all about access

December 6, 2012 is a day Seattle will always remember. On that day, the streets of Capitol Hill were awash with revelry as Washington officially deemed pot socially acceptable. Or did it? The social approval of using Tetrahydrocannabinol containing plants in their various states and forms has long been around. As any piece of visual media does, Reefer Madness (1936) spoke to a certain public concern; one generative of paranoid anxieties and yet one worthy of dramatic consideration. Legislation has finally caught up with culture. Or has it? Spirits are good and smoke hangs high but this new era in Washington (and Colorado) has its ambivalences. Employment discrimination is upheld (although cigarette smoking can be discriminated against as well). You cannot legal buy or sell it anywhere but you can possess it or grow it if you are a medicinal patient.  And it is still being used in courts as derogatory claims. It is going to be regarded like alcohol is, which has long enjoyed a contradictory place in American lives, being legal but with any consumption putting one at risk for a number of alcohol related crimes. Weed is going to hold a similar place in Washington law and while I agree we are not yet ready for a full scale decriminalization, it is putting us in a tricky situation until retail markets open up. Forward moving, I think it is going to be a process for using to become fully legal in a social way. It is still a highly stigmatized drug although the negative connotations applied are less injurious than other drugs. It is, some would say, the everyman's drug. A comic drug; one that brings like minds together and disparate minds closer. It is a also poised at the interested intersection of medicine and recreation. As a healing compound, it is controlled and access points are well, not all access. As a recreational substance, however, it will eventually become easier to come by than the medicine and this delegitimizes its use for medicinal purposes. As it is, no planned changes to the medical marijuana law are up on the table. This undermining of its medicinal properties is not entirely without merit. The medical marijuana clinic system in Washington is known, by the public and medical practitioners alike, as a joke. One can walk in to a clinic and get an authorization with no medical records that prove any of the 'qualifying conditions' and no referral. They can then walk right in to a dispensary, within the same hour, and purchase 'medicine'. With this 'medicine' now being set to reach the open market, I wonder about the dynamic now between the recreational user and the medicinal user. Some would say quality may be different (better?) at the clinics but the horticultural standards are essentially nonexistent and this market, as it stands, is highly unregulated. Sold to an open public, however, there will definitely be standards in place. In fact, Washington's notoriously stringent Liquor Control Board will take over its regulation. Could medicinal users be at a disadvantage here? Could their safety be overlooked while recreational users, in the year or so it will take to open up the market, are met with product that is more regulated? Does this seem like a logical organization? What still needs to be hashed out to mediate the Federal rulings and the State's law? There is a rupture here, between a human's right of access to healing medicines and the 'access stigma' the state still fosters. This stigma makes how you procure your medicine flexible in its morality and legality. Many questions will need to be answered over the next year or so in Washington and Colorado as the public market is established and the culture becomes more acquainted with the idea of decriminalization. For now, a social arbitration exists during every purchase, sale, growth or use of marijuana in all its forms and states. Judgment is withheld, or so the law suggests, at the state level but not Federally. This is a major source of contention among users and though this has always plagued medicinal users since 1998, I can foresee major disconnects between all users and all institutions.
My hopes for this process are better and more consistent access for medicinal patients and lessened stigma against this set of users. I want to address this and bring this to conversation in a way respectful of medicinal users. It is crucial to our continued understanding of this patient group that we keep this discussion on the table despite the new laws that have passed in Washington and Colorado. As it stands, Seattle maintains several medicinal marijuana access points but many (so many) are positioned near areas of notorious criminal activity or inconveniently away from major transportation routes. I have honestly been disappointed at how Washington has handled their medicinal marijuana  system and hold legitimate concern for the new open market we are about to come upon. 

Reefer Madness: Tell Your Children

1938 Louis J. Gasnier, dir. 66 min. 

George A. Hirliman Productions. Hollywood.

the (inner) workings of the brain

     It should come to no one's surprise that the brain is a major point of public interest. While the 'Decade of the Brain' was declared over twenty years ago, now is the moment when neuroscience is being popularized and the brain is taking up more and more visual space in our world. Today's world is a visual world as images become increasingly meaningful, sharing human experience globally, and instantly. One important aspect of this imagification is the generative representations of such intangibles as feeling, thought and processes. The brain encompasses all three of these representations and within this neuro-curious climate, brains are popping up everywhere! Here's one I procured from the UW bookstore. For material context, it was in the ever-expanding novelty section that housed such curios as a Jesus toast press, hip-hop themed ice cube trays (I bought these too) and all manner of things that are made to look like strips of bacon.

