"Softening the Medical Gaze Through Informal Economy. Towards a Resocialization of Medical Dominance"

Abstract

In order to ethnographically capture the ambiguous ways in which medical informal economy is understood, legitimized or questioned, a bottom-up analysis is needed; before highlighting the systemic valves due to which these informal practices appear, we need to document the specificities of the medical act and of the way in which disease and hospital culture are internalized by the patient. In this paper I will argue that attributes inherent to the specific way of understanding, organizing and practicing modern medicine are one of the main reasons why informal exchanges are legitimate and reproduced. Informality-as-gift, i.e., the situation in which the medical act is not in any form conditioned, most often seeks to replace the "medical gaze" with a human gaze, appropriate, non-hierarchical and non-paternalistic, "forcing" the healthcare professional to a type reciprocity that takes the form of recognizing the other's humanity by personalizing the therapeutic or care relationship.