Annemarie Mol's THE BODY MULTIPLE

bluesky review:

⌘ A fascinating ethnographic hospital study, focused on "the techniques that make things visible, audible, tangible, knowable," ultimately concluding that the reality of disease is primarily produced via the enactment of practices

⌘ The "practitioners" in Mol's analysis can be experts (physicians, pathologists, lab technicians), but the complaints and observations of the patient also play a role, as do Latour-esque nonhuman agents ("Paperwork. Rooms, buildings. The insurance system. An endless list of heterogeneous elements.")

⌘ this resonates with the discourse around other aspects of reality that are similarly made manifest through practices—most obviously it connects to the way gender is now understood as a performed complex of material and immaterial elements. Long story short: Judith Butler is mentioned in this book

⌘ note that Mol is not saying that disease is not "real" or that it is "all in one's head," but she is saying that the way disease is diagnosed, measured, and treated is wholly contingent on the sometimes-contradictory cloud of practices surrounding it & thus best understood via praxiographic inquiry

⌘ also referenced: Barbara Duden's THE WOMEN BENEATH THE SKIN, which apparently looks at women's medical records from 1730 Germany and examines how dramatically "the experience of one's own physicality from the inside" can change in 300 years. "We simply couldn't do such a body any more." INTERESTING

Notes, oldest to newest.

1. Enactment as opposed to knowledge

2. More than one, but not fragmented

3. Medicine's "ontological politics"

4. Various approaches to building knowledge about the body

5. Sources of knowledge, styles of knowing

6. Objects in Mol's "empirical philosophy"

7. An ethnography for objects

8. Attending to the multiplicity

9. Epistemological normativity vs ethnographic normativity

10. Ontology and practices

11. Who studies disease

12. Generalizations about "the literature," in Mol

13. Sickness as ritual

14. Talcott Parsons and medical sociology

15. The dangers of "perspectivalism"

16. Reporting on impairment

17. Doctors as producers of knowledge

18. The problems of trying to "locate" your work within a discipline

19. Marilyn Strathern's work on kinship

20. Melanesian kinship networks

21. The future of family relations

22. 1963: The coining of "gender identity"

23. The "illness" / "disease" distinction

24. Who or what makes events happen

25. Barbara Duden's "The Women Beneath the Skin"

26. Medicine and the "modern Western body"

27. Mol: "The flesh is stubborn"

28. "A paper that does not have references"

29. Modern practices, modern thinking (in Latour)

30. Latour's mixtures

31. The performance of disease

32. The ethnographic study of practices

33. Goffman's social self

34. Enactments that exclude

35. No identity but performance

36. Constructed by deeds

37. Pathology

38. Incoherent gender configurations

39. Gender materiality and immateriality

40. Stefan Hirschauer and gender performance

41. "Laboratories secrete reality"

42. "Ontological choreography"

43. Pathology in medicine

44. Complaints as medical ontology

45. The meaning and definiton of disability

46. Foucault's escape from dominant modes of thinking

47. The knowledge in "practices"

48. "Disease is a process in time"

49. Enacting reality

50. Nothing "is" alone

51. Parson's "The Social System"

52. Forms of coordination

53. Foucault's "normalization"

54. Physicians and social control

55. Associations and the Pasteurization of France

56. Social worlds

57. Ways of worldmaking

58. John Law on discourses

59. Science and the "multiplication of reality"

60. Data and the technology that makes them

61. Totalizing anthropological theories

62. Strathern's "partial connections"

63. "Closing" controversies, in science studies

64. "Radical Science Journal"

65. Indication criteria

66. Diverging theories of tuberculosis

67. "What is it to differ?"

68. Size and scale in medical ontology

69. The normal and the pathological

70. The clinic vs the lab

71. Foucault on the normal and the pathological

72. Where an organism begins and ends

73. Cultural hygiene

74. The institutionalization of ethnic identity

75. The boundary object

76. Networks and regions in geography

77. Networks and practices in science

78. Objects, practices, and reality

79. Biological facts vs. social events

80. Donna Haraway's "Primate Visions"

81. Praxiographic knowledge

82. "The practices forcing an object to speak"

83. Diagnosing, intervening, and enactment

84. Mol on "the effects of writing styles"

85. Epstein's "Impure Science"

86. Edward Soja's "Postmodern Geographies"

87. "The critical ontology of ourselves"

88. John Law and Annemarie Mol

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