Abstract
Anthropologist-clinicians who engage in both ethnographic inquiry and clinical practice confront methodological, ethical, and epistemological predicaments that can challenge and enhance the moral practice and ethics of care inherent both to healing and to ethnography. Clinician-ethnographers often find themselves practicing within harmful systems that they also critique, such as hospitals or carceral institutions. This paper analyzes the dual practice of obstetrical care and ethnography in a county jail and a county hospital. These intertwined roles involve wrestling with sometimes conflicting vocational and ethical obligations to heal, to protect privacy, to address bodily consequences of systemic oppressions, and to critique the systems that mete human suffering. Developing a consciousness of clinical-ethnographers’ complicity, rather than disavowing it, can be aligned with approaches of abolition medicine to reimagine more just forms of healing.
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Data collected prior to 2014 that is included here received funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The remainder of this research did not receive funding.
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Carolyn Sufrin has received funding within the past 3 years for research studies unrelated to the research in this article from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Greenwall Foundation, and Society for Family Planning. Dr. Sufrin serves on a volunteer basis on the board of directors of the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC) as the liaison for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She has served as a consultant for NCCHC Resources, Inc.
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Sufrin, C. Complicity Consciousness: The Dual Practice of Ethnography and Clinical Caregiving in Carceral Settings. Cult Med Psychiatry (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-022-09808-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-022-09808-y