     While clearly not intended to be an accurate model, this item speaks to national concern about 'brain-power' and its importance. It comically sums up the sentiment that 'in tough times, you better get smart' mentally that many of those that frequent university bookstores share. Indeed, in many real-life emergencies, being smart about your actions pays off. So, these ubiquitous brain images, where did they originate from? The simple understanding that brains are furrowed, squishy and (kind of) bean shaped had to have come from somewhere. Neuroimaging has undoubtedly played a role here. Gore-centered websites like 4Chan and Bestgore have also contributed some, if incomplete, specimens. Neuroimaging, like fMRI and CT scanning, has also provided cursorial information on the processes of the brain as well. These processes are interpreted by (and for) the public and translated into images that represent our understanding of the brain as we know it. These conceptions suggest ways we give meaning to neuroscience and how we incorporate it into our everyday lives. Hint; we commission factories in China to manufacture inflatable, canned brains to sell to American university students.

     Particularly telling are the images of the brain at work, or in action. Even neuroscience can boast only a tenuous grasp on the many complex mechanisms that transmit signals throughout the brain and the electro-chemical processes we do understand render the 'workings' of brain inconspicuous and uneventful. While I trust one day these mechanisms will be mapped in full, for now the images of the public imagination of the brain working serve to elucidate the way we understand neural process.
One of the most salient conceptual models I have come across is that of the brain as muscle or something to be "worked out" in some physiological way. The media depicts this as a very natural and intuitive analogy, brain as muscle, and supports the idea that you can increase brain power by doing cognitive work. This model provides some explanation for (and validation of), the "use it or lose it" mentality. It rewards what we relate to as hard physical work; this is fairly puritan in retrospect.

Another is the 'brain as machine' conceptual model of the brain at work. Many will recognize the characteristic 'cogs' on the wheels of cognition. Here we see a reverence for industrialism and ingenuity. This suggests a little less standard deviation than the 'muscle-man' model and therefore it's a little more egalitarian. Our understanding of machinery would suggest here that the working brain can be turned off or shut down, can work at varying outputs and requires maintenance. This also supports the "fuel" for the brain concept so many energy drink and supplement companies espouse.

 Providing valuable fodder for technology marketing is the 'brain as computer' model. This model is of increasing importance to the general public's interpretation of neuroscience. Generative talk about certain behaviors being "hard-wired" or how we can "re-wire" our brains (like firmware?) gives way to narratives on storage capacity, databases, being 'programmed' to do something.  While all conceptual models of the brain at work will also implicitly suggest how we understand the brain not at work, or at some lessened capacity, the computer model forces us to associate the infinite powers of technology with our brain capacities. Intimidating though it seems, I find potential utility in using this illimitable model of understanding and would suggest it is more of a sustainable model then muscle or machinery, as these both have been supplanted by computer technology in more cases than one. Real fruition can, in theory, come from using such conceptual models to understand the brain in all its mystique. The computer model standardizes brain power in some sense, as computers themselves are becoming a near human right. Neuroscience is already deep into integrating dialogue with computer science, building AI systems modeled off the human brain. So-called "cognitive computing" projects like The Blue Brain Project at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the DARPA funded SyNAPSE, in association with IBM, are working on full AI 'brains' hosted on supercomputers. These projects, when realized (speculated within the next two decades), will undoubtedly have transformative semantic power and will be a fertile site for anthropological analysis. For now, the human brain remains humblingly complex, but irresistibly interesting and up for myriad interpretations. For now, the brain is only limited through our imagination.

