Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals

"Seeking to learn how obstetric violence is routinized in Mexico, Smith-Oka reveals how societal inequalities shape trainee physicians' education, embodiment, and even souls. Taking readers backstage in medical interns' hospital work through rich and readable ethnography, she shows students' ideals meeting realities of toxic hierarchy, discrimination and precarity as they become doctors. Essential reading for understanding how professionalization reproduces inequality!"

 

Emily Wentzell, author of Maturing Masculinities: Aging, Chronic Illness, and Viagra in Mexico

"Vania Smith-Oka is a gifted ethnographer of the anthropology of reproduction. In Becoming Gods she reveals the embodied transformational processes through which Mexican medical trainees become good doctors, vividly depicting how doing so is hindered by the country's profoundly resource-poor medical system and the persistence of racial, social, class, and gendered hierarchies."

Carole Browner, co-editor of Reproduction, Globalization, and the State: New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectiv

New Books Network - New Books in Anthropology interview with Vania Smith-Oka

New Books Network - New Books in Anthropology

"The ethnography is sensitively and respectfully written, yet also visceral enough to evoke a deep feeling in the reader....The weight behind Smith-Oka's arguments connecting societal everyday violence to the normalization of violence against bodies in so-called health 'care', is a valuable contribution to the scholarship."

Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology