Research that matters

In her opening ceremony, Ana Maurine Lara makes the claim that “given knowledge and language… there is a responsibility to enact that knowledge and that language, and to render with great care the many ways of being that have sustained us and that are the sources of our greatest power” (2019, 20). Moving through her ofrenda, we are asked to participate in the call and response, to understand the responsibility of knowledge, both embodied and relational, as a collective endeavor. Rather than absorb, we are asked to partake in what queer freedom : Black sovereignty means to us, and to disentangle Christian colonial logics from future potentialities.

In particular, the notion of arrivant states stuck out to me. On page 12, Lara writes that we have a shared task “to reconcile with our shared roles in Indigenous genocide and in the continued perpetuation of the colonial settler futurities through the Christian colonial arrivant state, in all of its forms.” Here, my question feels hard to articulate, but is something akin to: how do we even begin to work towards queer freedom : Black sovereignty from the Christian colonial state? Or do we not engage with the arrivant state and instead focus on deconstructing our own settler colonist futurities? How do we make this ofrenda into practice?

also, not sure if anyone else has picked up on this as well, but the other tip to write an award-winning ethnography is to include the word palimpsest… i’m not sure we’ve had a single text without it lmao

This week, we read the chapters “Opening Ceremony” and “Altars-puntos” of Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty (2020) by Dominican American Anthropologist Ana-Maurine Lara. More than an ethnography, this piece serves as a ceremonial ofrenda to the complex, unclear : unknowing, intersecting, time-space oriented, physical-social, and spiritual qualities, ideas, practices, lives, and woven density of queer : Black : Indigenous spirits, lives, and genealogies, particularly as experienced in the Dominican Republic. The ofrenda’s intimate storytelling and poetic nature challenges Euro-ethnocentric norms and forms of knowledge in favor of a decolonial, Zambo (Afro-Indigenous) consciousness in the face of Christian coloniality in an arrivant state. Regarding this week’s focus on cultural artifacts I ask: how does Lara use the ofrenda and altar as a means to transcend the limitations of time, space, and distance in the ethnographic record as described by Murchison (2010: 158)? What are some examples of cultural artifacts in the text and how does she use them and relate them to her theoretical frameworks?

I look forward to discussing the chapters, book, themes, ideas, and methods in more detail in class on Tuesday as well as reading and discussing everyone’s questions.

In the introduction, the author talks about a drug detoxification clinic in New Mexico’s Espanola Valley. This area is where a lot of heroin addictions occur and it often results in deaths. I found the stories of the people that were apart of the clinic really interesting, particularly when John leaves the clinic and gets arrested. I took a class last semester that discussed a lot about how the physical environment/ land relates to different things. And so, I find it interesting how that is talked about here as well. More experiences of people in this area are shared in Chapter 5. And although there is a lot of drug dealing, addictions, and deaths happening, I like that the author mentions that the healthcare system is not giving the treatment that these people need. What do these personal struggles represented in Introduction and Chapter 5 say about the systemic issues in healthcare and drug detoxification clinics?

As we continue reading several of the bestselling ethnographies of the twenty-first century, I can’t help but continue to think about some of the recurring themes and trends these ethnographies have in common. For instance, violence. This week’s The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande by Angela García (2010) does a meticulous job at exploring the geographies of addiction (particularly of heroin) and dispossession of Hispano property and personhood along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. García states: “by attending to the politics of what I call the patient-prisoner, I explore how the local phenomenon of heroin addiction and addicts themselves are constituted not only through hardship and loss but also through the logic, routines, and practices of medical and juridical regimes” (2010: 8). What similarities and differences might the patient-prisoner framework have with other frameworks such as reparation (Thomas 2011), infrastructural violence (Dixon 2020), or obstetric violence (Suh 2021)? What conversations may or may not be happening between ethnographers, works, theories, and in anthropology/social science at large? What trends can we identify and why?

Additionally, Like many of the past ethnographers we’ve read (e.g. Deborah Thomas, Savannah Shange, Siri Suh, Lydia Z. Dixon), García has a personal connection to the primary site of her research—in this case, where she grew up.  As readers, we see how she both confronts this personal connection in the context of this difficult topic and uses it as a guiding force in her approaches and frameworks (e.g. looking at the “geographies” of addiction). In addition to this spatial aspect, she also makes a conscious effort to recenter the peoples’ and regions’ history and context in understanding present-day phenomena. She states: “I hope to show how Hispano addictive experience is closely related to history and not merely cultural or personal pathology, as it is so often described” (García 2010: 9). Moreover, in what ways does García position the space/landscape/geography and historical context in understanding Hispano addiction and dispossession? What does her own positionality offer her? How might this compare with how history, space, and positionality are discussed and employed by other ethnographers we’ve read?

