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- Convenors:
-
Chitra Sangtani
(University of Edinburgh)
Daniela Jacob Pinto (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
We seek to establish the basis for an anthropology of injury. What conditions foster injury in bodies and social worlds? What are the subjective and bodily effects of injury for those who suffer them and their peers? What political possibilities does injury open for stopping cycles of violence?
Long Abstract:
Bodily injury, whether as a result of accidents, occupational hazards or acts of violence, is a fact of life. Injury brings us to the materiality of bodies as enmeshed within social, political and economic conditions of risk. Nevertheless, certain subjects and social worlds are more exposed to this risk—and to premature death—than others. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were among the first to conceptualise injury within the exploitation of English workers. More recently, work in the domains of medical anthropology and anthropology of violence and subjectivity have extended inquiry into everyday spheres of social suffering, highlighting how subjects both navigate and, at times, re-appropriate experiences of pain (Kleinman, Das, Biehl, Scheper-Hughes).
In this panel, we seek to think about injury as it is presented in different ethnographic settings, firstly reflecting on the structural conditions underlying risk of injury (e.g. capitalist modes of production, practices of policing, public policy, etc.). Under what circumstances is injury normalised and what determines the possibility for its recognition? Furthermore, we want to attune to the lived experience of injury for those who suffer them as well as their peers. How is the injured body ‘inhabited’ and what constitutes ‘recovery’ or ‘healing’ in its aftermath? To do this, we invite participants to draw on affect theory, the anthropology of violence and subjectivity, ethnographies of abolition, alongside Marxist analysis. We also propose, following Laurence Ralph (2014), to foster discussions around the political possibilities opened by injury and its potential role in stopping cycles of violence.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
I draw on 18 months of fieldwork to explore the bodily effects and affects of injury and its aftermath on low-wage laborers in a small city in the USA’s Midwest. I explore what injury, pain and debility mean and give rise to.
Paper long abstract:
Injury is an expected part of life for many laborers who work in low-wage, physically demanding roles at grocery stores, restaurants, and factories. Through 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a health clinic in Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA, serving people with little to no insurance coverage, I learned what injury means for people who fill these roles. Injury, here, encompasses bodily aspects in terms of pain and functionality, and socio-economic aspects, in terms of care, lost days at work, and mounting demands on scant finances. In some cases, injury leads to lifelong chronic pain and debility (Puar 2017). In this paper, I consider the role of socio-economic class, race, and gender—many of the laborers I spent time with were women—in shaping embodied experiences of injury and pain, and the bodily effects and affects of that injury and pain. For most, recovery is embedded in a system of care that values their bodies less than others, and has become an impossible dream. Healing for those who cannot access advanced care, is a journey to “as good as it’s going to get.” For some, this experience has given rise to advocacy and activism efforts, while for others it has meant apathy and disillusionment.
Paper short abstract:
De-escalation efforts in German health and welfare services sensitize not only to the risk of being injured through a violent act, but also to the ways in which institutional life injures. Tracing this multiplicity of injury ethnographically, I examine aggression as a complex institutional object.
Paper long abstract:
Interpersonal violence and aggression are considered an occupational risk in many health and social welfare facilities in Germany. In my contribution, I draw on ethnographic research examining a specific workplace safety and violence prevention measure, namely de-escalation trainings and techniques. Linking aggression with stress, I show, de-escalation efforts sensitize not only to the risk of being injured through a violent act, but also to the ways in which institutional life injures. Following de-escalation into staff trainings, to insurance providers and into everyday practices in shelters for unhoused persons, I encountered injury as a matter of statistics, reporting and rehabilitation, but also as ruptures in social connections, as traces and reverberations of angry and violent encounters, and as a marker of vulnerability. This multiplicity of injury, I argue, makes it a powerful analytical tool to consider what kinds of institutional response aggression and violence draw within health and welfare facilities. It captures the transgressive potential of aggression in institutional spaces, where concern for its containment – for example in a body, in a situation or in a circumscribed space – as much as failure of its containment and more or less deliberate porosity for it, shape surfaces, interfaces and boundaries. The question of injury thus also poses a question of whose and which integrity is under threat, situating aggression as a complicated matter in health and welfare services, entangled in an array of care and security projects and politics.
