Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge

Published by Duke University Press 2023

Arc of Interference

Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge

Edited by: João Biehl and Vincanne Adams
Preface by: Paul Farmer

In the series Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478024378

Overview
Contents

About this book

Arc of Interference revisits the vital and core insights of medical anthropology in light of contemporary planetary and social crises, showing how the field provides central practices for understanding, interfering in, and refashioning a world full of mounting dilemmas.

Author / Editor information

João Biehl is Susan Dod Brown Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Princeton University and coeditor of Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming, also published by Duke University Press.

Vincanne Adams is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco and author of Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move, also published by Duke University Press.

Paul Farmer (1959–2022) was Kolokotrones University Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Reviews

“This is a book about life and death and about the aftermath of death. That alone makes it relevant to our species and to others, but Arc of Interference is also a book about the possibility of something more and something wonderful: across the continents, people struggle to care for one another.”

-- Paul Farmer, from the Foreword

“In this rich collection, leading medical anthropologists demonstrate ethnography as care. Attending to intimate realities and to the productive power of narrative, they use anthropology for collective healing.”

-- Helena Hansen, coauthor of Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America

“Arc of Interference is essential reading for anyone who cares about our troubled times. Its ethnographic creations mend what is broken by asking us to listen, care, and act.”

-- Angela Garcia, author of The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

“A major undertaking of humanist anthropology, this volume insists on the necessity of medical anthropology for facing the great challenges of our time, from pandemics and structural violence to climate change and political oppression. Arc of Interference is a milestone in medical anthropology.”

-- Susan Reynolds Whyte, editor of Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda

“Biehl, Adams, and their contributors have . . . penned a classic in Arc of Interference. . . . In our current times of reckoning–both global and disciplinary–contributions like Arc of Interference are a good place to start.”

-- Evelyn Hoon LSE Review of Books

"As a family physician who treats patients, not disease states, I found this book both reinvigorating and challenging. ... The book is a worthwhile read for physicians who care for their patients, whether domestically or globally."

-- Mark K. Huntington Family Medicine

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
FOREWORD Against the Grain. Medical Anthropology in the Anthropocene Paul Farmer Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
INTRODUCTION Arc of Interference João Biehl and Vincanne Adams Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I Traversing Imperiled Worlds and Envisaging Human Futures
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
1 Death by Fire: The Problem of Moral Certainty in China’s Tibet Vincanne Adams Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
2 Bringing Up the Bodies: Erasing and Caring for Mexicans in the Mexico-US Borderlands Davíd Carrasco Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	42
3 In the Vast Abrupt: Horizon Work in an Age of Runaway Climate Change Adriana Petryna Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
PART II The Category Fallacy and Care amid the Experts
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
4 Justifying a Lower Standard of Health Care for the World’s Poor: A Call for Decolonizing Global Health Salmaan Keshavjee Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
5 The Moral Economies of Heart Disease and Cardiac Care in India D S. Jones Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	112
6 Intimate and Social Spheres of Mental Illness Janis H. Jenkins Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
PART III Worlds of Biotechnological Promise and the Plasticity of Self and Power
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
7 A Good Death: The Promise and Threat of Biometric Inclusion for Transgender Women in India Lawrence Cohen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	161
8 Medical Cosmopolitanism in Moral Worlds: Aspirations and Stratifications in Global Quests for Conception Marcia C. Inhorn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
9 Environments and Mutable Selves Margaret Lock Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	210
PART IV Tracing Arts of Living (Or, Anthropologies after Hope Has Departed)
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
10 Anthropology in a Mode of Dying Robert Desjarlais Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239
11 Ethnographic Open João Biehl Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
12 Thinking on Borrowed Time . . . About Privileging the Human Jean Comaroff Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	287
AFTERWORD Lessons Learned from the Ethnography of Care Arthur Kleinman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	305
IN MEMORIAM Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	327
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	329
BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	331
CONTRIBUTORS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	371
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	373

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 408

eBook

Published: February 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781478024378