Images of Difference, Part 1

This post is part of a series that address images of difference focusing on the human body.

Marcel Duchamp's paintings have always held an interest with me. His Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2) is of particular interest to me for the way he portrays the nude human body so unabashedly yet without definition. The mottled coloring, the sharp and ungainly shapes; Duchamp shows the body unfavorably yet we can all appreciate the exquisite nature of his imagery.

Duchamp, Marcel. Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2)/Nu descendant un Escalier (No.2). 1912.

Lux sit

The University of Washington is a place where I learned much and experienced more. Once again, it is the time of year when new and returning students flood the quad, pack the coffee houses and impede quite contemplation at the UBS (University Book Store). Soon, disheveled mothers and fathers will be seen helping move in their freshmen, old desks and couches will declare listing for auction via sidewalk exposure and a "FREE" sign on classic college ruled, haphazardly taped on. Tour groups of early students will weave across campus and down the "Ave" and I will avoid them. I love the excitement of this time and find my own newness about the coming months. As a tax paying citizen, I try to take as much advantage of the University as I can since I have and still do fund it in part. The real treat for me are the lectures. Dropping off in summer, and sometimes slow in Spring because of defenses, lecture events on campus come back into full swing a few weeks in to fall quarter. I usually go to about one a week and they traverse the lot of the humanities and social science disciplines along with many of the health sciences. Eager to fill my calendar and reconnect with the greater academic community, not just my predominately cyber-bubbled medical anthropologists that span from Edinburgh to Seattle, Toronto to LA. Despite the reach of this cadre, I still find a sort of antiqued excitement in attending on campus lectures, even if outside my field. They are a beacon of intellectual stimulation in an otherwise dreary realm of rain and clouds.

Here are the few I've been able to calendar; reviews will follow!

B/ordering Violence: Boundaries, Indigineity, and Gender in the Americas

As part of the 2012-2013 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures at the UW on "B/ordering Violence: Boundaries, Indigeneity and Gender in the Americas," María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University) delivers the first of three quarterly lectures surrounding the theme of the Discourses and Practices of Policing Borders.



A Crisis of Care and a Crisis of Borders: Towards Caring Citizenship
Victoria Lawson
An internationally-respected feminist geographer, Victoria Lawson’s research focuses on how human relations have been altered by new modes of mobility, technology, and inequality; how people struggle to provide care and love in worlds that are fragmented by space and time; and how they support one another in an era of growing poverty.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012 - 7:00pm
Kane Hall, Room 110
Lawson is Professor of Geography at the University of Washington

the eternal bibliography

Regarde!: my new background

This is a collection of works that have held some significance in my intellectual debut. They span back to my freshman year and reflect well my journey from the humanities to the social sciences and back again twice. In college, I declared an English Language & Literature major proudly, as the department is competitive at the UW. I took a few quarters of some literature but mostly theory and some linguistics courses and realized pure literature did not occupy enough bits of my brain and it had a curious sense of death about it so I distanced myself from it somewhat. Through my reading of Foucualt, Said and myriad other of the french sociologists,I found myself upon some cultural studies literature and this led me to enrolling in anthropology courses. I was reminded of my love of critical theory in my Culture Concept class and was subsequently drawn back to English. I had to explain all this as well in my second admissions essay! Needless to say, I again felt morose and stale and headed back over to Denny, the anthro building at the UW. I took a seminar style class and was hooked. Now I freely "borrow" from the humanities and have the best of both worlds.
I was embarrassed at the time to have put my transcript through a such a workout but upon reflection, it was really indicative of my destiny for interdisciplinary work. My interests now straddle the humanities and the social sciences with some strategy, now with nearly a decade of trying to figure out where I belonged academically behind me.


And in no value-laden order:

Bourgois, Philippe, and Jeff Schonberg
2009 Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press.

Leakey, Richard E., and Roger Lewin
1977 Origins. New York: Dutton.

Ed. Joao Biehl, Byron Good, Arthur Kleinman, Ed.
2007 Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press.

Geertz, Clifford
1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Polhemus, Ted, Ed.
1978 The Body Reader: Social Aspects of the Human Body. New York: Pantheon.

Hurford, C.
1996 The anthology of popular verse. North Dighton: JG Press.
(the only text spanning back into childhood; I got this for Christmas when I was in 6th grade because I had won a poetry contest at Halloween)

Sacks, Oliver
1997 The Island of the Colorblind. New York: Knopf.

Dickens, Charles
1854 Times-Charles Dickens. New York: Penguin Books.

Broks, Paul
2003 Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Shenk, David
2001 Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic. New York: Doubleday.

Estroff, Sue
1985 Making it Crazy: An Ethnography of Psychiatric Clients in an American Community. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press.


Metzl, Jonathan and Suzanne Poirier, Eds.
2005 Difference & Identity: A Special Issue of Literature and Medicine. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.


Jenkins, Janice, Ed.
2010 Pharmaceutical Self: The Global Shaping of Experience in an Age of Psychpharmacology. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research.


Fabian, Johannes
2000 Out of our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press

(above center)
Lemelson, Robert
2010 Afflictions culture & mental illness in Indonesia. Watertown: Documentary Educational Resources.
I saw a partial screening of these at the 2011 Society for Psychological Anthropology conference. This was my first academic conference :)

a drink that does the mind good

I want to develop further my concept of "bodily responsibility" I blogged about roughly a year ago by exploring some of the nootropic drinks that are giving us yet another way to improve our health in correlation with our pocket books.

