Alice Street

Introduction Real and Imagined Spaces

The hospital’s ambiguous relationship to everyday social space has long been a central theme of hospital ethnography. Often, hospitals are presented either as isolated “islands” defined by biomedic...The hospital’s ambiguous relationship to everyday social space has long been a central theme of hospital ethnography. Often, hospitals are presented either as isolated “islands” defined by biomedical regulation of space (and time) or as continuations and reflections of everyday social space that are very much a part of the “mainland.” This polarization of the debate overlooks hospitals’ paradoxical capacity to be simultaneously bounded and permeable, both sites of social control and spaces where alternative and transgressive social orders emerge and are contested. We suggest that Foucault’s concept of heterotopia usefully captures the complex relationships between order and disorder, stability and instability that define the hospital as a modernist institution of knowledge, governance, and improvement. We expand Foucault’s focus on the disciplinary, heterotopic qualities of the hospital to explore the heterotopia as a space of multiple orderings. These orderings are not only biomedical. Rather, hospitals are notable for the intensity and heterogeneity of the ongoing spatial ordering processes, both biomedical and other, that produce them. We outline an approach to heterotopias that traces the contingent configuration of hospital space through relationships between the physical environment, technologies, and persons, while simultaneously considering the kinds of spatial imaginings, hopes for the future, and emotional responses that are rendered possible by those configurations. We provide three thematic frameworks through which the heterotopic and contingent qualities of hospital spaces might be explored: boundary work, generating scale, and layered space.

Affective infrastructure: hospital landscapes of hope and failure

Hospitals are designed as spaces of improvement. Yet an accumulation of infrastructural projects can lead over time to the emergence of a layered landscape made up of multiple incongruous planned spaces. This article focuses on Madang General Hospital in Papua New Guinea as one example of such a landscape. Here, deteriorating colonial buildings jostle against new gleaming constructions built with donor funds. The layered effect of the postcolonial landscape draws attention to enduring racial and class inequalities; the colonial past is rendered present in the buildings of the future. Drawing on recent work on affect in anthropology and cultural geography, the author argues that this landscape impresses affects of hope and disappointment on the people who inhabit it and shapes ambivalent attachments to national and state futures. This double movement of improvement and decay is analyzed as a process of ruination that is intrinsic to modern spaces of improvement.

Food as pharma: marketing nutraceuticals to India's rural poor

This commentary sketches out the politics of the expansion of affordable, fast-moving nutraceutical products into rural India, with a focus on fortified foods and beverages. It examines the relationships between industry, government and humanitarian organisations that are being forged alongside the development of markets for nutraceuticals; the production of evidence and the harnessing of science to support nutraceutical companies’ claims; the ways in which nutraceuticals are being marketed and distributed in rural areas; and the concepts of health and well-being that are being promulgated through those marketing campaigns. Lastly, it asks what kinds of impact fast-moving nutraceuticals are likely to have on the lives of India’s rural poor. It concludes by questioning how smooth a transition to nutraceutical consumption Big Food marketing strategies can really facilitate and how readily low-income families seeking to feed their families and safeguard health will actually adopt concepts of wellness and internalise micro-nutrient associated risks.

Artefacts of not-knowing: The medical record, the diagnosis and the production of uncertainty in Papua New Guinean biomedicine

Anthropological and STS scholars of biomedical work have traditionally explored contexts where inconsistencies and lacunas in diagnostic knowledge-production are problematic for medical practitioners, and such scholars have consequently focused on the social and political processes by which such epistemic uncertainties are resolved. This article draws on ethnographic material from a Papua New Guinean hospital where diagnostic uncertainty is not rendered problematic and where the open-endedness of the diagnostic process gives rise to new forms of medical expertise and practice. The paper focuses on the medical record as an artefact of not-knowing that both documents and performs uncertainty as a valuable resource. It shows that medical records can operate as either technologies of ‘opening’ that multiply opportunities for pragmatic action within a hospital space or as technologies of ‘closure’ that move people and documents between spaces. Practices of not-knowing and knowing are therefore shown to be interdependent and interchangeable ‘moments’ of bureaucratic-biomedical work.

