Here I ruminate on recent writing experiments at the convergence of poetry and ethnography as a means to convey experiences of suffering. Recent ethnographies of suffering highlight innovative ways medical anthropologists embed themselves in their accounts of others’ suffering, as well as their misapprehensions about what occurs in this process of witnessing. Dwelling in these misapprehensions shows the obvious potency …
Author Archives: Casey Golomski
Lenore Manderson, Elizabeth Cartwright and Anita Hardon’s The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology
The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology
Edited by Lenore Manderson, Elizabeth Cartwright and Anita Hardon
Routledge, 2016, 393 pages.
This is not a run-of-the-mill medical anthropology reader. Thank Routledge, its editors, and contributors for it. As someone who regularly convenes intermediate-advanced courses in medical anthropology, I’m grateful for its readability, teachable qualities, and particular theoretical angles. I’m going to …
Claire Decoteau’s Ancestors and Antiretrovirals
Ancestors and Antiretrovirals:
The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa
University of Chicago Press, 2013, 324 pp.
The specter of “tradition versus modernity” returns as a conundrum for understanding and signifying HIV/AIDS in post-apartheid South Africa in Claire Decoteau’s sociological monograph, Ancestors and Antiretrovirals. Interpretive social scientists like Decoteau are well trained to …