Stories of emigrants from Laos and Cambodia living in the United States are charged with an awareness of material indebtedness to the dead, especially those who died violent or inadequately attended deaths during wartime. At stake in this indebtedness is a sociality of living and dead that involves ongoing responsibility and care. Lao, Khmer, Kmhmu, and Hmong emigrants address both wartime violence, and the structural violence of minoritization and poverty in the United States through a reciprocity of living and dead. This reciprocity is intercepted by the biopolitical protocol of hospitals and funeral homes, which negates the social existence of the dead in ways that echo violations of the dead during wartime. In the United States, violation of the dead is linked not just to sciences of sanitation and death causation, but to latent theological presumptions about body and spirit. The presumption of a radical rupture between corpse and spirit enables the treatment of the corpse as inert matter with a purely symbolic relationship to the social person. The separation of matter and spirit that organizes the biopolitical management of death is also linked to mourning practices that emphasize memorialization over a bodily intimacy with the dead as social beings. Furthermore, current critiques of biopolitics following Agamben, although useful for addressing the devaluation of the living, prove inadequate to address socialities of living and dead. It is through their concrete participation in social encounters with the dead that emigrants respond to the material reverberations of past violence in the present.
Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false," between "real" and "imaginary." Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not? The simulator cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness What can medicine do with something which floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, or with the reduplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer true or false? [Baudrillard 1988:168] In the above passage from Simulacra and Simulations, Baudrillard uses the example of illness to distinguish between falseness and simulation. In this article, I shift the focus from the example of illness to the example of cure. Baudrillard asks (and, more importantly, deconstructs) whether a simulating patient who produces true symptoms is ill or not. In this article, in turn, I ask whether a simulating doctor who produces true wellness is a doctor or a quack. Just as simulated illness tends to erode the distinction between true and false illness, so it is argued here that simulated cure tends to erode the distinction between true and false medicine. Actual healing through false medicine has been framed by modern medical science within the concept of the placebo effect. This concept, however, allows simulation to be bracketed off to one side of medical practice, leaving the dichotomy of truth and falseness intact. Baudrillard's analysis of simulation and, even more tellingly, Taussig's analysis of the mimesis involved in any act of signification, suggest, on the contrary, that simulation is integral to medical practice, troubling the binary of truth and falsehood that is a foundation of scientific knowledge. In this article, I draw on the analyses of Baudrillard and Taussfg to trace the mimetic intricacies of medical simulation in the practice of an Ayurvedic doctor in an Indian metropolis. 1 The "magical" ability of the sign, identified by Taussig, to "spill over" and reconfigure the referent, accounts for the ability of the doctor's pulse diagnosis to reconfigure the patient's illness (Taussig 1993:233). Further, the commodity value of pulse reading as a sign of traditional wisdom and the political value of pulse reading as a precolonial practice not assimilable to European-styled medical training, account in part for the doctor's enormous popularity and commercial success. Ultimately, it is clear that the market-driven and politically motivated mimesis at the heart of the doctor's signifying practice disturbs not only the notion of medical authenticity so crucial to biomedicine but also the notion of cultural authenticity crucial to anthropology. 2 Drawing on recent insights into mimes...
No abstract
No abstract
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.