Social Theory after Strathern: An Introduction:

Taking its cue from the articles in this special issue, this introduction explores what value a critical engagement with Strathern’s work might have for the social sciences by setting such an engagement in motion. It argues that Strathern’s writings are a particularly fruitful starting point for reflecting on our assumptions about what exactly theory might be and how and where it may be made to travel. Through the juxtaposition of articles published in this special issue and Strathern’s writings on Melanesia it explores the theorization of power in the social sciences as one arena in which Strathernian strategies might be harnessed in order to reflect on and extend Euro-American concepts. It also takes Strathern’s own interest in gardening as a metaphoric base for generating novel topologies of subject and object, the particular and the general, and the concrete and the abstract. This introduction does not provide a primer for ‘Strathernian theory’. Instead it reviews some of the original strategies and techniques – differentiation, staging of analogy, surprise, bifurcation, the echo, and an unremitting focus on how we make our familiar categories of analysis known to ourselves – that Strathern has used to ‘garden’ her theory: it can be used, if you like, as a conceptual toolkit.

The Image after Strathern: Art and Persuasive Relationality in India’s Sanguinary Politics

Publicly-enacted blood extractions (principally blood donation events and petitions or paintings in blood) in mass Indian political contexts (for instance, protest or political memorial events and election rallies) are a noteworthy present-day form of political enunciation in India, for such extractions – made to speak as and on behalf of political subject positions – are intensely communicative. Somewhat akin to the transformative fasts undertaken by Gandhi, such blood extractions seek to persuade from the moral high ground of political asceticism. This essay seeks to shed light on how and why these extractions have become such a means, with a particular focus on blood-based portraiture. What makes such portraits – chiefly of politicians and ‘freedom fighter’ martyrs – interesting from a Strathernian point of view is their immanent persuasive relationality. The insights of Strathern can help us to explicate these objects’ dynamic relational features, while reciprocally, the portraits may help us to illuminate and clarify the very particular and interesting nature of the way Strathern treats (and creates) images.

The hospital and the hospital: Infrastructure, human tissue, labour and the scientific production of relational value:

How does science make a home for itself in a public hospital? This article explores how scientists working in ‘resource poor’ contexts of global health negotiate relationships with their hosts, in this case the doctors, nurses and patients who already inhabit a provincial-level hospital. Taking its lead from recent works on science, ethics and development, this article seeks to ‘provincialize the laboratory’ by focussing on the scientific tropics as a space of productive encounter and engagement. A view from the hospital reveals the tenuous process of ‘setting up’ a place for science, in a world that does not immediately recognize its value. The article examines the material exchanges of infrastructure, bodily tissues and labour that enable one young scientist to establish a scientific life for himself. The success of those transactions, it argues, ultimately derives from their objectification of scientific vulnerability and their enactment of relationships of mutual recognition. As opposed to asking how scientific knowledge is produced in the tropics, the view from the hospital challenges us to focus on the establishment of relationships between scientists and their hosts as a productive endeavour in its own right.

Hors-série 2014. Traduire et introduire

Ce hors-serie de Traces repose sur l’idee que l’espace universitaire est mondialise mais loin d’etre homogene pour autant : si beaucoup de travaux etrangers sont (plus ou moins) accessibles aux chercheurs francais, ils ne sont pas tous egalement lus et discutes. Il y a donc un interet a debattre specifiquement de l’œuvre d’auteurs etrangers, qui occupent une place centrale dans leur sphere d’influence mais n’ont pas suscite l’attention qu’ils ou elles meritent en France. Nous avons choisi de le faire en reunissant plusieurs commentaires qui permettent de presenter et de discuter le travail d’un auteur, dont nous traduisons egalement un texte significatif. Pour ce hors-serie, nous avons choisi la politiste argentine Pilar Calveiro, l’historien americain Daniel L. Smail et l’anthropologue britannique Marilyn Strathern.