Beyond the Limits: Conversation, Part IV

Sienna Craig: As we talk, I keep returning to the specificity of moments in ethnographic practice. I keep thinking about the phrase, “Follow the money.” What I mean by this is: How and in what ways do people's ontological commitments to worlds that include ancestors, or particular deities, or ways of rectifying relationships with sacred geographies, connect or relate to larger political–economic questions about who has what kinds of resources—literally money in some cases and other forms of capital in others—to act on illness in those moments? And how does that relate to healing outcomes? Laura Meek: Maybe one way that we are all combining these ontological and critical approaches in our pieces here is through prioritizing the everyday, its quotidian rhythms, intimate relations, and nonhuman actors. I wonder if situating our work in the mundane helps reveal how the limits of health and medicine are imposed and challenged through even the smallest acts of everyday life? I'm thinking of moments in these pieces like sipping tea, applying for IRB approval, offering incense, tasting a pill … Casey Golomski: It's also about what you foreground in your writing: Are you foregrounding somebody's words? Or are you foregrounding relationships between their words and other things in the environment that they may or may not comment upon, but that you think you see as an anthropologist or analyst? What is the locus of the interpretive gaze, where does “the human” sit in this gaze, and how have these been constituted in writing? Sienna Craig: This is part of what I think is both exciting and sometimes confusing about being situated within medical anthropology. On the one hand, the subdiscipline has such breadth; on the other, it is still figuring out how to marry the critical with the speculative. In my piece, I was trying to think and play with the concept of illness narrative, which is such a foundational trope in our subdiscipline—so important in one sense, and yet so incomplete in others. Important in that it can at once elicit and honor cultural specificity and causal complexity, and incomplete because this method and narrative form is hard-pressed to capture the intersubjective nature(s) of illness dynamics. For better and for worse, in a sense, it is still a narrative focused on one narrator's lived experience. Abigail Neely: In thinking about Sienna's piece in this collection in particular, I think the value of starting from our interlocutors is the way that it brings you into that space and opens up possibilities instead of forecloses them. It's not telling you what to think. It's leading you down a certain path but it's not in the way a journal article leads you. I think this is one way to offer more fidelity to many of the places where we work, especially listening to everybody talk about why they're working on questions that would be interesting to medical anthropology. You started talking about a lineage, Casey, but none of us came to medical anthropology through its main lineages; we all got here by going to the field and then all of a sudden thinking, “Oh, wow. What I'm doing is medical anthropology.” This is not the same as going to grad school to work with so-and-so, right? It's a different thing. The pieces in this collection, and especially Sienna's piece, show us why this matters.

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