As I went through this reading I was struck by many of the same things as Stephanie. I think it also has to do with the fact that I am also currently studying and preparing to be involved in the healthcare field. With this ethnographies detail of how the addiction has become an inescapable part of the land, it really dispels any illusions of the healthcare field I had  and forced me to be honest and transparent with my understanding of how many shortcomings and issues exist within the ‘professional setting.’

Something that I thought was interesting was how, in the introduction, the commentary on the distribution of the relaxers was made. Garcia comments on how the relaxers that were given out at the clinics could often be found all around being used for recreation, however, at the clinic, where those handing out the relaxers with no proper training were considered ‘legitimate’ because of the false security or authority that comes with the idea of the clinic. This again reminds me of the many conversations had about the failures of public health and helps me to really see the whole picture Garcia is painting as this commentary is paired with her many stories of the heroin syringes being intertwined with every single aspect of the land.

This also reminds me of the piece on the midwives because it too explicitly talks about how there is a need for a bridge due to the failing pieces of the healthcare field. These two texts paired together has helped me piece together a large picture of the gaps between our current world and proper care/health.

“A few plots down was Danny’s grave. His small mound was com- pletely covered with toys. Teddy bears and Matchbox cars and cowboys- and-Indians figurines. Little blond angels and superheroes. Dozens of crosses and Jesuses and Virgins and pinwheels that spun in the breeze. I read one of the many handwritten notes his mother—the neighbor to whom I rarely dared to speak—had placed there. Among her promises to her son was this: I will be joining you soon.”

I admittedly had a hard time finishing the chapter I assigned everyone because Angela Garcia’s writing was so beautiful and poignant and emotionally devastating. Perhaps because I have a greater background in studying the field of care/healthcare, I found her descriptions of the clinic and the bureaucratic red tape surrounding it to be very haunting: the idea that the clinic was not credible because its workers were untrained when the company that hired them and funded the clinic refused to provide adequate training; and the idea that patients are “difficult” and “doomed to fail” due to their lack of being ideal or perfect patients.

What I’d really like to focus on and think about going into my presentation tomorrow is this quote from Garcia where she says “we are inescapably shaped by our dependence on other human beings” (203). What does everyone think about the emphasis placed by Angela Garcia on empathy and care of her subjects and study? Does it make The Pastoral Clinic as a work more compelling? How do we think her fieldwork was impacted by her emotional connections?

Interested to hear everyone’s thoughts :-)!

In a world where healthcare systems often fall short, the power of community care shines through in the context of Garcia’s poignant narrative. The difficulties that families in the Española Valley have when coping with addiction are highlighted through the scope of a loss of hope and systemic failures in healthcare service were defined by the closure of Nuevo Día’s detox facility. Garcia quotes, “The failure of the clinic became a part of the material and symbolic order through which heroin use, overdose, and even suicide are realized as a form of life” (190). The profound difficulties that people fighting addiction face on a daily basis are highlighted by this harsh truth and further when quoting patients herself, ““I will never be cured,” she said, “because there is nothing wrong with me. Be- cause without heroin, I can’t really live.”
Looking further than just personal accounts, Garcia emphasizes the systemic social problems within healthcare and rehabilitation. The disturbing tendency towards bureaucratic standardization and privatization is mirrored in the move towards managed care models, as seen in the reorganization of Medicaid. Vulnerable populations are left without basic services as a result of these developments, as important healthcare institutions like Nuevo Día’s clinic are being closed.
In spite of all this, there are grassroots movements that are showing signs of progress. Resilience in the face of institutional failures is shown by community-based efforts like as needle-exchange programs and naloxone training. But these endeavours also show how private interests and macro-level regulations constrain them, therefore we need long-term, all-encompassing answers. From personal experience with loved ones, I recognize how challenging it can be to hope that others that aren’t directly impacted by the disease to handle addiction compassionately and understandingly. I believe that Garcia’s call for a reevaluation of the community care within healthcare structure is paramount. Care is more than simply a responsibility; it is a deep act of empathy and support, and while we work through these complicated difficulties, let us not forget that real healing often starts with support and helping hands.

The key theme that stood out to me from Garcia’s book was that of care. In the first chapter, care was palpable in Andrés’ question of whether Garcia wanted to “observe” or to “work.” Beyond being a great example of participant vs engaged ethnography, this question also spoke to care. Did the author want to help the addicts at Nuevo Día, or did she just want to study them? I appreciated that this point did not turn into a self-aggrandizing discussion of her work on the night shift, but instead remained rooted in positive consideration of the heroin users with whom she worked. On that note, I was struck by one of the final sections in chapter one, entitled “On Writing With Care.” It is in this section that the following line emerges: “Conversations, encounters, recollections, and incidents— between them, between us— form the heart of this book and make it move” (34-35). I think that we can all draw from this definition of the heart of ethnography as we continue moving forward in this class.

