In this contribution to Somatosphere’s Dispatches from the Pandemic we attend to practices of boundary making, of separating outsides from insides. The new coronavirus appeared on the global stage as a threatening invader that is to be kept outside of human bodies. But it is not obvious how to achieve this. Where and how to make the boundaries around those …
Author Archives: Annemarie Mol
Clean in Times of Covid-19: on Hygiene and Pollution
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, air pollution and greenhouse emissions decrease, or so news reports say. The satellite images of China in lockdown provided a first striking example. In response to this, one Dutch newspaper even proclaimed ‘a winner’ in the coronavirus pandemic, namely ‘the environment’. But that is a bit too hasty. Not only are (as environmental experts warn) …
Juxtaposition
Editor: The following is an introduction to a new Japanese translation of The body multiple. It can be purchased through Suiseisha publishers, as part of their series on The Anthropological Turn.
In 1982/3 I spent the academic year in Paris. There I lived in the Cité Universitaire—student housing that was built in the aftermath of the …
Exemplary: The case of the farmer and the turpentine
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 …
A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn” – Part 4
Editor’s note: In the wake of all the discussion about the ‘ontological turn’ at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference, we asked four scholars, “which texts or resources would you recommend to a student or colleague interested in the uses of ‘ontology’ as an analytical category in recent work in anthropology and science and technology studies?” This was the answer …