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Accepted Paper:
The life of care: ethnographic portraits in a HIV/AIDS hospice in Gujarat, India.
Gaurav Datta
(University of North Dakota)
This paper uses visual ethnography to imagine end-of-life care among socially abandoned people in a hospice with late-stage HIV/AIDS and co-existing mental illness.
Paper long abstract:
Amidst the global critique of purely pharmaceutical modes of treatment for mental illnesses, there has been increased emphasis on the role of expert clients and lay workers, particularly in resource-limited settings in the form of task-shifting and task-sharing. Further, the ‘treatment gap,’ has been sought to be replaced by the more comprehensive measure ‘Mental Health Care Gap,’ which includes psychosocial and physical health care gap in addition to the existing treatment gap (Pathare et al., 2017). Care, being a highly subjective and dynamic phenomenon, how it is enacted and understood depends as much on the context as on the actors and their local worlds. In this photo-essay, I use visual ethnography to the trace how care is construed among the residents of a hospice for terminally ill people with HIV/AIDS in Gujarat, India¬ – a zone of social abandonment (Biehl 2013, Datta. G 2016). By pairing the photographs with ethnographic vignettes, I show that still photographs, made by ethnographic listening and not doing, could provide insights into community care, that exists as a world simultaneously within and beyond institutionalized palliative and mental health care services. Such visual ethnography I argue, could also be used to imagine and inform care by transforming the gaze of the reader, apart from documenting human suffering.