This post was contributed by Nick Shapiro (Oxford).
This entry is a follow up to Sadeq Rahimi’s posting of Byron Good’s Marett lecture—originally presented on 30 April 2010 in Oxford, UK. The morning following this address a fellow doctoral student, Nadine Levin, a Filmmaker, Robert Rapoport and I sat down with Professor Good to record a series of contextualizing interviews. That May Day morning, as revelers leaped from Magdalen Bridge into the River Cherwell despite tepid attempts by the police to impede this longstanding tradition, we recorded the following clips.
For those interested in better understanding the specific circumstances that gave rise to the lecture, we composed a short companion piece that lays out Professor Good’s shifting research interests in the 20 years since the publication of Medicine, Rationality and Experience.
We also filmed a more in-depth biographical sequence. In the first two sections Professor Good recounts his early academic history, from his birth to starting graduate school at the University of Chicago (Section 1) and from meeting his future wife and collaborator, Professor DelVecchio-Good, to conducting fieldwork together in Iran (Section 2). In the combined following sections Good details the beginnings of the journal Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry and “first real moment of something like a Harvard approach to medical anthropology” (Section 3) and traces out his intellectual trajectory from 1976 to his contemporary work in Aceh, Indonesia (Section 4).
This post was kindly made possible by permission of University of Oxford anthropology podcasts.
Lastly, there is some “threading” or distortion around Professor Good’s mouth and as he gesticulates, which is either due to my accidental over-compression of the HDV file or the thick coat of digital dust that must have accumulated on these links as they lay unused over the summer—my apologies either way.
Nick Shapiro is a doctoral candidate in medical anthropology at the University of Oxford.
2 replies on “A biographical interview with Byron Good”
Of course, a warm thanks should also be extended to Professors Good and DelVecchio Good, for their insights, patience and time generosity while visiting Oxford. It was a charmed visit!
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