The radically humanistic essays in Arc of Interference refigure our sense of the real, the ethical, and the political in the face of mounting social and planetary upheavals. Creatively assembled around Arthur Kleinman’s medical anthropological arc and eschewing hegemonic modes of intervention, the essays advance the notion of a care-ful ethnographic praxis of interference. To interfere is to dislodge ideals of naturalness, blast enduring binaries (human/nonhuman, self/other, us/them), and redirect technocratic agendas while summoning relational knowledge and the will to create community. The book’s multiple ethnographic arcs of interference provide a vital conceptual toolkit for today’s world and a badly needed moral perch from which to peer toward just horizons.

Contributors. Vincanne Adams, João Biehl, Davíd Carrasco, Lawrence Cohen, Jean Comaroff, Robert Desjarlais, Paul Farmer, Marcia Inhorn, Janis H. Jenkins, David S. Jones, Salmaan Keshavjee, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Adriana Petryna

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.

Foreword. Against the Grain: Medical Anthropology in the Anthropocene / Paul Farmer  xi
Introduction. Art of Interference / João Biehl and Vincanne Adams  1
Part I. Traversing Imperiled Worlds and Envisaging Human Futures
1. Death by Fire: The Problem of Moral Certainty in China’s Tibet / Vincanne Adams  23
2. Bringing Up the Bodies: Erasing and Caring for Mexicans in the Mexico-US Borderland / Davíd Carrasco  42
3. In the Vast Abrupt: Horizon Work in an Age of Runaway Climate Change / Adriana Petryna  65
Part II. The Category Fallacy and Care Amid the Experts
4. Justifying a Lower Standard of Health Care for the World’s Poor: A Call of Decolonizing Global Health / Salmaan Keshavjee  91
5. The Moral Economies of Heart Disease and Cardiac Care in India / David S. Jones  112
6. Intimate and Social Spheres of Mental Illness / Janis H. Jenkins  133
Part III. Worlds of Biotechnological Promise and the Plasticity of Self and Power
7. A Good Death: The Promise and Threat of Biometric Inclusion for Transgender Women in India / Lawrence Cohen  161
8. Medical Cosmopolitanism in Moral Worlds: Aspirations and Stratifications in Global Quests for Conception / Marcia C. Inhorn  187
9. Environments and Mutable Selves / Margaret Lock  210
Part IV. Tracing Arts of Living (Or, Anthropologies After Hope Has Departed)
10. Anthropology in a Mode of Dying / Robert Desjarlais  239
11. Ethnographic Open / João Biehl  257
12. Thinking on Borrowed Time . . . About Privileging the Human / Jean Comaroff  287
Afterword. Lessons Learned from the Ethnography of Care / Arthur Kleinman  305
In Memoriam  327
Acknowledgments  329
Bibliography  331
Contributors  371
Index  373