Wainwright Megan
a Division of Social and Behavioural Sciences, School of Public Health and Family Medicine , University of Cape Town , Cape Town , South Africa.
Med Anthropol. 2017 May-Jun;36(4):332-347. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2017.1287180. Epub 2017 Feb 7.
The sensory experience of breathing, particularly the sensation of breathlessness in the case of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), is a rich though understudied topic in medical anthropology. Fieldwork in Uruguay made it clear to me that to study the sensorial experience of breathlessness, I would also have to study the widely shared cultural conceptualizations and practices surrounding air, breath, and health. In this article, I illustrate ethnographically how the experience of breathing and breathlessness is closely tied to perceptions of air outside the body - in particular humidity, temperature change, wind, and contamination. In conceptualizing breath as the mechanism and air the medium for environmental embodiment, I bring together sensorial medical anthropology, anthropology of the body, and the anthropology of wind and climate. My findings, in light of similar findings across contexts, suggest that a body transformed by COPD is hyperperceptive and hypersensitive to changes in air.
呼吸的感官体验，尤其是慢性阻塞性肺疾病（COPD）患者的呼吸急促感，在医学人类学中是一个丰富但研究不足的话题。在乌拉圭的田野调查让我清楚地认识到，要研究呼吸急促的感官体验，我还必须研究围绕空气、呼吸和健康的广泛共享的文化概念和实践。在本文中，我通过民族志的方式说明呼吸和呼吸急促的体验如何与对体外空气的感知紧密相连——特别是湿度、温度变化、风以及污染。在将呼吸概念化为环境体现的机制、空气作为媒介的过程中，我将感官医学人类学、身体人类学以及风和气候人类学结合在一起。根据不同背景下的类似研究结果，我的研究发现表明，因慢性阻塞性肺疾病而发生改变的身体对空气变化具有高度的感知力和敏感性。
