Reflections on the tensions between the general and the particular
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
This post is an introduction to our new series, The Ethnographic Case.
We launch this series with a question: What is an ethnographic case? As ethnography is a process and practice of authorship, this question produces another: What can it be made to be?
This series explores what cases can generate, and our reasons for resisting or embracing them …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
This post is part of our new series, The Ethnographic Case.
In 1976, when I was eighteen and he was eighty-four, my grandfather told me the case of the young farmer and the turpentine. By then this case was more than fifty years old. It stemmed from the time that my grandfather, Chris Mol, worked as a general practitioner …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
This post is part of our new series, The Ethnographic Case.
One doctor, seven medical students and an anthropologist crowd into the patient’s very small hospital room. The doctor places his briefcase next to the bed, introduces himself to the patient and turns to his students. Whose turn to do a respiratory examination? Mumbling, shuffling, staring at shoes but …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
Cases set boundaries; cases draw you in. Often imagined as they appear in traditional museums – archipelagos of order in ordered spaces with carefully placed markers for larger narratives – cases partition, sequence, and present artifacts and information for visitor attentions. As anthropologists interested in museums and other exhibitionary spaces, we consider the parameters around what is encased and what …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
Spectrum:a broad range of varied but related ideas or objects, the individual features of which tend to overlap so as to form a continuous series or sequence. (Dictionary.com)
The presence of disability in American public culture is at once increasingly visible and yet still segregated and rendered invisible. In our multi-sited ethnographic research on Disability, Personhood, and “the New Normal” …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
While conducting ethnographic fieldwork on indigenous political organizing in northwest Guatemala in the mid 2000s, I encountered, quite by accident, an apparent epidemic of Bell’s Palsy—an illness involving the paralysis of one half of the face, known locally as derrame facial (facial stroke) or parálisis facial. After conversing with sufferers, I began to wonder what their condition and the …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
This case is a story that a soldier told me. I call her Kelly, and she said it was “the craziest story I was gonna get” from her. So for her it was an extreme, a worst case, but also a kind of telos of conditions she lived with and feelings she felt every day in occupied Iraq. It was …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
“Is writing seemly? Does the writer cut a respectable figure? Is it proper to write? Is it done?”
– Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Disseminations
~ ~ ~
“I choose… Estrella. Yes, you can call me Estrella when you write.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
Estrella nodded her head, a wisp of dyed honey-blonde hair coming loose from …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
What constitutes evidence of sexual assault?
I am seated in a courtroom as a sexual assault forensic nurse is asked to explain, by a prosecutor, the basic tenets of genital anatomy. During the sexual assault trials I observed in Milwaukee, WI, testimony is highly orchestrated. Sequestration orders bar the presence of witnesses from the courtroom unless they are testifying. The …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
“The question for me of whether to get a stomach tube for my mother was whether or not she has lived her natural life completely.[1] Maybe her time has come and maybe not. The tube just makes a natural life last longer. . . But it is really difficult! It just has to be case by case…”
Yasuda-san pursed …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
The Chinese film, Under the Dome, tells the story of a former CCTV news anchor’s struggle to understand and deal with smog in the wake of her pregnancy and motherhood. The filmmaker and narrator, Chai Jing, makes a case for reducing pollution in China by highlighting the potential correlation between Beijing’s smog and the tumor found in her developing fetus, …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
Advocates of a more robust democratic citizenship in Brazil often point bitterly to the frequent practice of cutting ahead of others in line. Such line-cutting, they lament, indicates a popular attachment to hierarchy and a disregard of one’s fellow citizens. Democratic citizenship, so this line of thought goes, inheres in one’s respect for the stranger’s time, body and life-world, a …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
A black plastic garbage bag, held in place by masking tape, covered the drinking fountain jutting out from the brick wall. It was an incongruous sight in the otherwise clean, carpeted church hallway on the outskirts of Charleston, West Virginia. The thick covering separated observer from object, simultaneously hiding and calling attention to what it ostensibly sought to obfuscate. “[Facilities …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
In recent anthropological film practice we see a shift from established visual ethnographic paradigms focused on discursive representation (Crawford 1992), towards the realm of interdisciplinary cooperation and experimentation. Working with filmmakers and artists has a long history in visual anthropology, however recent theoretical debates open up new terrains for cooperation with various fields like science and technology studies, bio-medical sciences, …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