Keeping with the theme of caring, the interweaving of addiction, lifeways, and narratives of addictive cycles, was bared painfully in the discussion of Adela’s home treatment center. On showing Garcia the house, the movement between pointing to the room that her husband never remodeled, to the room her children were born, and to the room that her son died, Adela’s narration of her physical house spoke to the lifeway that heroin usage poses, as later discussed by Bernadette and Eugenia.

In terms of a question, I was left thinking about Garcia watching her drug-dealing neighbors from her attic window (especially in the context of the death of her young son). What are the limits to observation in terms of ethics? How do we write about pain and suffering in ways that are committed to recognizing the hardships that lead to certain unsavory practices? And, what would it mean to witness, but to exclude from the narrative? If Garcia observed from the attic but never wrote about it, what part of the narrative becomes changed?

The two chapters of this book were really surprising. The way that women that underwent either an induced or spontaneous abortion are treated really poorly in countries where abortion is illegal, such as Senegal. Some of the practices like digital evacuation performed on women in Senegal hospitals are not even approved by the World Health Organization (WHO). Low-income women and women that do not abide by the stereotypical societal expectations are harassed during their hospitalization/treatment. Although PAC has been seen to be financially disadvantageous, not efficient, and its ethics are often not being met, some countries persist in keeping abortion illegal. It is also really interesting that induced abortions are very rarely recorded and it is quite difficult to determine whether an abortion was induced or spontaneous. By the statistics, it seems like this system is not working out as well as these countries hoped.

Having read “Introduction: PAC as Reproductive Governance” and Chapter 3 “‘We Wear White Coats, Not Uniforms’: Abortion Surveillance in Hospitals” in Siri Suh’s (2021) Dying to Count: Post-abortion Care and Global Reproductive Health Politics in Senegal I find myself very appreciative of the concepts of “obstetric violence,” “necropower,” and “population control” as situated in her research. Additionally, Suh states: “Since the early 1990s, women of color activists and scholars have understood reproductive justice as a framework for research, theory, and practice that highlights how inequalities related to gender, race, class, and ability constrain people’s capacity to lead healthy reproductive lives (Luna and Luker, 2013; Ross and Solinger, 2017). Feminist scholars have a responsibility to critique mechanisms of global reproductive governance when they harm women.” I also briefly read Chapter 1 “A ‘Transformative’ Intervention” and Suh (2021) positions herself as a Black American woman, PhD student (at time of fieldwork), and public health official with experience working for and continued ties to the Senegal office of Management Sciences for Health (MSH). How does Suh explicitly and implicitly situate her work in relation to her own positionality? How does she contributed to a larger global dialogue (and recurring themes in these well-renowned ethnographies we are reading for class) of maternal/women’s healthcare, violence, and policing/government intervention ? Moreover, how does Suh establish her ethics and reliability as a social scientist interviewing numerous healthcare workers and associated individuals while also taking her own activist stand regarding the matter?

“Spending money on an intervention may in fact be more critical to establishing political credibility within a short period of time than rigorously determining the intervention’s cost-effectiveness over long-term intervals” (110). This quotation in chapter four really grabbed me, gave me a good shake and a huge reality check. This summarization just serves as a poignant entry point into the nuanced balance between immediate action and long-term planning in addressing reproductive health issues. As I read the first three chapters, Suh set the stage by shedding light on the intricate interplay between political expediency and sustainable solutions. However, the first chapter created a really solid foundation for understanding the urgency of addressing post-abortion care as a critical component of reproductive health services. I didn’t know until reading the first chapter of this book how paramount the importance of investing resources in interventions really was. Suh then shifts in chapter three to explaining how we can prioritize immediate impact while acknowledging the broader implications for long-term sustainability instead of allowing little change to these intense government health regimes.

After reading the introduction and chapter 3 I definitely have to say that I am on the same boat as Mandy. Prior to reading this text I had an idea of what PAC might look like and how abortions would be treated, however, after reading I can definitely say I was very off. I was definitely struck by the harsh regulation that exists on women’s bodies. I feel that often, especially in America, we think about the regulation of women’s bodies from the context of the way that a man will push that regulation. I thought it was interesting to see the way that this regulation is being pushed by other women.

It was also interesting to read about the unique role that healthcare providers have. I am currently taking a class called clinical ethics and it talks about the ethical guidelines that clinicians hold themselves to in regards to providing their patients with proper care. Through Suh’s work it definitely makes me think about ethics and how they are shaped by the environment and culture and how the line of ethical care moves throughout these different environments.

