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General Anthropology Division
Group Flash Presentation Session
Gabriela Morales
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Scripps College
What would it look like to make doctors kin? How might bodily and material practices enact forms of mutuality across doctor-patient hierarchies? This flash presentation considers how Aymara patients draw mostly mestizo medical practitioners into long-term relations of kinship and obligation in a small town in the Bolivian Andes. I draw from, but also expand on, Annemarie Mol’s (2008) conception of care as a practice of non-linear tinkering and adjustment. Moving beyond her read of care as willing collaboration between practitioners and patients, I attend to how care unfolds in a context where legacies of colonial and medical violence are still sharply present and where the enterprise of saving lives is sometimes experienced as murderous (Stevenson 2014). Practices of kin-making do not offer neat resistance or erase hierarchies (Van Vleet 2008; Winchell 2018) — but rather reroute relations between self and other, mobilizing bodies and materials to enable possibilities for tinkering centered on wellbeing beyond life itself. I present a rapid series of images to consider how relations of obligation enable new forms of attentiveness and seeing the previously “unseen.”