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Contribution short abstract

Tenacious Assumptions in Medical Anthropology reframes care as racial grammar and communicability. Naming “ethnography in the wake,” I read worry, silence, gossip, and refusal as ethical practices and how care can slide into extraction.

Contribution long abstract

Tenacious assumptions in Medical Anthropology (riffing on Deborah Gordon) argues that “care” is a stubborn, inherited grammar that sorts communicability: who can speak as a patient, who is heard, and when refusal is pathologized. Writing from anticipatory grief and worry, I read affect as evidence of living “in the wake” (Sharpe) as the ongoing, unresolved afterlife of slavery that saturates health and relation. These are the field’s tenacious assumptions: that care is self-evident, that autonomy is evenly distributed, and that communicative breakdowns are failures rather than sites of ethical possibility.Bringing Black study (Spillers, Hartman, Sharpe) into conversation with medical anthropology, I show how core categories—patient, risk, consent, kin—presume forms of personhood that antiblackness historically withholds. Through scenes of biomedical extraction, including the ethical afterlives of Henrietta Lacks/HeLa, I trace how care can function as appropriation, liability management, and bodily theft, even when framed as benevolence. I propose an anthropology of the flesh and “ethnography in the wake” as method and critique: attending to grammar, silence, distrust, and refusal as data. Recasting care as a problem of thought and communicability, the paper asks what forms of witnessing, repair, and responsibility medical anthropology might cultivate in a polarized present.