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All That Was Not Her

All That Was Not Her

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$25.95

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While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone—what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly’s life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist’s engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their ending. Todd Meyers offers an intimate ethnographic portrait of a woman he met during his fieldwork as a way to explore the complexity of the anthropologist’s personal relationships with their subjects and how to speak of and to someone who is gone. Todd Meyers is Associate Professor and Marjorie Bronfman Chair in Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University. Undoing  ix
1. These Moments Formed between Us  1
2. Still Life  13
3. The Accident of Contact  41
4. Resuscitations  63
5. A Living Room  85
6. Thoughts of Suicide  97
7. [ . . . ]  123
8. Breathing Feels like a Falsehood  133
9. Notes on a New Moralism  151
10. Black Figurine  175
Reassembling  199
Notes  203
Bibliography  215

“This beautiful, smart, and unique book cuts into ethnography and race in powerful and necessary ways, stepping off the plane of current critical race theory into risky, generative thinking and writing. An intimate, frank account of a situation and relationship beyond the convenient stability of an understanding or meaning, All That Was Not Her is an absolutely compelling read.”
“All That Was Not Her is an exceptionally compelling reflection on the long-term complicated relationship through time between an anthropologist and a key interlocutor. Todd Meyers remarkably gets at the fraught, complex, and entangled forms of connection and difference, offering a new understanding of the interpersonal, ethical, and epistemological dimensions of work undertaken in contemporary medical and sociocultural anthropology. This is an altogether necessary book for these times.”
"Meyers’s conscience-driven reflections regarding the utility of his work, the shifting parameters of the researcher-interlocutor relationship, and the special challenges of communicating across gaps of class and race, form the heart of the book. He makes academic writing his leaping-off point for a deeply thoughtful, lyrically expressed ethical and philosophical enquiry. This is a book that can be slotted into many non-fiction categories, but don’t be put off: it is a unique work of literature."
"Meyers’ writing is compelling for its beauty and for the honesty of his descriptions. More than anything, I took from this its head-on confrontation with the uneasiness inherent in the relationship between the ethnographer and their subject that should be familiar to anyone with experience of doing ethnographic fieldwork."

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Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 1 × 1 in