Arc of interference: Medical anthropology for worlds on edge By JoãoBiehl, VincanneAdams (Eds.), Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2023. 385 pp.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: How can anthropology promote care-and caring-in a world that increasingly feels like it's spinning out of control?This sober question frames Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge, a festschrift prepared, with great care, to honor Arthur Kleinman's extraordinary contributions to medical anthropology and its many sibling disciplines, among them psychological anthropology, psychiatry, social medicine, bioethics, medical humanities, science and technology studies, and global mental health.Like Kleinman's oeuvre, contributions traverse the broad sweep of contemporary anthropology, introducing concepts and cases that telegraph the astonishing breadth and depth of Kleinman's influence.The collection opens with a poignant foreword by Paul Farmer, arguably Kleinman's best-known mentee, who sadly did not live to see the book's release.In their introduction, the editors explain their title, which signals Kleinman's call to productively "interfere" in matters of health and illness, bodies and embodiedness in order to disrupt commonsense thinking, call out flawed paradigms, and invite more humane ways of caring, in all senses of the word.Despite its sober framing, the volume advances Kleinman's view of "Anthropology as an aspirational project," as Farmer puts it (xvii)-a project that may, perhaps, be able "to provide a conceptual and ethical toolkit to interfere in our worlds on edge" (Biehl & Adams, 3).The book's 12 chapters are grouped in four sections: "Traversing Imperiled Worlds and Envisaging Human Futures," "The Category Fallacy, and Care Amid the Experts," "Worlds of Biotechnical Promise and the Plasticity of Self and Power," and "Tracing Arts of Living (or, Anthropologies After Hope Has Departed)."In an afterword, Kleinman enters the conversation, interfering with his own "Lessons Learned from the Ethnography of Care."Six strong threads in Kleinman's work weave through these chapters.First is an abiding concern with experience-or, more precisely, with the "primacy of experience as the starting point of anthropological investigation" (Jenkins, 137; emphasis in original).Jenkins' chapter, for instance, begins in the troubled lifeworld of Taciana, a Zuni teenager in New Mexico whose mental health struggles cannot be resolved through modes of psychiatric intervention that neglect social processes and cultural dynamics.Invoking Kleinman's insistence on the "epistemological weighting of experience" over
Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/maq.12887
Author: Sarah S. Willen
Institution: University of Connecticut
Language: English
Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4402774397