Regular readers may realize that the body is a subject, and object, I recurrently come back to. Indeed, I designate this as the focus of my work however I do tend to perseverate on the brain. Other structures or assemblages have been known to generate great interest on my part but I'm all over that brain, all the time, that's me.
Now, in the past, I have focused numerous times on the relationship we hold with our own bodies, constructed around regimes, treatments, perceptions and respects for the body, our body. My concept of "bodily responsibility" suggests a separation from the self and the body and an absolute objectification. Here, with the nootropic drinks, we see the body as something to feed with what we can see as performance enhancing food in order to maintain optimum functioning. Fuel to an engine. Now, when everyone begins sentience with the same engine, equality would mandate all are given the same quality fuel. Marketed nootropic drinks bend this moral membrane we have naturally between what is and what is not a basic human right. Energy drinks, nootropic drinks, supplements and all other manner of proto-health sustenance that exist in the consumer realm are not basic human rights, as evidenced by their price point and accessibility. This puts the producers of such super foods in a hard spot between profiting from selling a lovely thought about who deserves to be healthy and selling a life-sustaining fluid, so essential to health it is deserved by all the lot of us, the 7 billion that is.

As Western bio-medical discourse preaches about maintenance and preventative care actions, consuming nootropic drinks and other supplemental foodstuffs can be seen as one such action, a fundamental severance occurs between the subjective,victim based model of suffering and the objective and morally weighted based model of suffering.
When engaging with the U.S. health care system, we can be made to feel, and indeed it may be the agenda, that we are responsible for our own health in the way we are responsible for a pet or a dependent. Health supplements, drinks included, may be expensive, but they make you a better person, physically and morally, all the same.

I do not disagree fully here, and to treat and maintain a healthy body is indeed a set of actions to be reflected upon with pride however, linkages between morality and health can be problematic. The problem being, not all health conditions can be controlled or avoided through responsible body ownership, indeed many can not. The brain is just as prevalent in this argument, with an added element of brain power that can be "harnessed".

SO, if we pair our sense of bodily responsibility with the neuro-movement that so saturates the consumer market at the moment then we get this:

or this

or these guys...

Are we to believe more the fallacy that is the concept of there being a convenient way to good health when seeing these? Do these beverages really exist in the democratic society we pretend to live in? A society where buying expensively carbonated water can increase intelligence and energy, and as the story goes, life as well?
I had the Brain Toniq today at lunch. With regularity, I hit the 2pm slump like every other office girl who lacks thrill in her job and although there is a Starbucks in my office building lobby, I try to find ways around engaging in that patronage. The so-called "energy drinks" are usually too harsh for my delicately inclined palate so I tend towards the cafe side of things and to give perspective, I have no real aversion to herbal qualities and rather like fennel, anise and tarragon, or liquorices. Though I like to think I have better uses for some four-dollar and odd cents every day around this time, I fail to find any one of those ways when I have fifteen minutes to refresh and recenter my energies. This all been said, I still can't get excited about Brain Toniq, even despite it so smugly self-identifying as a "think drink". I could really almost see myself getting behind any product that gets people thinking about their brains more. And I wish there was a drink that could actually make me think with greater anything, other than the stupidity brought on by alcohol or the cock-eyed enthusiasm caffeine totes with it. Damn.

on a method of inquiry: (re)defining the self

The Self is a topic that has long been probed with the anthropologist's tool (his mind) and has, rather than developing a defining set of processes and symbolisms, managed to redefine itself as soon as one thinks it defined. And so we chase this elusive, ever checking ourselves in the mirror for a chance to reconnect with ourselves, the human we study most assiduously.
Indeed, through asking questions, anthropologists inherently learn about themselves, if at least the realization is residuary. Observations are made, perceptions are concretized and patterns are noted and through this sempiternal digestion of material comes a self-knowledge that is at once both holistic and reflective, inexorably linked to the experiences from which it sprung forth.

Is knowledge of the Self useful in any other way than the most intimate? To be sure, many anthropologists have used themselves as comparative canvases of meaning on the blank human form, polysemous means to a culturally comparative end. The Self and the Other are both necessary vantages from which to stand when examining cultures. This iconic dilemma betwixt Self and Other, manifest into Us and Them, also stamps out the divide between marginalized and non-marginalized, dangerously close to the territory of the exploitative. Though, in essence, essentializing, such division helps frame other highly amorphic concepts such as difference, identity and judgement. Divisions like these can neither harm nor compromise the pursuit of knowledge. It would be dangerous to say, then, that if true, at perhaps..first light, as long as we recognize ourselves in a cultural proceeding, a resigned recognition of what differs exists, tainting purely reflective Self knowledge with what is so dirty and subversive about identifying difference. I speak of difference not as a segmentor but a mucilage between yes, this "Us" and those "Thems" that at once reflects sameness and allows contemplation of what escapes what confines "sameness" indicates.

I'd like to commence an ongoing series of image comparisons employed to stave off the ennui of Seattle summers when it is too beautiful to stay inside but simply too hot to do anything of substantive engagement. The theme of these images is difference, with an attention to the self-defining practice of defining the Other. To begin, another haunting Antony Gormley installation: