ANT358H1 Lecture 4: Lecture 4 - Improvising clinical encounter
Document Summary
Innovation comes because of improvisation; work in a system where biomedicine is uneven. Story that explains how people manage to enact care in an under-serviced centre. Hospital-based ethnography - adapt evidence-based medical knowledge to their institutional setting (pp. At first glance, it might seem like she"s using the suffering stranger trope. Patients are not given a lot of description/voice. Ethnography doesn"t see their lives outside of the hospital. Not to read the book as a conglomerate of suffering strangers. Uses cancer as the universal element, not humanistic nature. Unify people through cancer, whereas tb/malaria/hiv etc. are exoticized and seen as distant. Cancer happening between people, not just to people - relations. Not the same as how cancer is developed in the west. Cancer = absent in western images of africa. Livingston = trained historian; uses historical particularities. Visible and invisibility during certain times and only with certain types of cancer -> legitimate. Thought that cancer = disease of civilization.
