What do you think?
Rate this book
生命之側：關於因紐特人，以及一種照護方式的想像
擅自認定他人生命的價值，會不會跟否定生命的價值一樣危險？
我們能不能想像或找到另一種傾聽的方式，一種容許不確定性的照護形式，來理解生命？
◎2015年，人文人類學學會，特納民族誌寫作獎
◎2020年，高等研究學院，J. I. Staley Prize
我們對照護的理解往往離不開善意、好的結果，或對受苦的情緒反應。但挪動這種理解將讓我們得以分辨照護論述的細微差異，進而看見自身欲望的矛盾，以及試圖照護他人時的混亂失措。
1956年，一位名叫考雅克的因紐特女性從北極灣的家鄉搭船前往加拿大南部的醫院接受肺結核治療，病逝於途中。考雅克死前經歷了什麼、她跟誰在一起、遺體送去哪裡，是一個從未解開的謎。後來，每當那艘船再度靠岸，考雅克的孫子就會跑去工人裝卸貨的港口探聽消息。他當然知道祖母已經死了，但他希望聽到的是她死去的經過，而那通常是加拿大政府在處理因紐特社群肺結核大流行時努力抹除的資料——人只是一個身分牌號碼以及統計上的數字。
1950年代晚期，加拿大政府展開肺結核清空行動，北方被想像成一座大實驗室，正在進行一場大規模社會實驗，藉由降低死亡率等方法，把因紐特人變成真正的加拿大公民。這項「實驗」要求因紐特人配合政府提供的照護形式和邏輯，包括把像考雅克這樣染上肺結核的因紐特人從家人身邊帶走，撤離到南部的療養院。1953到1964年間有將近一半的因紐特人被送進機構，其中有75%到80%再被送往南部城市的療養院。
加拿大政府對外宣稱的目的當然從來不是要殘酷地置因紐特人於死地。將他們撤離到南部的療養院，只是降低因紐特人的死亡率和提升其生活水準的諸多措施之一。這些措施還包括將因紐特兒童送到寄宿學校、給他們一個「白人的」名字，將其過去的一整套生活方式阻擋在外；或是為了防堵青少年自殺潮，設立防治專線、發送海報文宣，努力宣導要年輕人「好好活下去」。
要當一個好公民就表示要配合這樣的生命體制。只是，擅自認定生命的價值，將它捧為至高至善，可能跟否定生命的價值一樣危險。
+++++
這本民族誌的主角是居住在加拿大北部的因紐特人，關注他們被收編進加拿大政府的醫療與照護體制下的結果。作者史蒂文森以傅柯和巴特勒「生命政治」的概念貫穿全書，整體結構分為兩大部分，第一部分透過1940到1960年代出現的肺結核大流行與1980年後出現的自殺潮，討論加拿大政府官僚體系提供的照護，以及其對因紐特人心靈造成的持續衝擊；第二部分試圖勾勒出因紐特人另類的照護模式。有別於當代生命政治的匿名照護，因紐特人的照護不急於確認事實與數據，而是以一種不確定、意象式的方式，陪伴、傾聽與理解他人。
人類學研究關注的往往是重複發生的事。人類學家所謂的「實證」是建立在日常透過重複而趨於穩定的認知上。史蒂文森認為需要打造另一種理解世界的方法，主張透過意象所做的人類學研究——有時候我們需要傳達的是可能的而非實際的真相，或是否定的、缺席的或懷疑的精神真相。傳達日常最好的方法不是累積實例，而是透過意象中的濃縮經驗；雖然意象並不能像事實一樣被檢驗。
「我想要設想一種容許遲疑的人類學傾聽方式，去傾聽那些一再打亂我們確定知道什麼的話語。」
+++++
「我用『死活相依』這個詞來表達另一種思考生命的方式，以及支持這種思考方式的照護形式。『死活相依』關心的主要不是延續實體生命，而是誰是誰，而照護就在認出令人不安的他者意象並對它付出關懷中發生。……渡鴉的意象一方面暫時表達了生命中的死亡，另一方面也表達了何謂生或死的不確定性，使我們得以放開乾淨／骯髒、生／死等建構人類照護方式的二分法，哪怕只是短短一瞬間。若是活著跟目睹生命中的死亡有關呢？要是死去，但仍被愛你的人放在心上，也是一種活著的方式呢？我們如何可能去關注那些存在於自身之外、永遠無法變得完整的生命？」──本書前言
我們能不能想像或找到另一種傾聽的方式，一種容許不確定性的照護形式，來理解生命？
◎2015年，人文人類學學會，特納民族誌寫作獎
