Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge

by Joïo Biehl (Editor), Vincanne Adams (Editor), Paul Farmer (Foreword by)

Overview

The radically humanistic essays in Arc of Interference refigure our sense of the real, the ethical, and the political in the face of mounting social and planetary upheavals. Creatively assembled around Arthur Kleinman’s medical anthropological arc and eschewing hegemonic modes of intervention, the essays advance the notion of a care-ful ethnographic praxis of interference. To interfere is to dislodge ideals of naturalness, blast enduring binaries (human/nonhuman, self/other, us/them), and redirect technocratic agendas while summoning relational knowledge and the will to create community. The book’s multiple ethnographic arcs of interference provide a vital conceptual toolkit for today’s world and a badly needed moral perch from which to peer toward just horizons.

Contributors. Vincanne Adams, João Biehl, Davíd Carrasco, Lawrence Cohen, Jean Comaroff, Robert Desjarlais, Paul Farmer, Marcia Inhorn, Janis H. Jenkins, David S. Jones, Salmaan Keshavjee, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Adriana Petryna

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478019800
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/24/2023
Series:	Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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

What People are Saying About This

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda - Susan Reynolds Whyte

“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.”

Paul Farmer

“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.”

Editorial Reviews

"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."

Family Medicine - Mark K. Huntington

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda - Susan Reynolds Whyte

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