I love to read works that are truly energizing. I am reading Social lives of medicines by Whyte and van der geest as well as Black Skin, White Masks by Franz Fanon at the moment. Social lives is a piece I’ve had on my Amazon list for ages. It is drawn from with such a frequency and trust in my field that it simply naturalizes itself into many works. I would akin these pieces to …
1. Interim words until one can originate superior verbiage, and since the literary can harbor deep respect for those they reference, this ‘superiority’ is never actualized
A great ethnography or edited work is a dynamic entity rather than archived knowledge. It reifies itself through networks of sourcing and reinterpretations of theory. Black Skin is highly interpretive and metaphorical, in other words, it deals with symbols and meaning. His argument addresses the ‘Other’ and exoticization. Social lives follows the ‘materia medica’ or the physical beings of medicines today as they travel global traffic ways and come into being in a patients' possession. Pills, capsules, tablets and other techniques of medicinal actions, like syringes and needles, have such a visual presence in our culture as well as others, as Social lives suggests. I’ve compiled an extensive archive of images of medicines, mostly pills and the like, and they really speak to exactly what Whyte and van der geest are saying. Pills are economic, social, political and lastly, medical subjects. They divide lines between the worthy and the worthless, the recognized and the marginalized and the rich and the poor.
Global efforts towards open anti-retroviral access and HIV vaccine testing, in part with health care reform and part humanitarian efforts, have failed to eradicate this reticent virus, despite past projections. In asking ‘why’ this can happen, despite massive economic efforts and decades now of research, we must look to the social. ‘The Matrix’ called attention to this explicitly with the red pill/blue pill binary put forth as a choice of fee will, despite having to make the choice, throughout. These pills represented social states of being in the Matrix and are salient features in Matrix merchandise today. This ‘social life’ of medicine, the one too often undermined or ignored, echoes the conflict between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences and further the very argument of what knowledge is most valuable. Here the human soul and spirit are questioned and subjective and ‘flowery’ accounts are not taken seriously. Except in anthropology. Anthropology is the unique discipline, outside of language and literature itself, which appreciates such ‘flowery’ work and allows it the chance to be meaningful. Fanon got me really excited about language again and hence, this blog simply occurred.
Bravo Fanon. ‘Feeling’ and writing are so inextricably linked it is no wonder why anthropologists have long written about subjectivities. This is a growing movement, lately, and I’d like to think it reflects a more global turn towards humanism but that could be premature. Writers are still depicted as hair-brained, eccentric and a bit helpless by our media outlets. I can’t refute personally, but I know it is not the only equation for 'writerness'. The ‘touchy-feely’ types still threaten some American notion of strength given this persistent demeaning stereotype.
This ‘tough-guy’ primacy is an obvious evolutionary vestige, as one can be subjective and interpretive and still proliferate in the neoliberal global economy which highly values cognitive power, but nevertheless remains.
In Peter Elbow’s words, “Don’t give me any more of that subjective bullshit” (Elbow 1973; 141). Subjective bullshit, for lack of a more fully developed euphemism, is ill conceived by a public that misconstrues lack of structure for ‘ease’ in writing practices, according to Elbow, and they are lacking a true understanding of “the nature of rigor and language” (141).
This is a difficult subject for good writers to be authoritative on, as they themselves inevitably find such ‘ease’ in the work that they do. Language is rigorous, as a tool and a method, in fact it is the most challenging subject I’ve studied, the one that caused the most furrowed-brows, desperation and tears. Yes, I’ve literally shed tears over writing, even writing without a due date. So much of it is extracting; it begs so much of the human psyche. Writers do put pencil to paper, as a practice, but their work is that of expression not of oppression. The oppressive powers bestowed upon the economic subject will never penetrate fully the purest of writers. Different powers are at work here. These powers are more ravaging than those of capitalism, they are those of the writer’s soul. These powers are like the Greek pharmakon, they can be both medicine and poison. But it is not a choice; for some writing simply comes, disrupting at times, cathartic at others.
Elbow, Peter
1973 Writing without teachers. Oxford University Press.
