Drawing on ethnography of Equine Assisted Therapies for young people, I will suggest that alongside efforts to evoke forms of understanding that are not reliant on ‘voice’, we must maintain an interest in when, why, and how, voicelessness matters.
Paper long abstract:
An ethics of care goes beyond the things that are said about, or to, one another. Equine Assisted Therapies for young people utilise a form of response-able (Haraway, 2008) relatedness that is about noticing, and changing, the way bodies can move one another in space. Ethnographic studies of these, and other, ‘experiential’ therapies could draw us into understandings of personhood, interaction, and ethics that are not couched in the concept of ‘voice’ and its kin-terms ‘coherence’ ‘reason’ and ‘authenticity.’ Yet my point of departure in this debate is concern with rendering non-verbal encounters or experiences into words – ventriloquising – as part of our methodology. Rather than describing non-verbal encounters in our own anthropological analytic language, I suggest studying the complex sphere of ethics that surrounds the articulation of others' experiences within care infrastructures. Medical anthropologists both describe and intervene – these two roles are not always comfortable allies. It is right that we intervene in the historical privileging of ‘voice’ in medical and social scientific logics. This can involve paying deep regard toward non-verbal forms of encounter. But there is a risk that our interventions and innovations could diminish, and/or exasperate, the predicament some people endure of being articulated by others. We must keep items like voicelessness, non-verbality, incoherence, and inarticulacy in view as descriptive and variable ethnographic objects.