From the very beginning of her work, Suh’s book threw me for a loop. On page two, Suh notes that between a quarter and a third of women in Senegalese prisons are there on abortion or infanticide charges. A quarter and a third. Each charged between several months and years. For me, it was one of those moments where I realized how insular the U.S. conversations around the legality of abortion are. Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there was so much activism around getting people with uteruses safe abortions and talk about how pills could be shipped to states where abortion was made illegal. However, I realized that I never saw any information about women who were imprisoned because of their abortion decisions or miscarriages, a contrast to what we predicted would happen following Dobbs v. Jackson. This is not to say that the overturning of Roe v. Wade should  be compared to the situation in Senegal, but it is to point out that, despite PAC being a global health intervention, U.S.-based activism around abortion does not center around questions of global health, despite the fact that 97% of unsafe abortions happen in developing countries (6). The caveat here is that this is based upon my own interaction with abortion rights activism, much of which has come through work with Planned Parenthood since about 2018. Major legislation such as the Global Gag Rule was genuinely a surprise to me and has made me realize how little I actually know about abortion as a global health issue. Apologies if this note feels obvious to y’all, but I wanted to keep track of my thinking as I thought through why my knowledge on abortion policies globally is so limited.

Now, to less surprise and more critical thinking. Suh’s key argument is grounded in thinking about PAC both mitigates harm while simultaneously exposing uterus havers to obstetric violence (12). Thinking about being entitled to survive abortion but not to do so without bodily and mental harm and strain speaks to the lack of care given to the uterine folx themselves. My understanding here is that PAC, as a part of global reproductive governance, places emphasis on uterine individuals as means of future reproduction more so than as agentic beings that deserve access to safe abortions. So, then, how are we to think about conversations around reproductive sovereignty in ways that decenter neoliberal priorities of cost-effectiveness and privatization (19)? And, furthermore, how can we understand PAC as a means by which peoples’ uteruseseseses are simultaneously violated and decriminalized? And how can we put this question in conversation with the percentage of Senegalese women that are incarcerated because of infanticide or abortion charges?

Anyways, this reading made me realize that I know so little about abortion on a global scale, and how little I have been asked to challenge my own thinking about reproductive rights beyond our state borders. I’m off to go stare at a wall and think through these international systems of policing and surveillance… see y’all on Tuesday!!!!

Siri Suh thoroughly documents what she calls “reproductive governance” in three different hospitals in Senegal. She links this phenomenon and PAC (Post-Abortion-Care) practices to the Foucauldian concept of biopower that is to say, the practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their subjects through “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations”. But in that very case, it happens to be the subjugation of the female body. On page 14, she links PAC practices to capitalistic and neocolonial dynamics by demonstrating how PAC actually contributes to the reification and commodification of women bodies so as to further the enrichment of pharmaceutical companies. And this isn’t all.  She adds an intersectional lens to the mistreatement of women in PAC by pointing out that the “ranking of bodies” is orchestrated according to “a gendered, racialized, and classed spectrum of normative reproductive behavior.” (p.15)

I was very shocked by the abuse women seeking PAC are suffering through and was particularly struck by the demands made of women to conform (once again) to certain expectations of womanhood: in order to seek a “respectable” status at the hospital and hope to be treated decently, a woman needs to be virtuous and married (sex outside of marriage being deeply frowned upon), appropriate (arrive on time or at a specific non-suspect time of the day), proper (not convey their physical pain too loudly) but paradoxically convey deep pain at the idea of losing the fetus. This demonstrates a need for the performance of specific standards of womanhood which shed light on the inequitous power and gender dynamic in Senegalese society. Indeed, not once does the author mention the point of view of a man accompanying a woman in need of PAC.

The tradition of midwifery in Mexico showcases not only that the marginalized groups have to find alternative ways to get health services, but also their resilience. Through struggle, these groups are able to adapt new practices. In Chapter 3, we see how this tradition was established and then evolved. Midwives are able to incorporate modern techniques in their work and provide best care that they can. This means resilience is one of the main things that enrich this culture. I wonder what other techniques marginalized groups implemented over the years and how they compare to the modern, more expensive versions of that technique.

What stood out to me while reading this text was the way that Dixon made the distinction between global health as a noun and then as a verb. In her distinction between the two, she addresses the way that ‘infrastructural violence’ both passive and active are markers of how the government has failed in their attempts towards ‘progress and development.’

In her use of the midwives as the bridge it was also interesting to see how they exist in a space where they are working with and also against the state. This brings me to the question of how do Dixon’s findings challenge the dichotomy between traditional and biomedical knowledge, and also how does Mexico’s history play into the ‘conditioning’ occurring amongst women in Mexico.