In one of several letters he wrote to me during my fieldwork, Serge addressed what he considered to be the problems of integration for disabled people in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Writing this letter in November 2013, he reflected on the upcoming International Day of Persons with Disabilities on the 3rdof December. “Across the world,” he wrote, …
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We can trace an unbroken record of injustice back through generations, to our grandfathers and our grandmothers, our great-grandfathers and to those before them. We can trace them back to the time when a label was put on our people, legitimate victim. Other people learned that they could victimize us and nothing would happen because the laws, your laws, did
On a sunny, stifling afternoon, my friend, an Ayurvedic doctor, ushers me into a scantily furnished examining room of his clinic in central Kerala, South India. There, a small, stout woman sits on a chair. Her name is Mercy.1 She is wearing a salwar kameez, an outfit comprising of a long shirt, baggy pants and a scarf, rather …
Umm Adnan,[i] like many women I met during my research on Down Syndrome and kinship in Jordan, was extremely protective of her son Adnan. The youngest of four, Adnan was constantly battling sickness. His health issues, in conjunction with Down Syndrome, marked the toddler as especially vulnerable, and Umm Adnan reacted by cultivating her own brand of fierce maternal …
Medico-legal borderlands?
What is this nebulous sounding compound concept, “medico-legal borderlands”? How has it been used by social scientists whose ethnographic studies scratch at itches in the intersecting areas of human health and illness and the organization and production of health care systems?
Through a collection of four essays curated for this Somatosphere series, we invite readers to join us …
The concept of the “medico-legal borderland” commonly refers to the discursive intersection of medical and legal knowledges in the constitution of a new knowledge regime (McClelland, 2013). The following essay adds to the discussion of borderlands an empirical illustration showing how the flow of knowledge in borderland spaces is highly policed and disciplined. Further, it demonstrates that even disciplining itself …