cancer and chronicity

A recent connection with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has drawn my mind recurrently to the processes of 'beating' cancer lately. While 'Fred Hutch' does much more than cancer research, it still stands as a beacon of experimental treatment for the patients that have exceeded the capabilities of first-line treatments at their primary medical institutions. Cancer intrigues me simply because it intrigues us, as a society of bodies continually at some point in a matrix of risk, never being allowed to truly 'forget' about cancer. This perpetual and innate susceptibility is one of the driving forces, I argue, behind our society's 'beef' with cancer. Publicly engaged in a enduring conflict with a diagnosis that creeps, attacks, kills and then haunts has generated metaphors alluding to fights, battles, wars and armed conflict. What I am interested in is the ways in which this 'fight' with cancer is articulated in treatment discourse, survivor narratives and cultural processes. We wage large, visible wars against cancer, commercially, through rubber bracelets and 'walks for the cure' but even more crucial are the small wars of the every-day against treatment side-effects, the 'work' of cancer treatment and what it means to have such a reticent cell living in your body. Having a chronic condition myself which requires a fairly involving treatment regime, I have come to a closer understanding of those with incurable cancers, HIV/AIDS and other chronic and profoundly self-altering diagnosis. There exists a 'work' of a chronic condition that itself is a continual financial, energy and soul draining activity. Unlike my condition, however, cancer can be fatal and a separately generated anxiety is produced just from that abiding threat alone. The permanent structural impairment from surgical and chemical treatment alike also forever alter a cancer patient's sense of self, bodily integrity and even gender identities. I just read a great piece from the New York Times addressing cancer survival and perused their ongoing collage of cancer 'survivors' as they depict and give voice to what it means to be 'post-cancer'. These are a few particularly telling narratives:


On what it means to 'fight'

If've learned one important truth, it is the meaning of the phrase "fighting cancer." It was showing up when I wanted to crawl away. It was crying when I needed to, and to shouting, "enough!"
Bob Skye, Hoboken, NJ


On continuing care

I've had all the usual problems men have after prostate cancer surgery four years ago. I've learned to live with them although it's been a life-altering experience. My surgeon said that it (the operation) would be a speed bump on the road to the rest of my life. All I can say is thanks for saving my life but that was one hell of a speed bump!
Jim Porter, Danville, KY

On anger

(But) I am more angry. Angry at the damage chemo has done to my heart and lungs, angry that it has stolen my loved ones from me, angry at the constant anxiety about recurrence that it leaves and at my guilt for not living a perfect toxin-free life.
Please, don't ever tell a cancer patient that they are lucky to have it.
Laurie Comings, Alexandria, VA

On revenge

I have a vendetta against cancer and I will not stop fighting until I am dancing on its grave.
Virginia Fasulo, New Jersey


On continuing anxieties

Now, three years since surgery and chemotherapy for a lymph node presentation of ovarian cancer, I am struggling to know myself. Being "watched for recurrence" unnerves me and drains me. I hope I can absorb it better as time goes on.
Barbara Moore, Washington, D.C.

On gender identity

Physically of course I'm still suffering of the late side effects of all these poisons I got, but the biggest part to work on is the psychological side. Breast cancer does not only take away a part of a female body, but it takes away a big part of one's femininity.
Daniela Marullo, Brussels, Belgium

And on losing the fight

Can you in all good conscience say there is 'life after cancer' for anyone? There's only 'life with cancer' and only if you are lucky enough.
Karen, Espoo, Finland

On the ambiguities of remission

Mine is asleep now, it feels like a little bird on my shoulder that whispers in my ear, "you may die today." How wonderful. No time to waste. Change your mind, you can change the world.
Scott Williams, United States

On post-cancer care

In the last ten years, life as I knew it came to an end.
I am no longer an active, healthy, sports-minded individual. The side effects from cancer drugs, cut that part of my life short. No doctor listens or takes an interest in my new challenges.
It's a shame there is no after-cancer treatment or care in this country. You do the best you can.
Susan Brockert,Brazoria, TX


These are responses to the question, 'how is life different after cancer?'. From these we can deduce that chronic and/or life threatening illness has fundamentally transforming effects on the human psyche. The transformative process of ill-health speaks to the essential human consideration of sickness as significant experience.

