Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part II

Casey Golomski: As I see it, there are definitive intellectual genealogies within medical anthropology, like the lineage of scholars you may have studied under, the inherited social relations that make up that lineage, and the concepts that make up an intellectual genealogy. And if you originated or grew up outside of that lineage, that becomes a boundary you have to cross in your conceptual and social work to successfully engage with prevailing ideas in writing that hopefully lead to being published in the main arenas of medical anthropology—journals. I came to medical anthropology from an anthropology of ritual and religion background, so that shaped my writing and thinking toward certain concepts and questions. Like China Scherz also wrote about in this journal, I think there are implications for medical anthropology moving away from cultural perspectives toward strongly critical or biomedical ones. It doesn't mean that doing the former or both is not possible or do not have the same value, but they represent different lineages that also become boundaries in a sense, for me. Abigail Neely: I have largely focused on political ecology, which is most often about the environment rather than health. In this framework, you bring together sciences that tell you about environmental processes with a critical approach to that science. From my perspective, little critical medical anthropology engages with materiality as materiality, by which I mean the physicality or the biology of health and illness, to put it crudely. I've noticed going to conferences as an outsider that that kind of materiality seems like a limit in medical anthropology, and that limit has been interesting for me as I think about my contributions to the field. Sienna Craig: I find the idea of lineage, on the one hand, and then this question about materiality, on the other, compelling. My entry into medical anthropology really began by caring about horses and caring about how people cared for horses where I do my fieldwork. That led to ethnoveterinary questions, which led to questions of healing more generally, to multiple ontologies that exist within and beyond Tibetan medicine proper. … Perhaps because of this lineage, I've always been drawn to different ways of thinking about materiality. Laura Meek: Picking up on these questions of lineages and their limits, I would like to see an unsettling of the divide between “applied” medical anthropology versus “theoretical,” as if stories and concepts don't have world-making capacities. I believe that thinking differently does change the world. And the sorts of medical humanities work you brought up earlier, Casey—music, poetry, art, dance—I think is also “applied” in the sense that these are world-making practices. I wonder how we might rethink the different values we ascribe to these different kinds of interventions and their respective genealogies. Tatiana Chudakova: One of the things that I find extremely frustrating is the political role of translation in academic writing, whether that is the expectation that everything will be written in English or the expectation that you must first write in English, and then everything else is just extra. Linguistic drifts or translational vectors are not politically neutral or devoid of relations of power, but they often act as if they are. Abigail Neely: That's a really important insight. And, speaking of the value of different genealogies, we also need to recognize the lineage of scholarship in Black studies and Black feminisms in particular. This work asks us to question the category of the human in ways that to me are very persuasive and important for medical anthropology, and as Casey notes, in thinking about the human in humanities.

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