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 …
Tag Archives: Poetry
On Plastic Reason by Tobias Rees
This article is part of the series: Second opinion
Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms
by Tobias Rees
University of California Press, 2016, 352 pages
Plastic Reason is an excellent occasion to reflect on the relationship between poetry and science.
One might feel the proverbial contrastive tension in naming together poetry and science, a tension one finds in certain intellectual habits that foreground a …