Examining the gray cube effect on naïve viewers' appreciation of street-based art in Hong Kong and Poland.

The present research investigates the appreciation of sanctioned street-based art among naïve viewers. It examines the role of viewing context in art appreciation, by experimentally testing a gray cube effect, which posits that street-based artworks are more likely to be identified as art (H1), liked more (H2), and understood more (H3) when viewed on the street. Identical procedures were carried out in Hong Kong (Experiment 1) and Lublin, Poland (Experiment 2), separately, sampling local artworks and local viewers. Experiment 1 tested 14 murals with 100 Hong Kongers; Experiment 2 tested 7 sculptures and 7 murals with 88 Poles. Participants were randomly assigned to either viewing street-based artworks on the street (gray cube) or viewing digital images of street-based artworks in a laboratory. The participants assessed each artwork in terms of art identification, liking, and understanding. These "twin" experiments yielded identical results, i.e., street-based artworks were liked more (H2) and understood more (H3) but not more likely to be identified as art (H1) on the street than in the laboratory. Overall, the present findings support the gray cube effect with ecologically valid data, and the effect seems robust across Western and Eastern cultural contexts and across genres of sculpture and mural.

Psychiatrization of adoption practices in contemporary Poland.

In this article, I propose to take a closer look at the practices of kinning in the context of adoption in contemporary Poland. I am interested in the social production of this 'unfamiliar kind of kinship' and the positions of various actors involved in defining the "adoptable" children and the "families of excess" capable of adopting. My focus will be on the ways in which the psy-knowledge and practices are implied in these social processes of defining and delimiting the norm, the proper, and the ideal. This process can be called a progressing psychiatrization of kinning, this time developing on a specific terrain of adoption (i.e., the most desired state of exception from ideal family-nuclear, heteronormative, based around married, and non-divorced couple). I will consider both top-down and bottom-up processes within which the individuals, state institutions, and psy-knowledge interact. Thus, I propose to look at a sub-process of psychiatrization, which takes place in the specific ethnographic context at the intersection of family and social policies, medicalization and psychologization of familial relations, and troubled, disconnected biographies. Throughout the article, I discuss how the adoptive families become patient-consumers within the system of healthcare. It is despite the fact that when they enter the adoption network, they start to take part in the political process of solving the social problem. In fact, they become a part of the network, which enables privatization of the social problem and works toward individualizing the responsibility for solving it.

Critical Medical Anthropology--a voice for just and equitable healthcare.

The article presents a paradigm current in contemporary medical anthropology - Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA), which merges political-economic approaches with a culturally sensitive analysis of human behaviour grounded in anthropological methods. It is characterized by a strongly applied orientation and a devotion to improving population health and promoting health equity. The beginning of CMA dates back to the 1970s when the interdisciplinary movement called the political economy of health was developed. Today, CMA has grown into one of three major perspectives used in anthropological research devoted to health, illness and wellbeing. The author discusses the origins, key concepts and CMA's usefulness for social research, and its significance for the design of effective policies in the realm of public health. Examplary interventions and ethnographic researches are introduced and wider usage is advocated of such works and methods by bureaucrats and medical staff for understanding the patients' behavior, and the influence of social, economic and political factors on the workings of particular health systems.

Why and how to include anthropological perspective into multidisciplinary research in the Polish health system.

The article focuses on ways in which anthropological knowledge, incorporated into multidisciplinary and multilevel research projects, can be applied for understanding health- and illness-related behaviours and functioning of the health system in Poland. It selectively presents potential theoretical and methodological contributions of the anthropological discipline to the field of applied health research, and briefly reviews selected ethnographic theories and methods for researching and interpreting socio-cultural conditioning of healing, health and illness related practices. The review focuses on the following approaches: Critical Medical Anthropology, Cultural Interpretive Theory, phenomenology, narrative analysis, and the biography of pharmaceuticals. The author highlights the need for team work and use of a holistic perspective while analyzing the health system in Poland, and underlines the need for serious attention and financial support to be given to multidisciplinary research projects of which anthropology is a part.