I remember driving by Fred Hutch when I was young and wondering what life is like for those in there, being treated. For those dying and desparate enough to travel across the state, relocating, if only temporarily, their family, their lives, for a chance at winning these wars. It was honestly frightening for me, to think of such a disruption and downright incomprehensible to think of what it might be like to be fighting cancer or even worse, giving up the fight.
These arousings revisit me today and now, as an anthropologist, I reframe those strong emotions into queries around the human condition in chronic illness and what it means to fight and win/lose such battles. Chronicity, however, takes residence somewhere between the hope of cure or remission and acute, life-threatening crisis. Chronic conditions tend to be habituated, taken into ones life and rooted in processes and practices of self-care. These practices can be therapeutic, taxing, despised. For the above cancer patients, cancer has filled their post-crisis days with anxieties, fears and the draining emotional labor of redefining the self.
With so much public import placed on 'beating' cancer, I question if little is left to place on the post-cancer life. How can cancer affect so many lives but still we obscure (avoid?) the residue of acute cancer treatment? Isn't it time we asked: what happens after treatment? Thoughts on these questionings are welcome!



Parker-Pope, Tara. 2010. "Picture Your Life After Cancer", The New York Times, April 8. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/08/health/cancer-survivor-photos.html?ref=health#index">ongoing collage (accessed 11/20/12).

Social Lives and White Masks

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.

Images of Difference, Part 3 "What Can a Body Do?"

What Can a Body Do?, inspired by Gilles Deleuze's 1990 critical essay on Spinoza of the same name, is an upcoming exhibit of nine contemporary artists exploring, more accurately, what a body cannot do, spanning from October 26th to December 16th in a schedule of events at Haverford College. Curator Amanda Cachia aimed at counter-claiming Spinoza's posits, “We do not even know what a body is capable of...” and “We do not even know of what affections we are capable, nor the extent of our power"(1), through examining what the disabled body is not capable of doing and its lack of power through contemporary art. Cachia asks; What does it mean to inscribe a contemporary work of art with experiences of disability? What shapes or forms can these inscriptions take? How, precisely, can perceptions of the disabled body be liberated from binary classifications such as “normal” versus “deviant” or “ability” versus “disability” that themselves delimit bodies and constrain action? What alternative frameworks can be employed by scholars, curators, and artists in order to determine a new fate for the often stigmatized disabled identity? (2). I am especially interested in the limits these binary classifications hold over bodies in practice. Cachia's project addresses "classifications" of disability in ways I find satisfying and justifying; attending to the visualities of difference in pungent and tactile ways.

Despite the "body" being so much a part of what being a human means, contemporary anthropologists who study it are not in the majority. My humanistic preferences pull me back to philosophy and the arts time and time again, and more so when anthropology can't articulate what I'm curious about. The below photo, part of a set of three plus a video piece, from Polish artist Artur Zmijewski provides such fodder for my imagination.

Zmijewski's project, Oko za oko (An Eye for an Eye), expresses the duality of able/disabled while reflecting upon the precarity of helped-states of ableness. Oko za oko explores bodies in 'composition' with each other, compensative measures and the bodily integrity of the 'helper'. He dialogues with Deleuze as well, whom I'm appreciating more and more, and shows an almost sardonic recognition for his ideas of becoming and unity.

Despite the attitude towards visual disabilities I was indoctrinated with, that of the infamous "don't stare" ideology, I did indeed stare, and want to stare, at physical disfigurements. It seems to me the most natural thing in the world for a child, sans the "world experience" a more mature being has, to observe difference with rapture and the same voracious curiosity they apply to nearly everything else. To my child-self, amputees were positively science-fiction, people of the extreme of both ends of the height spectrum were reasons for excitement and those with all manner of disfigurements and disorders had me visually transfixed. These curiosities, as the story goes, were also made quite clear to be "impolite" and "not lady-like", by all manner of opinionated adults whom I was simply to shy to share my interests with. Today, the humanities allow for that 'need to know' drive to be satiated. Projects of difference, like Cachia's curation and Zmijewski's photo, are therefore stimulating and contemplative spaces for exploration and analysis of what I was "not" staring at all these years.

Deleuze was a coincidental (critical)fan of Francis Bacon's so I've included one of his works as well. Make of it what you will; I've always liked Bacon but I won't pretense that I am an expert on his vicissitudes!

Bacon, Francis. Studies of the Human Body, 1979, 1980.


References...

1. Gilles Deleuze, “What Can a Body Do?,” in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 226.

2. Cachia, Amanda. "Essay & Bibliography". What Can a Body Do?

3. Smith, Daniel and Protevi, John, "Gilles Deleuze", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

http://exhibits.haverford.edu/whatcanabodydo/
Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery
Haverford College