Description
Book SynopsisThe radically humanistic essays in
Arc of Interference refigure our sense of the real, the ethical, and the political in the face of mounting social and planetary upheavals. Creatively assembled around Arthur Kleinman’s medical anthropological arc and eschewing hegemonic modes of intervention, the essays advance the notion of a care-ful ethnographic praxis of interference. To interfere is to dislodge ideals of naturalness, blast enduring binaries (human/nonhuman, self/other, us/them), and redirect technocratic agendas while summoning relational knowledge and the will to create community. The book’s multiple ethnographic arcs of interference provide a vital conceptual toolkit for today’s world and a badly needed moral perch from which to peer toward just horizons.
Contributors. Vincanne Adams, João Biehl, Davíd Carrasco, Lawrence Cohen, Jean Comaroff, Robert Desjarlais, Paul Farmer, Marcia Inhorn, Janis H. Jenkins, David S. Jones, Salmaa
Trade Review“This is a book about life and death and about the aftermath of death. That alone makes it relevant to our species and to others, but
Arc of Interference is also a book about the possibility of something more and something wonderful: across the continents, people struggle to care for one another.” -- Paul Farmer, from the Foreword
“In this rich collection, leading medical anthropologists demonstrate ethnography as care. Attending to intimate realities and to the productive power of narrative, they use anthropology for collective healing.” -- Helena Hansen, coauthor of * Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America *
“
Arc of Interference is essential reading for anyone who cares about our troubled times. Its ethnographic creations mend what is broken by asking us to listen, care, and act.” -- Angela Garcia, author of * The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande *
“A major undertaking of humanist anthropology, this volume insists on the necessity of medical anthropology for facing the great challenges of our time, from pandemics and structural violence to climate change and political oppression.
Arc of Interference is a milestone in medical anthropology.” -- Susan Reynolds Whyte, editor of * Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda *
“Biehl, Adams, and their contributors have . . . penned a classic in Arc of Interference. . . . In our current times of reckoning–both global and disciplinary–contributions like Arc of Interference are a good place to start.”
-- Evelyn Hoon * LSE Review of Books *
"As a family physician who treats patients, not disease states, I found this book both reinvigorating and challenging. ... The book is a worthwhile read for physicians who care for their patients, whether domestically or globally."
-- Mark K. Huntington * Family Medicine *
Table of ContentsForeword. Against the Grain: Medical Anthropology in the Anthropocene / Paul Farmer xi
Introduction. Art of Interference / João Biehl and Vincanne Adams 1
Part I. Traversing Imperiled Worlds and Envisaging Human Futures
1. Death by Fire: The Problem of Moral Certainty in China’s Tibet / Vincanne Adams 23
2. Bringing Up the Bodies: Erasing and Caring for Mexicans in the Mexico-US Borderland / Davíd Carrasco 42
3. In the Vast Abrupt: Horizon Work in an Age of Runaway Climate Change / Adriana Petryna 65
Part II. The Category Fallacy and Care Amid the Experts
4. Justifying a Lower Standard of Health Care for the World’s Poor: A Call of Decolonizing Global Health / Salmaan Keshavjee 91
5. The Moral Economies of Heart Disease and Cardiac Care in India / David S. Jones 112
6. Intimate and Social Spheres of Mental Illness / Janis H. Jenkins 133
Part III. Worlds of Biotechnological Promise and the Plasticity of Self and Power
7. A Good Death: The Promise and Threat of Biometric Inclusion for Transgender Women in India / Lawrence Cohen 161
8. Medical Cosmopolitanism in Moral Worlds: Aspirations and Stratifications in Global Quests for Conception / Marcia C. Inhorn 187
9. Environments and Mutable Selves / Margaret Lock 210
Part IV. Tracing Arts of Living (Or, Anthropologies After Hope Has Departed)
10. Anthropology in a Mode of Dying / Robert Desjarlais 239
11. Ethnographic Open / João Biehl 257
12. Thinking on Borrowed Time . . . About Privileging the Human / Jean Comaroff 287
Afterword. Lessons Learned from the Ethnography of Care / Arthur Kleinman 305
In Memoriam 327
Acknowledgments 329
Bibliography 331
Contributors 371
Index 373
