Andrew McDowell

Andrew McDowell is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist. He is an assistant professor in the Tulane University Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on medical care and social life in India. He has conducted long-term ethnographic research in rural Rajasthan, urban unplanned neighborhoods in Mumbai, and within global health institutions. In each of these contexts he has focused on the ethics and practices of medical care in India by studying how social life enter clinics and how clinical practices enter homes and bodies. In his first book he focused on tuberculosis, its globalized treatment regimen, and communities impacted both by TB and marginalized by caste to theorize the entanglement of bodies and social atmospheres through breath. In another co-authored book he considered the ways that global health takes local shape in Indian TB research. Currently he is completing a manuscript on for-profit medical care in Mumbai to understand how physicians manage the needs of patients, communities, and the market as they treat diseases most associated with poverty. He has published in The Lancet, The International Journal of TB and Lung Disease, PLoS, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Biosocieties, and Medicine, Anthropology, Theory, among other venues. He teaches classes in Medical Anthropology, Anthropology and Global Health, and Anthropology and Infectious Disease.