma are thought to better capture habituated subconscious beliefs; these are both distinct from the actual experience of being weight stigmatized.…”