Curare. Journal of Medical Anthropology

Visual Expressions

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Visual Dynamics of Contagion

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How does one visually depict the spread of disease Tibet an artists at the turn of the seventeenth century must have asked themselves this very question when they prepared a series of medical scroll paintings, one of which will be discussed here. They were painted to illustrate the medical writings of the Fifth Dalai Lama’s regent, Desi Sangyé Gyatso, specifically his commentary on the Four Tantras, an important medical treatise dating back to the twelfth century. Sangyé Gyatso oversaw the preparation of these scroll paintings in Lhasa. They were designed for educational but also political purposes. At the heart of this visual narrative is the depiction of an Indic origin myth concerning poisons, exploring the themes of elixirs in the pursuit of immortality. The painting presented here steers an inquiry into the interconnectedness of medical ideas of poisoning within the broader notions of disease transmission. The images reveal Tibetan medical ideas of potency, interlinking the poisonous with the medicinal in intriguing ways: poisonous substances could also be used as antidotes to poisoning when properly processed, but they could also be “cast” to cause intentional poisoning. Through existing reproductions of these visuals, this paper explores and analyzes the dynamics between forms of poisoning and the antidotes used to treat poisoning. What understanding of poisoning and contagion can we draw from this almost four-hundred-year-old medical painting?

“Being Cultured”, Changing Culture

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As poetic and political, images mobilized by public health campaigns are often dense with meaning and associations, even as they make certain assumptions about the good, virtuous, natural, and right. This article explores the assumptions about “being cultured” that underlie the “Let’s Make the City Cultured” campaign and related public health messaging in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital city. In the image-slogan complexes mobilized by such campaigns, “being cultured” (soyoltoi), healthy (erüül), and clean (tsever) is linked to curbing specific behaviors such as urinating and spitting in public, which took on new urgency in health-related discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a concept that retains the legacy of meanings and associations in connection with state socialist era values, “being cultured” has been used in different yet connected ways across the 20th and 21st centuries to dis- seminate hegemonic messages. Drawing on the “Let’s Make the City Cultured” and related ideological public health campaigns, this article explores discursive efforts to generate a subject of the state that espouses bourgeois values.

Visual Expressions of Embodied Risk

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With increasing opportunities of early detection of risk in biomedicine, the communication of statistical likelihood of disease has gained importance. Risk communication is committed to the support of risk literacy, assumed to be a prerequisite for making informed decisions to minimise one’s risk. Graphical representations play a crucial role in this context; among others, stylised human silhouettes are employed to visualise likelihoods, for ex- ample to indicate the number of persons out of one hundred who will or will not get the disease. While this may sup- port risk literacy in terms of more easily ‘grasping’ abstract statistics, still a risk likelihood is difficult to comprehend in terms of its meaning for one’s individual life. So what if this principle is inverted and the stylised human silhouette is used instead to visualise the individual and collective meaning attributed to a certain – actual or envisioned – disease risk? In the context of a study on health literacy among persons with an increased disease risk, we employed body maps in research and in teaching. In the research project, we conducted narrative interviews with 20 persons who had been informed about having an increased risk for familial breast and ovarian cancer or psychosis. Towards the end of each interview, we invited our informants to do a body mapping exercise, using a stylised human silhou- ette on a sheet of paper and asking them to sketch their risk. In teaching, we invited medical students attending an ethics seminar to do a body mapping exercise in small groups based on a case example, using a stylised human silhouette on a flip chart sheet.