Tashi thought they were his kids. They were his kids. He was the only father they had ever known. He had been their father since the day each of his four children was born. After being recognized as a Convention Refugee in Canada, he applied for permanent residence and listed his wife and children as his “overseas dependents” on his …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
There was a small glitch when our book Second Chances was almost ready to go to press. It was a layout problem. The Table of Contents was congested with too many chapters, too many vignettes, and too many authors[1]. We had to drop the authors’ names and in the end, for technical reasons, the good people at Duke …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
On a boat sailing through the still waters of the Noi River, a tributary of the Chao Phraya River in Thailand, Miura-san, a senior male engineer from a Japanese engineering consulting company, grows increasingly excited about the legendary Dutch irrigation engineer Homan van der Heide, who designed the basic plan for the entire water infrastructure of the delta in the …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
In my fieldwork at the Cardiology Unit at Vilnius public hospital I encountered what I call “the cake case.” In 2009-2010 I was in Lithuania to study how medical care was transforming as the state embarked on health care reform that aimed to rationalize and privatize public services. In particular, the neoliberal reform projects targeted informal payments, or “bribes,” that …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
“The necessity of respecting game is still widely acknowledged by Inuit. The awareness, that the continuity of society depends on the maintenance of correct relationships with animals and the land, is still very strong.” (Aupilaarjuk et al. 1999: 2)
In 2012, I spent eight months living and working in the Inuvialuit hamlet of Paulatuuq, which is situated on the coast …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
In 1956, Claude Lévi-Strauss addressed a letter to the 1st International Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris. In the letter, he stated that “after the aristocratic humanism of the Renaissance and the bourgeois humanism of the 19th century” the Congress announced the arrival of “a democratic humanism” in which “every human society must be represented, not …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
The case that follows illustrates an ethnographic flashpoint in my work on disability. Here, I offer an account of a single morning during my first research trip in Central America. The day marked my only visit to a particularly well-known institution (or shelter) for children and adults with disabilities. The following summer, I would learn that the scenes depicted below …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
This is a story of women who invoke another woman’s psychosomatic distress to make a case for the green good life and its possibilities. Hailing from a northern German village transformed by sustainable development projects, the people in this story weigh the promises of the Energiewende, Germany’s “energy turn” from nuclear to renewable energy, through the experience of one woman …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
As a visual anthropologist, I went to the field with the intent of making a documentary film about one of my informants, while also conducting ethnographic research with sex workers who worked on the streets of the historic district of Quito, Ecuador. Over the three years I ended up staying in the field, I spent time with 40 women. I …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
The first time I encountered Judy I was with Dr. Erlich, gathering fact sheets about vulvar pain conditions. Dr. Robichaud, the other physician at the Vulvar Health Clinic (VHC)[i], and a new resident entered the pod in a white-coated blur—animatedly conferring, hastily scribbling on forms that they were pulling from file cabinets, and getting on the phone to …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
This case begins with an unsettling email. It came from a powerful man of the church, a Mennonite executive, and it was a response to an email from me, in which I told this leader that he was perpetuating violence against queer people.
I was an ethnographer writing about the Mennonite movement for queer justice, and I also was a …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
In this short essay, I will try to convince you of the importance of earthworms in thinking about politics.
If this sounds like an argument, that is because it is. I first organized the materials in this essay to make a case. They were part of a public thesis ‘defense’ that took place in the small country of the …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
Is ethnographic research analogous to a gold mine project, an extractive industry that makes a social and material landscape knowable, and hence governable? Is knowledge construction a veil for narrative extraction, where knowledge is a commodity to be reassembled for productive gain? I ask these questions as a way to tease out the tensions experienced between me and my collaborators …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
During her pregnancy, Puthea went to a private maternity clinic for regular ultrasound exams. This clinic was one of the larger and more popular in Phnom Penh at the time (2010) and one that provided echo poar, color ultrasound services.[i] Puthea preferred color to black and white scans because she could see more detail. Following the doctor’s narration, …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
This entry concludes the series “The Ethnographic Case” which ran every other Monday between June 2015 and July 2016. The bookCase, which holds 27 cases, can be accessed here.
One day, early on in the series, we received two submissions. Their similar anatomy was striking. Each featured a medical waiting room. Someone entered the space with a gift …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology