Our Collections

The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul

The Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals in 16-century Brazil

By Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

In the mid-sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries working in what is now Brazil were struck by what they called the inconstancy of the people they met, the indigenous Tupi-speaking tribes of the Atlantic coast. Though the Indians appeared eager to receive the Gospel, they also had a tendency to forget the missionaries’ lessons and “revert” to their natural state of war, cannibalism, and polygamy. This peculiar mixture of acceptance and rejection, compulsion and forgetfulness was incorrectly understood by the priests as a sign of the natives’ incapacity to believe in anything durably.

In this pamphlet, world-renowned Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro situates the Jesuit missionaries’ accounts of the Tupi people in historical perspective, and in the process draws out some startling and insightful implications of their perceived inconstancy in relation to anthropological debates on culture and religion.

Access the book here.

Ringing the Existential Alarm: Exploring BirthStrike for Climate

By Heather McMullen and Katharine Dow

Photo: Matt Palmer

Climate change is altering the horizon of a liveable future and as a result giving rise to a host of anxieties: ecological, demographic, reproductive, and existential. The BirthStrike for Climate collective was a group of people who were reconsidering reproduction as a result of the climate crisis. In exploring the case of BirthStrike we consider how these decisions were used as a tool for “existential” activism and how the campaign was encountered and discredited in the public realm. We argue the campaign ignited numerous anxieties, resulting in an inability to “hear” the existential threat BirthStrikers aimed to call into focus.

Read the full article here.

All That Was Not Her

By Todd Meyers

While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone – what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly’s life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist’s engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their ending.

Read the book here.

The foreign gaze: authorship in academic global health

By Seye Abimbola

“There is a problem of gaze at the heart of academic global health. It is difficult to name. […] Recent bibliometric analyses confirm autorship imbalances patterns that are largely explained by entrenched power asymmetries in global health partnerships — between researchers in high-income countries (often the source of funds and agenda) and those in middle-income and especially low-income countries (where the research is often conducted). But we cannot talk about authorship without grappling with who we are as authors, who we imagine we write for (i.e., gaze), and the position or standpoint from which we write (i.e., pose).”

Drawing on the ideas of ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ gaze, Abimbola highlights how imbalances in autorship are generally a reflection of wider power inequalities in the production and dissemination of knowledge in global health.

Read the article here.

Facing Malignancy: Women’s Lived Realities of Breast Cancer in Central Vietnam

By Trang Thu Do

In her thesis, Trang Do examines how breast cancer is understood and managed in Vietnam based on nine-month ethnography using observation, interviews with 37 patients, interviews with 11 healthcare providers, and three focus groups. She demonstrates that people widely perceive breast cancer as a modern disease which vitally requires biomedical interventions to detect and manage its malignancy. She argues that pursuing breast cancer treatment is not merely an event of biological nature but has become a “long-term career” for the sufferers of this illness. Her research highlights the structural vulnerability and health access problems, but also the nuances of women’s agency in their responses to this pathological condition.

Read the full thesis here.

Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding

By Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

Who has the right to a safe and protected childhood? Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding deepens understanding of children as political capital in the hands of those in power, critically engaging children’s voices alongside archival, historical, and ethnographic material in Palestine. Offering the concept of ‘unchilding’, Shalhoub-Kevorkian exposes the political work of violence designed to create, direct, govern, transform, and construct colonized children as dangerous, racialized others, enabling their eviction from the realm of childhood itself. Penetrating children’s everyday intimate spaces and, simultaneously, their bodies and lives, unchilding works to enable a complex machinery of violence against Palestinian children: imprisonment, injuries, loss, trauma, and militarized political occupation. At the same time as the book documents violations of children’s rights and the consequences this has for their present and future well-being, it charts children’s resistance to and power to interrupt colonial violence, reclaiming childhood and, with it, Palestinian futures.

Read the book here.

Inequality and expendability in early public health

By Elise A. Mitchell and Mathieu Corteel

This seminar examined two early public health interventions and their impact on the morals and ethics of the field. More particularly, Mitchell discussed the quarantining of slave ships during the Caribbean Slave Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. She argues that these policies and practices reasserted recently-arrived enslaved Africans’ apolitical status and rendered them expendable in order to preserve the health of those considered part of the colonial commonwealth. 

Corteel looked at the assumptions surrounding 19th century health statistics, focusing on the normativity of public hygiene statistics on poverty before and during the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris. Through this, he questions the moralistic emergence of public hygiene values through the lens of inequality.  

Read more and watch the seminar here.

The Private Worlds of Dying Children

By Myra Bluebond-Langner

Photo: Guillaume Piron

“The death of a child,” writes Myra Bluebond-Langner, “poignantly underlines the impact of social and cultural factors on the way that we die and the way that we permit others to die.” In a moving drama constructed from her observations of leukemic children, aged three to nine, in a hospital ward, she shows how the children come to know they are dying, how and why they attempt to conceal this knowledge from their parents and the medical staff, and how these adults in turn try to conceal from the children their awareness of the child’s impending death.

Access the book here.

The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism

By Maren Klawiter

In this book, Klawiter analyzes the breast cancer movement to show the broad social impact of how diseases come to be medically managed and publicly administered. Examining surgical procedures, early detection campaigns, and discourses of risk, Klawiter demonstrates that these practices initially inhibited, but later enabled, collective action. The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer ultimately challenges our understanding of the origins, politics, and future of the breast cancer movement.

Read the book here.

Ek Jagah Apni – A Place of Our Own

Ek Jagah Apni (‘A Place of Our Own’) is a film set in the city of Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh, India) and offers a glimpse into the lives of the transgender community in the city. Part of the Museum of Art and Photography’s exhibition ‘Visible/Invisible: Representation of Women in Art through the MAP Collection’, the movie follows the journey of two trans women in their quest for an apartment as well as for a space in society.

Presenting a slice of reality and shot in a realistic style, it is a story of an artistic expression of people who are the subjects of the film as well as the tellers of their own story as actors, co-writers, and the cast and crew that comprise the filmmaking process.

Read more and explore the museum’s website here.

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