Visual Embodiments of Bodily Sensations and Their Individual Conditionality

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This paper gives insight into the exploration of perception, visual representation, and mediation of physical symptoms using methods of artistic research. A crucial question is what experiences and languages can serve to re-present the invisible. The cultural and individual context through which perception is first constituted plays an essential role. Bodily sensations are everyday experiences, but become even more explicit through symptoms of illness. Lived experiences are deeply subjective and require a language in order to be conveyed. This investigation is based on self-experienced incidents caused by multiple sclerosis (MS). Many individuals afflicted with MS experience paresthesia due to a signal-transmission disorder in the central nervous system. The symptoms are not perceived as occurring at the actual location of the damaged nerve cells; in addition, there is no external stimulus associated with the sensations. Such sensations include that of socks covering the feet or balls of textile material underneath the feet. This material is perceived as foreign. These illusions seem perfectly real and are irritating. The process of making bodily phenomena visual is preceded by introspection and leads to externalization, these phenomena ac- quiring, in this process, an additional existence outside the body. The transfer to a sheet of paper can bring relief and help in the process of regaining possession of an alienated body. The drawings are also a means of conveying the invisible to other affected persons, their relatives, and persons in the clinical field. In the process of sensation–perception–representation, a double question arises: What pre-existing images occur during perception and to what extent do the visual representations allow the recipient to begin to comprehend a sensation? Does legibility depend on similarity of experiences and cultural contexts?

As Far as I Can Record

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This account draws on my experience as a practitioner filmmaker documenting my father’s experience of living with dementia. The scope is to analyze how the intimate relationship between me as a filmmaker and the people portrayed in the film shapes the construction of the visual representation of the experience of living with de- mentia. This reflection is placed in the larger frame of the cinematic and media portrayal of mental lines. Visual portrayal of circumstances that involve people struggling with mental disorders, calls for a particular awareness of the responsibility and accountability of documentary filmmakers who assume such endeavors. Personal audio-visual engagements have been viewed as a possible answer to the problem of representation raised by the ethnographic and documentary practice. They are part of a broader ‘social movement that blurs the lines between public and private life’ (Aufderheide 1997). Throughout the process, the filmmaker assumes interchangeable roles of both in- sider and outsider. The subjective position of the filmmaker subverts the aspiration to objectivity, realism, and precision of traditional documentary discourses. Drawing on my experience as a practitioner filmmaker documenting my father’s experience of living with dementia, I discuss the methodological challenges that emerged during the process of film production. What are the cinematic strategies of reinterpretation, reconstruction, and understand- ing of self and otherness? How does such a level of access and intimacy affect the construction of the narrative of living with dementia?

Zusammenfassungen der Beiträge von Curare 46 (2023) 1

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Article abstracts of Curare 46 (2023) 1

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Résumés des articles Curare 46 (2023) 1

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Comics in the Time of COVID-19

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In recent years Graphic Medicine has gained in importance in various fields, ranging from clinical to activist contexts. By analysing the experiences of the Käthe Collective which created the comic book Materia Viva in 2020, the aim of this essay is to review the elaborations that have developed in the field of Graphic Medicine and examine its role during COVID-19. Materia Viva is a comic that focuses on different concepts and principles of health such as: a conceptualisation of health that goes beyond the absence of disease, the social determinants of health, health inequalities, and community participation. Starting from a review of the different uses and purposes of Graphic Medicine, the essay focuses on the context in which Materia Viva was born, namely the lockdowns introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, and on the creative process that led to the publication of the comic book. Subsequently, the main contents of the comic book are analysed, to conclude with the description of the concrete contexts of Materia Viva’s development and use after its publication. Our analysis highlights how, although Materia Viva was created to disseminate health-related content, it has also been used in other educational, clinical and activist contexts. In this perspective its physical and virtual form, as well as its purpose are shaped by the people who interact with it, resulting in an unexpected relevance compared to the original intentions.

Picture This – Medical Comics as an Impetus

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Two and a Half Years of IMHAR

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Tibetan Anatomical Terms in “Knitted Body Materiality”

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Comparative Guts – Exploring the Inside of the Body Through Time and Space

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Kristen Smith 2022. Medical Tourism and Inequity in India. The Hyper-Commodification of Healthcare

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Angel Martínez & Lina Masana (eds) 2022. Subjectivities and Afflictions in Medical Anthropology

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Editorial

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