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents findings from a collaborative ethnography of primary care in Walker, a poor neighbourhood in Newcastle, showing how the complex relationship between injury and care is mediated by the presence and function of pharmaceutical compounds, such as painkillers and antidepressants.
Paper long abstract:
“First do no harm” remains a foundational principle of medical care. Yet harm and care are sometimes not so easy to distinguish. This paper reports on the early findings of an ongoing collaboration between a sociologist, anthropologist, and general practitioner (GP) to explore the impact of poverty on primary care outcomes in Walker, a deprived neighbourhood in the East End of Newcastle upon Tyne characterised by high rates of painkiller and antidepressant prescription, which bring with them the promise of relief as well as the risk of harm. We present a series of everyday clinical episodes that reveal the various ways in which harm and care can become entangled - for patients, clinicians, and researchers. We find that, in a relational context highly suffused and heavily mediated by the presence of pharmaceutical compounds, injury and therapy present themselves not as self-evident social or medical facts but as objects of reflexive moral reasoning, which encompass but also exceed purely biomedical logics. Attending to this fact invites a reconsideration of some of the key assumptions of both mainstream medical ethics and the critical medical humanities, as well as suggesting new ways of thinking about the relationship between injury, therapy, and moral agency in urban environments and academic research collaborations.
Paper short abstract:
The paper look at the valorisation process in the value chain as structuring risk and injuries. It investigates how risk is conceived, managed, distributed to facilitate this valorisation; and how workers navigate and re-appropriate notions of ‘risky work’.
Paper long abstract:
The paper develops from a series of reports and ethnographic insights on ‘crush injuries’ and occupational safety and health in auto and auto-component manufacturer factories (especially in the operation of the press shops) in five industrial clusters in northern India - Gurgaon, Manesar, Faridabad, Neemrana, Rudrapur.
The paper will also take another section of workers in the informal sector, the sanitation workers in Delhi-NCR from the predominantly Valmiki Dalit community, who are engaged in manual scavenging and septic tank cleaning, resulting in deaths and risk laden with humiliation and indignity.
With these two ethnographic locales, the paper will seek to situate the endemic nature of injuries and risk in the labour process, and look at the valorisation process in the value chain as structuring these risks. It will also investigate how risk is conceived, managed, distributed to facilitate this valorisation - in government regulations (especially the ESI or Employees State Insurance Act 1946 and its life), clinical expertise (‘safety norms’) and socially (caste and gender dynamics). It will seek to understand how workers navigate these forms of work, re-appropriating notions of risk, power and dignity.
Paper short abstract:
Injury is an everyday occurence at the northern French border, yet its nature and scale remain opaque. Mapping spaces of (formal and informal) care at the border and how the injured-in-transit navigate and experience them, this paper reflects on the politics of embodied harm and care.
Paper long abstract:
The deadliness of the English Channel has become particularly visible over the past few years, as border securitisation has been reinforced and the number of people who lose their lives at sea has increased. Less visible however are routine forms of maiming that people seeking to cross the France-UK border suffer. Policing strategies honed over the past decade have generated a situation where injury has become an everyday occurrence, yet its nature and scale remain opaque. In this paper, I discuss ethnographic research with injured people in spaces of care at the northern French border: a hospital, a clinic and most centrally a safehouse which hosts the injured upon their release from hospital. This is a space of recovery and respite from a life out of doors, where the formerly-injured support the newly-injured in navigating nodes of care in a hostile border environment. Through these experiences, I unpack how (formal and informal) care actors have adapted their practices to cater to border injury. I propose that by mapping spaces of care and how the injured-in-transit navigate and experience them, the absurd violence of the border environment cultivated by the French state may be revealed. The injured inhabit a paradoxical affective landscape, bearing the mark of the hostility of the state, while feeling relatively well cared for by medical institutions at the border. The paper invites reflection on the politics of injury in northern France, and how care actors might strategically cooperate to resist a downward spiral of violence.
