This article is part of the following series: Contested Truths
One of the most significant challenges to confronting and mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic concerns the manufacturing, circulation, and interpretation of what we call “contested truths.” By this term, we mean the many and varied ways in which official, institutional, and/or scientific facts and recommendations about COVID-19 are challenged, ignored, or subverted at multiple scales, from the individual to the state. …
This article is part of the following series: Working Definitions: Making and Unmaking “Medical Anthropology” around the World
We are an ensemble cast. As such, it is perhaps appropriate that one of the first places where we all came together as a team had at one point been a set for a Canadian television show. Now the buildings are owned by the First Nations, an Anishinaabek community, with whom we were partnered. We came together through a series …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
“COVID is the thing that works differently. It’s not our experience of the illness that works differently.”
A recent observation by Hannah Alcock
We both spend a lot of time in hospital Emergency Departments (EDs). We know the moods, the smells, the human tableaus played out in a loop with each new intake, each new shift. As a medical …
This article is part of the following series: A reader's guide to the "ontological turn"
December 29, 2014
A friend sent me the following text and footnote from Peter Skafish’s introduction to Viveiros de Castro’s book, Cannibal Metaphysics, (p. 10-11) which he characterizes as:
“perhaps the first attempt by a “real” anthropologist at doing speculative philosophy on the basis of ethnographic materials, and to lay out how anthropology has perhaps already been doing this …
What might arise from an encounter between medical anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) as they investigate the common subject of health and (bio)medicine? One answer could be found at the panel Repositioning health, illness and the body: the challenge of new theoretical approaches to medical anthropology, organized by Simon Cohn and Rebecca Lynch at ASA[1] decennial …
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter
W. W. Norton, 2013, paperback, 627 pages.
Incomplete Nature is a big book, literally and conceptually. The subtitle “How Mind Emerged From Matter” hints of a grand synthesis and Terrence Deacon, chair of University of California–Berkeley’s anthropology department, presents a dense argument which defies usual labels. The result is part …