◎2020年，高等研究學院，J. I. Staley Prize
我們對照護的理解往往離不開善意、好的結果，或對受苦的情緒反應。但挪動這種理解將讓我們得以分辨照護論述的細微差異，進而看見自身欲望的矛盾，以及試圖照護他人時的混亂失措。
1956年，一位名叫考雅克的因紐特女性從北極灣的家鄉搭船前往加拿大南部的醫院接受肺結核治療，病逝於途中。考雅克死前經歷了什麼、她跟誰在一起、遺體送去哪裡，是一個從未解開的謎。後來，每當那艘船再度靠岸，考雅克的孫子就會跑去工人裝卸貨的港口探聽消息。他當然知道祖母已經死了，但他希望聽到的是她死去的經過，而那通常是加拿大政府在處理因紐特社群肺結核大流行時努力抹除的資料——人只是一個身分牌號碼以及統計上的數字。
1950年代晚期，加拿大政府展開肺結核清空行動，北方被想像成一座大實驗室，正在進行一場大規模社會實驗，藉由降低死亡率等方法，把因紐特人變成真正的加拿大公民。這項「實驗」要求因紐特人配合政府提供的照護形式和邏輯，包括把像考雅克這樣染上肺結核的因紐特人從家人身邊帶走，撤離到南部的療養院。1953到1964年間有將近一半的因紐特人被送進機構，其中有75%到80%再被送往南部城市的療養院。
加拿大政府對外宣稱的目的當然從來不是要殘酷地置因紐特人於死地。將他們撤離到南部的療養院，只是降低因紐特人的死亡率和提升其生活水準的諸多措施之一。這些措施還包括將因紐特兒童送到寄宿學校、給他們一個「白人的」名字，將其過去的一整套生活方式阻擋在外；或是為了防堵青少年自殺潮，設立防治專線、發送海報文宣，努力宣導要年輕人「好好活下去」。
要當一個好公民就表示要配合這樣的生命體制。只是，擅自認定生命的價值，將它捧為至高至善，可能跟否定生命的價值一樣危險。
+++++
這本民族誌的主角是居住在加拿大北部的因紐特人，關注他們被收編進加拿大政府的醫療與照護體制下的結果。作者史蒂文森以傅柯和巴特勒「生命政治」的概念貫穿全書，整體結構分為兩大部分，第一部分透過1940到1960年代出現的肺結核大流行與1980年後出現的自殺潮，討論加拿大政府官僚體系提供的照護，以及其對因紐特人心靈造成的持續衝擊；第二部分試圖勾勒出因紐特人另類的照護模式。有別於當代生命政治的匿名照護，因紐特人的照護不急於確認事實與數據，而是以一種不確定、意象式的方式，陪伴、傾聽與理解他人。
人類學研究關注的往往是重複發生的事。人類學家所謂的「實證」是建立在日常透過重複而趨於穩定的認知上。史蒂文森認為需要打造另一種理解世界的方法，主張透過意象所做的人類學研究——有時候我們需要傳達的是可能的而非實際的真相，或是否定的、缺席的或懷疑的精神真相。傳達日常最好的方法不是累積實例，而是透過意象中的濃縮經驗；雖然意象並不能像事實一樣被檢驗。
「我想要設想一種容許遲疑的人類學傾聽方式，去傾聽那些一再打亂我們確定知道什麼的話語。」
+++++
「我用『死活相依』這個詞來表達另一種思考生命的方式，以及支持這種思考方式的照護形式。『死活相依』關心的主要不是延續實體生命，而是誰是誰，而照護就在認出令人不安的他者意象並對它付出關懷中發生。……渡鴉的意象一方面暫時表達了生命中的死亡，另一方面也表達了何謂生或死的不確定性，使我們得以放開乾淨／骯髒、生／死等建構人類照護方式的二分法，哪怕只是短短一瞬間。若是活著跟目睹生命中的死亡有關呢？要是死去，但仍被愛你的人放在心上，也是一種活著的方式呢？我們如何可能去關注那些存在於自身之外、永遠無法變得完整的生命？」──本書前言
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
24 people are currently reading
447 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
April 17, 2024
(read for class) ohhhhhh my god. two clocks!!!
