All That Was Not Her (Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography)

While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone—what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly’s life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist’s engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their ending. "All That Was Not Her is a story of a woman and her struggle with chronic illness set in an American city. It is a story about care given and withheld; about dying and the things that take up residence in the aftermath of a life. And it is about an anthropologist-grasping at facts and near-facts as they whiz by in the tumult of loss-who recognizes the improbability of a relationship that lasted well over a decade. Todd Meyers asks, "How to speak of and to a subject after death, to produce writing as a form of afterlife?" His answer is an ethnography that is granular, returning to small moments woven through months and years, exposing a fabric of relationships stretched thin by economic poverty, illness, and other crises. All That Was Not Her speaks to concerns in the human sciences about representation, erasure, the difficulty of repair, and letting go"-- Provided by publisher "Todd Meyers offers an intimate ethnographic portrait of a woman he met during his fieldwork as a way to explore the complexity of the anthropologist's personal relationships with their subjects and how to speak of and to someone who is gone."--