Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge

Abstract

"The radically humanistic essays of 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, they 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 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"-- Provided by publisher. Foreword: Against the grain: medical anthropology in the Anthropocene / Paul Farmer -- Introduction: Arc of interference / João Biehl and Vincanne Adams -- Death by fire : the problem of moral certainty in China's Tibet / Vincanne Adams -- Bringing up the bodies : erasing and caring for Mexicans in the Mexico-US Borderlands / Davíd Carrasco -- In the vast abrupt : horizon work in an age of runaway climate change / Adriana Petryna -- Justifying a lower standard of health care for the world's poor : a call for decolonizing global health / Salmaan Keshavjee -- The moral economies of heart disease and cardiac care in India / David S. Jones -- Intimate and social spheres of mental illness / Janis H. Jenkins -- A good death : the promise and threat of biometric inclusion for transgender women in India / Lawrence Cohen -- Medical cosmopolitanism in moral worlds : aspirations and stratifications in global quests for conception / Marcia C. Inhorn -- Environments and mutable selves / Margaret Lock -- Anthropology in a mode of dying / Robert Desjarlais -- Ethnographic open / João Biehl -- Thinking on borrowed time . . . about privileging the human / Jean Comaroff -- Afterword: Lessons learned from the ethnography of care / Arthur Kleinman.