Translating disability in a Muslim community: a case of modular translation.

This study examines how Muslim religious leaders (imams) introduce the liberal notion of disability to their communities in Israel. The project described, initiated and supported by an American NGO, provides a case for exploring how the secular notion of disability rights is cast and recast in a Muslim world of meaning. It focuses on the mediation strategy that I call modular translation, employed by imams in sermons delivered for the purpose of altering or improving the status and conditions of people with disabilities.

The field worker's fields: ethics, ethnography and medical sociology.

Sociologists who do field work in medical settings face an intractable tension between their disciplinary field, which takes a critical perspective toward medicine, and their ethnographic field, which often includes physicians. This paper explores the ethical problems that result from the collision of the two fields. While in the field, ethnographers are forced to choose between sociology and their obligations to host members, as they decide whether to disclose their actual research agendas, whether to ask tough questions or to reveal their concerns, and whether to give advice.

Boundary at work: alternative medicine in biomedical settings.

The study explores the process of boundary demarcation within hospital settings by examining a new phenomenon in modern medicine: collaboration between alternative and biomedical practitioners (primarily physicians) working together in biomedical settings. The study uses qualitative methods to examine the nature of this collaboration by calling attention to the ways in which the biomedical profession manages to secure its boundaries and to protect its hard-core professional knowledge. It identifies the processes of exclusion and marginalization as the main mechanisms by which symbolic boundaries are marked daily in the professional field.

Between formal and enacted policy: changing the contours of boundaries.

This study examines the strategies of the biomedical discourse vis-à-vis the growing public demand for alternative medicine by comparing formal and informal claims for jurisdiction. The analysis is based on two main sources of data from Israel: (a) two formal position statements, and (b) a series of participant observations and interviews with practitioners in clinical settings where biomedical and alternative practitioners collaborate. At the formal level, the biomedical discourse seeks to secure its dominant position by drawing strict cognitive and moral lines differentiating "proper biomedicine" from "improper alternative medicine.

Changing boundaries: modes of coexistence of alternative and biomedicine.

In this article, the authors address the boundaries of institutional structures, the dynamics of their configuration, and the nature of their permeability. The authors explored these issues in Israel, where the changing relationship of bio- and alternative medicine elucidates recent processes of professional boundary redefinition. They used qualitative methods to analyze in-depth interviews in clinics and hospitals where alternative and biomedical practitioners work under the formal auspices of publicly sponsored biomedical organizations.

Entering the well-guarded fortress: alternative practitioners in hospital settings.

There is a growing evidence that alternative health care practitioners and physicians are working together in collaborative patterns. The paper examines these collaborative patterns in hospital settings in Israel. On the theoretical level, the specific issues relate to theories concerning relationships between dominant institutional structures which enjoy the benefits of epistemological legitimacy as well as extensive, supportive social structures and groups of non-conformists who seek to attain many of the same goals by utilizing different methods based on other epistemologies.