Anthropology

The article discusses the advantages and limitations of new forms of anthropological inquiry in which researchers working with indigenous communities approach indigenous actors as potential research partners. By repositioning engagement within the theoretical as well as ethical debates that led to a redefinition of the relationship between researcher and study community in anthropology, the article argues that detached forms of anthropological research are epistemologically unsustainable, particularly when applied to the study of contemporary indigenous societies.

This article examines the tension in Hannah Arendt’s thought between the creativity of political action and the worldlessness of labour in light of fieldwork with feminist activists in Mexico City. Drawing from my ethnographic research, I explore how labour and action are knitted together in the feminist practice of accompanying women who seek safe abortion in the city. Bringing Arendt’s thought into dialogue with anthropologies of illness experience as well as the reflections of my interlocutors in the field, I shift from an approach to the situation of abortion as a decision-making event, to ask other questions about autonomy and dependency, freedom and necessity, mortality and political life. I argue that what is interesting about Arendt’s conceptualisation of the labouring body is not that she separates ‘bare life’ from the political sphere of ‘men’, but rather that it alerts us to the uncertain way our life is implicated with others. In conclusion, I argue that feminist accompaniment networks foster an ephemeral relation of care between activists and women in situations of abortion, one that invites us to re-imagine the temporality of political action and to ask, again, what it is to make a new world versus make this world livable.

This event situates contemporary debates about abortion and reproductive health within a broader set of concerns about the government of life and death. We will engage questions such as: How are frameworks of reproductive rights and health entangled with practices of punishment and control? How do measurements of maternal risk and mortality shape what counts as a reproductive future? What forms of ethical and political action are possible within shifting regimes of legality, rights, and criminalization?

Conference speakers include Princeton and IAS faculty: Elizabeth Armstrong, Didier Fassin, Joseph Amon, Carolyn Rouse, and João Biehl; Visting scholars: Sina Kramer, Estefanía Vela Barba, Lisa Guenther, Penelope Deutscher, Dominique Béhague, Sameena Mulla, Paola Bergallo, and Michele Rivkin-Fish; and Healthcare practitioners and activists: Ana Cristina González-Vélez, Gabriela Rondon, Oriana López Uribe, and Monica Simpson

Feminist health care providers have debated the efficacy of the decriminalization of abortion in Mexico City. Luisa, a counselor in a private clinic, suggested that while the law has expanded the visibility of, and access to safe abortion, it has also called forth “other ghosts.” In this article, I take Luisa’s critical perspective as a starting point for examining ongoing criminalization and moral stigma as forms of haunting that arise in the wake of the Mexico City abortion policy. Drawing on ethnographic research, I explore how Luisa’s ghosts materialize in the embodied- affective relations between patients in new legal clinics. Women who attend public clinics negotiate moral stigma along with religious and familial pressures in the ways they suffer, as well as normalize abortion as a painful experience. Rather than approach pain as purely a sign of victimization, I suggest that its expression constitutes an effervescent collectivity between women in the clinic, making explicit, while at the same time dissipating, an intractable moral-affective knot that might otherwise be ignored.

This working group is a crossing point for scholars in the humanities and sciences to rethink core concepts  of illness, health, environment, and the body. We challenge the view that humanistic and scientific paradigms are irreconcilable or even "complementary," and instead explore the material and imaginary entanglements of scientific knowledge, subjectivity, and social difference—including but not limited to race, class, and gender—on multiple scales. Through a comparative framework we aim to deterritorialize the human body and human experience as universal concepts and modalities of being, paying close attention to the historical situatedness of specific phenomena.

This article traces the politics of jurisdiction in legal abortion debates in Mexico. It analyzes how jurisdictional claims work as a kind of lawfare from "above" and "below" examining: 1) how the Mexican Supreme Court invoked technicalities of jurisdiction to settle the constitutional conflict over the decriminalization of abortion in Mexico City, and 2) how a feminist litigator reappropriated the court's formal principles of legality toward their own ends in what they call "legal guerilla." Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City, the author explores how competing jurisdictions create ambiguous spaces and temporalities of inclusion and exclusion from rights and care. In closing, she argues that feminist activists who work to create access and people who seek abortion enact their own forms of "legal guerilla" as they move through overlapping and contradictory legalities.

This essay considers abortion politics as a struggle over our collective conditions of life and death. It brings the perspectives of feminist acompañantes in Mexico City and Xalapa, Veracruz, to bear on critical questions about forms of life, loss, care, and time. Although abortion is legal during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy in Mexico City and now in eight other states across the country, a powerful and diffuse feminist movement continues to grow adjacent to the law, building an autonomous sphere of collective practice. Within this movement, acompañantes—or abortion doulas—are creating an anticapitalist ethics of care and a political vocabulary that grapples with how to imagine futures amid proximity to death.

Traveling anatomy exhibitions import plasticized, posed human cadavers and place them on display. We explore the current industry, its history, and the spectacle of anatomy exhibits. The commodification of cadavers is examined as a problem in global political economy. The absence of global rules identifying plastinated cadavers as human remains allows a globalized plastination and exhibition industry. The spectacle of the exhibitions themselves divert attention away from important moral questions about the proper use of human remains and about the provenance of the cadavers used to create plastinates. The absence of global norms and the distraction of spectacle results in a global regime permitting commodification of cadavers.

In recent and massively popular “anatomical” exhibits such as Gunther Von Hagens’ “Bodyworlds”, the standard Western medical “ethos of detachment” is not called into question- it is reinforced in the enactment of an affective neutrality and clinical gaze as the proper “mode” within which to assess the wonders of human anatomy. This kind of discourse infiltrates the literature accompanying the exhibit as well as the design of the display, but the contagious and enthusiastic curiosity that characterizes most modern spectators’ reactions to the bodies demands that we pay critical attention to the sharp dichotomy between working understandings of the “insides” of the body and the ways in which these are operationalized in the museum “trenches”, in relation to cadavers (often of unknown origin) which stand before the viewer demanding appraisal on the basis of appearance, health, and “unusual”, “diseased” or “pathological” characteristics.