Journal Club - Medical Anthropology

Harvey TS (2008). Where there is no patient: An anthropological treatment of a biomedical category. Cult Med Psychiatry 32:577-606.

This article continues the dubious tradition in medical anthropology of essentializing both indigenous communities and biomedicine. Drawing mostly on the author’s PhD research among K’ichee’ Maya, it belabors the point that non-Western views of wellness and healing are often at odds with Western models.

It begins by comparing the dynamics of encounters with ethnomedical healers and allopathic practioners. These case studies are used to make the point that Maya models of healing involve a communal body and collaborative notions of wellness (multiple patients or family members attending a single consultation, family members standing in for a patient physically absent) while allopathic models require the presence of a disarticulated, theoretically mandated Western individual.

The author essentializes his own Western culture, theoretically demanding that all Westerners adhere to his model of individualism. Data from pediatrics (collaborative consultations with parents) and the terminally ill (therapeutic interactions with extended families) are ignored, as are Northern spiritual healing traditions (e.g. Pentecostal healing prayer), which would be much better comparisons to the data he compiles among the K’ichee’. Furthermore, it essentializes indigenous communities, denying them a priori the capacity or desire to interact with allopathic medicine in ways that are locally productive.

In the end, he perpetuates one of the most common theoretical fallacies in medical anthropology. What the author manages to criticize effectively is ‘bad doctoring’—but he conflates ‘bad doctoring’ with allopathic practice per se, thereby shutting the door on any analysis of how to engage in effective, cross-cultural allopathic practice.

Finally, the article is deficient in parsimonious political economic or materialist analysis. Does the fact that multiple members of a family attend a consultation really say something about their wellness model, or does it rather imply that their lack of facility in Spanish requires that an entire family’s combined linguistic ability be employed in order to understand what the doctor is saying? Does the fact that a relative stands in for a physically absent patient imply a collective body, or does it implicate a lack of job security and labor protection that does not allow individuals time off from work in order to attend a medical consultation?

"Your being over there tonight..."

Paul Celan - "Dein Hinübersein heute Nacht..." translated by John Felstiner.

Your being over there tonight.
I fetched you back with words, here you are,
all things are true and a waiting
for trueness.

The beanstalk climbs
at our window: think
who's growing up near us and
watches it.

God, so we've read, is
one part and a second, dispersed:
in the death
of all who've been reaped
he grows whole.

Our gaze
leads us there,
it's this
half
we deal with.

Assisi - Paul Celan

Umbrische Nacht.
Umbrische Nacht mit dem Silber von Glocke und Ölblatt.
Umbrische Nacht mit dem Stein, den du hertrugst.
Umbrische Nacht mit dem Stein.

Stumm, was ins Leben stieg, stumm.
Füll die Krüge um.

Irdener Krug.
Irdener Krug, dran die Töpferhand festwuchs.
Irdener Krug, den die Hand eines Schattens für immer verschloss.
Irdener Krug mit dem Siegel des Schattens.

Stein, wo du hinsiehst, Stein.
Lass das Grautier ein.

Trottendes Tier.
Trottendes Tier im Schnee, den die nackteste Hand streut.
Trottendes Tier vor dem Wort, das ins Schloss fiel.
Trottendes Tier, das den Schlaf aus der Hand frisst.

Glanz, der nicht trösten will, Glanz.
Die Toten - sie betteln noch, Franz.

Current Reading List

Things I have been reading in the last few weeks.

1. Robert Pinsky (1996). The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996. The Noonday Press: New York.

2. Martin Buber (1953). For the Sake of Heaven. Meridian Books: New York.

3. Carmen Martinez Novo (2006). Who Defines Indigenous? Identities, Development, Intellectuals, and the State in Northern Mexico. Rutgers University Press.

4. Ernesto Cardenal (2007). Poesía Completa: Tomo 1. Editora Patria Grande: Buenos Aires.

5. Jacques Lacan (1999). Écrits. Norton: New York.

From 'A Love of Death'

A small excerpt from my favorite Robert Pinsky volume, An Explanation of America (1979).

None of this happens precisely as I try
To imagine that it does, in the empty plains,
And yet it happens in the imagination
Of part of the country: not in any place
More than another, on the map, but rather
Like a place, where you and I have never been
And need to try to imagine--place like a prairie
Where immigrants, in the obliterating strangeness,
Thirst for the wide contagion of the shadow
Or prairie--where you and I, with our other ways,
More like the cities or the hills or trees,
Less like the clear blank space with their potential,
Are like strangers in a place we must imagine.

Tenebrae

This incredible poem by Paul Celan, first in German and then an ok English translation by John Felstiner.

Nah sind wir, Herr,
nahe und greifbar.

Gegriffen schon, Herr,
ineinander verkrallt, als wär
der Leib eines jeden von uns
dein Leib, Herr.

Bete, Herr,
bete zun uns,
wir sind nah.

Windschief gingen wir hin,
gingen wir hin, uns zu bücken
nach Mulde und Maar.

Zur Tränke gingen wir, Herr.

Es war Blut, es war,
was du vergossen, Herr.

Es glänzte.

Es warf uns dein Bild in die Augen, Herr.
Augen und Mund stehn so offen und leer, Herr.
Wir haben getrunken, Herr.
Das Blut und das Bild, das im Blut war, Herr.

Bete, Herr.
Wir sind nah.

Near are we, Lord,
near and graspable.

Grasped already, Lord,
clawed into each other, as if
each of our bodies were
your body, Lord.

Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.

Wind-skewed we went there,
went there to bend
over pit and crater.

Went to the water-trough, Lord.

It was blood, it was
what you shed, Lord.

It shined.

It cast your image into our eyes, Lord.
Eyes and mouth stand so open and void, Lord.
We have drunk, Lord.
The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.

Pray, Lord.
We are near.

Ivy "Ivan" Rohloff c1992-2009

Bartleby's Books

Amazing book store day. Tripping around Georgetown enjoying the sun and pop my head into this Americana bookstore where, much to my suprise, I find three books that I have been hunting down for ages:

Adrián Recinos and Delia Goetz. The Annals of the Cakchiquels. 1953.

Sandra Orellana. Indian Medicine in Highland Guatemala. 1987.

Lilly de Jongh Osborne. Indian Crafts of Guatemala and El Salvador. 1965.

To the Virgin Mary

Much I have suffered
On your account
And on your son's, Our Lady.
Since first in my sweet youth
I heard of him;
For not the seer alone,
But even those who serve
A destiny rules. Because I

And many a song which to
The Highest, the Father, I once was
Disposed to sing, was lost
To me, devoured by sadness.

Yet, heavenly one, yet you
I'll celebrate and let no one
Reproach me with
The beauty of native speech,
Now that alone
I go to the field where wild
The lily grows, fearless,
To the inaccessible
Primordial vault
Of the forest,
the Occident,

and over mankind
In place of other deities there reigned
The all-oblivious, Love.

Holderlin, from the fragment An die Madonna

Photos of the year

My favorite pics from the year past.

Books of the Year

Every January I make this little list for myself. These are the 10 books that I thought about most this year. This type of list is different than a "books I read" list, because often the same books make it onto the list multiple years in a row (there are a few books that I go back to repeatedly).

1. Heidegger - Early Greek Thought
2. Holderlin - Poems and Fragments
3. Gadamer - Truth and Method
4. Kant - Critique of Judgment
5. Michael Roth - The Poetics of Resistance
6. WS Merwin - The Dancing Bears
7. Rilke - Duino Elegies
8. Levinas - Humanism of the Other
9. Buber - The Prophetic Faith
10. Kazantzakis - Report to Greco