Paper short abstract:
I reflect on how a violent event can be, on the one hand, the ratification and deepening of more invisible and prolonged violence, and on the other, how anthropology, and specifically ethnography, can be used to study in depth the articulation of this violence and its continuity.
Paper long abstract:
I met Estela, a 28-year-old woman from the municipality of La Pintana, during a two-year ethnography (2019-2020) on parenthood and childcare. During this time, I got to know her desires, her struggle to make ends meet, the support she received from her feminised network of caregivers, and her relationship with a state whose presence is weak and discontinuous, and which is often represented by professionals who suspect her parenthood. It was in this context that an unexpected but catastrophic event occurred: a stray bullet killed her 6-month-old son. After this event, her relationship with the state changed and she quickly went from being an invisible subject to a priority in institutional networks and the media. From the analysis of Estela's case, in this paper I reflect on how a violent event can be, on the one hand, the ratification and deepening of more invisible and prolonged violence, and on the other, how anthropology, and specifically ethnography, can be used to study in depth the articulation of this violence and its continuity.
Paper short abstract:
By tracing the material progression of injury, this paper argues that 'fitness to work' in occupational health settings isn’t just a tool to measure bodily ability vis-à-vis work but a tool to maintain workers’ fitness just enough to keep them working.
Paper long abstract:
Occupational health systems interpret injury to determine worker’s ‘fitness to work’ and legal claim to compensation. The private-public occupational health system in Pakistan called PESSI is responsible for not just determining workers’ fitness to work but maintaining it for specific factory jobs. The semi-government system is responsible for providing healthy workers to private factories while implementing the country’s labor compensation laws. This is done by interpreting injury’s impact on work and changing workers’ work position or strengthening specific muscles that quickly enable worker to return to work. By tracing how a worker’s injury was interpreted at PESSI, I show how the process of maintaining his fitness kept him going between PESSI and his workplace. This movement between work and PESSI makes the injury heal unevenly, reoccurring often and impacting the workers’ body over time. At the intersection of disability studies and anthropology of work, I ask: what can the unstable character of injury reveal about ‘fitness to work’ as a tool for measuring bodily ability? How being in between work and care make hybrid identities of patient-workers? Therefore, by tracing the material progression of injury both at PESSI and at work, this paper argues that fitness to work isn’t just a tool to measure bodily ability vis-à-vis work but a tool to maintain workers’ fitness just enough to keep them working.
Paper short abstract:
Neuroscientists are increasingly showing the damaging effects of low-force head impacts in sport, prompting new questions about responsibility, care, and violence in sporting contexts. This paper considers what anthropological approaches might add to understandings of sporting brain injury.
Paper long abstract:
Moral and medical anxiety about sporting brain-injury is going through a process of profound change. Emerging neuroscientific research (e.g. Russell et al 2021) shows that repeated lower-force blows to the head cause the neurodegenerative illness Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) – an illness only previously associated only with higher-force impacts known as ‘concussions’. CTE has profound, life-changing effects, yet often only becomes symptomatic after sporting careers end, and is currently only diagnosable post-mortem. Consequently, emergent cases of sporting CTE are raising new questions about who is responsible for past injuries, what meaningful care looks like in the present/future, and how (indeed, if) sports might be regulated to prevent CTE. These questions - about responsibility, care, violence, commoditisation - emerge at the intersection of major transnational forces (e.g. governance bodies, multi-billion-dollar teams and leagues), yet also always play out through contextually specific notions of personhood, body, illness, ageing etc. Building on ethnographic research with boxers in Ghana and the UK, this paper asks what a distinctly anthropological perspective might add to our understanding of sporting brain injury. Conversely, I also consider how ethnographic engagements with sporting CTE – as both lived experience and emergent bio-medical category - might deepen our understanding of injury more broadly. In particular, I consider what might be gained by exploring how sporting CTE is navigated by sports practitioners on the periphery of global sporting industries – where resources may be scarce, regulation less stringent, and where many athletes are involved in global sporting economies from subaltern positions.