Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography : 47. Arc of Interference : Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge

The radically humanistic essays in 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, the essays 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 from which 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 CONTENTS 7 FOREWORD 11 INTRODUCTION 23 PART I Traversing Imperiled Worlds and Envisaging Human Futures 39 Introduction 39 1 Death by Fire: The Problem of Moral Certainty in China’s Tibet 45 2 Bringing Up the Bodies: Erasing and Caring for Mexicans in the Mexico-US Borderlands 64 3 In the Vast Abrupt: Horizon Work in an Age of Runaway Climate Change 87 PART II The Category Fallacy and Care amid the Experts 107 Introduction 107 4 Justifying a Lower Standard of Health Care for the World’s Poor: A Call for Decolonizing Global Health 113 5 The Moral Economies of Heart Disease and Cardiac Care in India 134 6 Intimate and Social Spheres of Mental Illness 155 PART III Worlds of Biotechnological Promise and the Plasticity of Self and Power 177 Introduction 177 7 A Good Death: The Promise and Threat of Biometric Inclusion for Transgender Women in India 183 8 Medical Cosmopolitanism in Moral Worlds: Aspirations and Stratifications in Global Quests for Conception 209 9 Environments and Mutable Selves 232 PART IV Tracing Arts of Living (Or, Anthropologies after Hope Has Departed) 255 Introduction 255 10 Anthropology in a Mode of Dying 261 11 Ethnographic Open 279 12 Thinking on Borrowed Time . . . About Privileging the Human 309 AFTERWORD Lessons Learned from the Ethnography of Care 327 IN MEMORIAM 349 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 351 BIBLIOGRAPHY 353 CONTRIBUTORS 393 INDEX 395 "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 Arc of Interference revisits the vital and core insights of medical anthropology in light of contemporary planetary and social crises, showing how the field provides central practices for understanding, interfering in, and refashioning a world full of mounting dilemmas.