This article focuses on the quotidian interactions taking place at a seemingly unimportant location—a convenience store—and how these interactions animate the space as one of multiple frames. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a convenience store in West Los Angeles, I argue that an important part of what makes an urban space such as the convenience store viable is how space and crowds align in a way that allows for relational fluidity. This argument is developed by a depiction of the coexistence and intersection of five different interactional units at the store, which facilitate “infraordinary ties” that cut across the interactional units. Mediating between the interactional units and the everyday trajectories that take one to other parts of the city, the infraordinary ties allow the individual to obtain a role that endures over the immediate interactions. As these ties allow interpersonal connections that can morph from one form to another, they animate the space as one of multiple frames. An appreciation of this mechanism of mutual intensification between space and crowds furthers understandings of the relationship among space, interactional patterns, and forms of sociality.
This article addresses the question of how the belief that leprosy is curable became an accepted scientific statement during the processes of colonization and postwar nation-building. Following the use of chaulmoogra oil to the introduction of diaminodiphenyl sulfone (DDS) as a cure for leprosy, the article shows how medical workers in Hong Kong and Taiwan, two contact zones in the global leprosy network, helped transform leprosy medicine into a practices centered on the mass administration of DDS. Focusing on the idea of a cure and looking for all the transformations this idea went through afterward, this article argues that it was chaulmoogra oil that created the research and management infrastructure for DDS. DDS did work, but it worked because chaulmoogra oil had already produced the conditions for a cure. This article contributes to recent calls to “provincialize STS” and to investigate postcolonial technoscience by examining the situated production of the global leprosy infrastructure. It shows that by serving as laboratories and extending the network in which the belief of a cure was embedded, the colonies were key to each stage forming the cure for leprosy as an accepted scientific statement.
When Hansen's disease became treatable in Taiwan in the mid-20th century, a group of Hansen's disease patients lost their sick role despite still having lingering symptoms that continued to evolve. While sociologists have explored in-depth situations in which the social role of the sick is ambiguous, few studies have investigated body experiences under liminality that requires sick people to find a new sick role. Living with lingering symptoms in a post-Hansen's disease world, the Hansen's disease patients I have studied face the conundrum of having to find an alternative sick role. Ethnographic fieldwork demonstrates how patients develop a specific set of body techniques that shape and are shaped by their membership in a patient community. Exploring the reinforcing projects of re-embodiment and sociality around Hansen's disease, I argue that patients are able both to legitimate each other's feelings of sickness and to use those feelings to manage their illness and, as such, to collectively acquire an alternative sick role. Adding to existing discussions of active patients, this article identifies the body mechanical as a way of practicing active patienthood organized around fixing, trials, mending and functionality.
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