Arc of Interference

JoÃo Biehl is Susan Dod Brown Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Princeton University and coeditor of Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming, also published by Duke University Press.Vincanne Adams is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco and author of Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move, also published by Duke University Press.Paul Farmer (1959–2022) was Kolokotrones University Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“This is a book about life and death and about the aftermath of death. That alone makes it relevant to our species and to others, but Arc of Interference is also a book about the possibility of something more and something wonderful: across the continents, people struggle to care for one another.” - Paul Farmer, from the Foreword “In this rich collection, leading medical anthropologists demonstrate ethnography as care. Attending to intimate realities and to the productive power of narrative, they use anthropology for collective healing.” - Helena Hansen, coauthor of (Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America) “Arc of Interference is essential reading for anyone who cares about our troubled times. Its ethnographic creations mend what is broken by asking us to listen, care, and act.” - Angela Garcia, author of (The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande) “A major undertaking of humanist anthropology, this volume insists on the necessity of medical anthropology for facing the great challenges of our time, from pandemics and structural violence to climate change and political oppression. Arc of Interference is a milestone in medical anthropology.” - Susan Reynolds Whyte, editor of (Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda) “Biehl, Adams, and their contributors have . . . penned a classic in Arc of Interference. . . . In our current times of reckoning–both global and disciplinary–contributions like Arc of Interference are a good place to start.” - Evelyn Hoon (LSE Review of Books) "As a family physician who treats patients, not disease states, I found this book both reinvigorating and challenging. ... The book is a worthwhile read for physicians who care for their patients, whether domestically or globally."- Mark K. Huntington (Family Medicine)

• Foreword. Against the Grain: Medical Anthropology in the Anthropocene / Paul Farmer  xiIntroduction. Art of Interference / JoÃo Biehl and Vincanne Adams  1Part I. Traversing Imperiled Worlds and Envisaging Human Futures1. Death by Fire: The Problem of Moral Certainty in China’s Tibet / Vincanne Adams  232. Bringing Up the Bodies: Erasing and Caring for Mexicans in the Mexico-US Borderland / DavÍd Carrasco  423. In the Vast Abrupt: Horizon Work in an Age of Runaway Climate Change / Adriana Petryna  65Part II. The Category Fallacy and Care Amid the Experts4. Justifying a Lower Standard of Health Care for the World’s Poor: A Call of Decolonizing Global Health / Salmaan Keshavjee  915. The Moral Economies of Heart Disease and Cardiac Care in India / David S. Jones  1126. Intimate and Social Spheres of Mental Illness / Janis H. Jenkins  133Part III. Worlds of Biotechnological Promise and the Plasticity of Self and Power7. A Good Death: The Promise and Threat of Biometric Inclusion for Transgender Women in India / Lawrence Cohen  1618. Medical Cosmopolitanism in Moral Worlds: Aspirations and Stratifications in Global Quests for Conception / Marcia C. Inhorn  1879. Environments and Mutable Selves / Margaret Lock  210Part IV. Tracing Arts of Living (Or, Anthropologies After Hope Has Departed)10. Anthropology in a Mode of Dying / Robert Desjarlais  23911. Ethnographic Open / JoÃo Biehl  25712. Thinking on Borrowed Time . . . About Privileging the Human / Jean Comaroff  287Afterword. Lessons Learned from the Ethnography of Care / Arthur Kleinman  305In Memoriam  327Acknowledgments  329Bibliography  331Contributors  371Index  373