October 23, 2020
As the book went on, I did have the feeling that this was more about what the Native ethnographic subject taught the white anthropologist researcher. And certainly I, too, was affected. Nonetheless, I still appreciate the boldness of writing against life, a regime of life, a boldness that no doubt comes from the Inuit youth themselves.
CW: suicide
"As I came to know the youth involved I also came to love them and, in the process, to desire their life...This meant asking whether it is possible to articulate my own desire for the life of an other without making that desire an imperative—without, that is, demanding that he or she cooperate in assuming my desires. It has also meant asking whether there are different affective and political bonds to be formed, different ways of caring that presume neither the certainty of life as ultimate value nor the discreteness of life and death." (17)
"What if dying, and being borne along by those who love you, is also a way of being alive? How might we come to care for life that is constitutively beside itself, life that could never be fully itself?" (18)
"Are we ready to think about other ways of being in time without immediately pathologizing them? As I've been intimating, I think this requires different ways of being toward death." (138)
"Whatever else it may be, suicide is also a leap into another way of being in time, one that questions whether there is always a brighter future around the corner. I want to say that suicide answers in one temporality a question that cannot be posed in another: what if the future cannot redeem the present?" (147)
"My question has become what would happen if we were to take an instance of loving rather than hating as the paradigmatic instance of interpellation? What happens when the 'call' that is at the heart of any notion of interpellation has more to do with a recognition of the other's presence than with the stabilizing of the other's identity? What happens when the call really isn't a matter of fixing the other in his or her place but making room for that other within language?" (164)
"I don't know what suicide always is. I sense it sometimes erupts out of intolerable pain, sometimes out of a feeling of pointlessness, and sometimes from impulsive anger. What else? One thing I have learned is that suicide is sometimes invested with the desire to live differently—to live 'mythically,' in Maurice Leenhardt's terms—to transcend the grinding psychic pain that accompanies colonization and to 'rediscover the original moment in which I make myself world' (Foucault)...Recognizing that suicide is not always a failure of imagination does not lead us to nihilism or to stop caring for those who are suffering profoundly. It allows us to listen differently to the lives and imaginations of the people who matter to us...We are left to work out new ways to love, new ways to imagine the other that take this observation, that life is beside itself, seriously." (174)
CW: suicide
"As I came to know the youth involved I also came to love them and, in the process, to desire their life...This meant asking whether it is possible to articulate my own desire for the life of an other without making that desire an imperative—without, that is, demanding that he or she cooperate in assuming my desires. It has also meant asking whether there are different affective and political bonds to be formed, different ways of caring that presume neither the certainty of life as ultimate value nor the discreteness of life and death." (17)
"What if dying, and being borne along by those who love you, is also a way of being alive? How might we come to care for life that is constitutively beside itself, life that could never be fully itself?" (18)
"Are we ready to think about other ways of being in time without immediately pathologizing them? As I've been intimating, I think this requires different ways of being toward death." (138)
"Whatever else it may be, suicide is also a leap into another way of being in time, one that questions whether there is always a brighter future around the corner. I want to say that suicide answers in one temporality a question that cannot be posed in another: what if the future cannot redeem the present?" (147)
"My question has become what would happen if we were to take an instance of loving rather than hating as the paradigmatic instance of interpellation? What happens when the 'call' that is at the heart of any notion of interpellation has more to do with a recognition of the other's presence than with the stabilizing of the other's identity? What happens when the call really isn't a matter of fixing the other in his or her place but making room for that other within language?" (164)
"I don't know what suicide always is. I sense it sometimes erupts out of intolerable pain, sometimes out of a feeling of pointlessness, and sometimes from impulsive anger. What else? One thing I have learned is that suicide is sometimes invested with the desire to live differently—to live 'mythically,' in Maurice Leenhardt's terms—to transcend the grinding psychic pain that accompanies colonization and to 'rediscover the original moment in which I make myself world' (Foucault)...Recognizing that suicide is not always a failure of imagination does not lead us to nihilism or to stop caring for those who are suffering profoundly. It allows us to listen differently to the lives and imaginations of the people who matter to us...We are left to work out new ways to love, new ways to imagine the other that take this observation, that life is beside itself, seriously." (174)
December 4, 2024
Everybody should read this book, especially if you live in Canada.
Two days ago, CBC published a story about how a God's Lake First Nation woman in northern Manitoba was sent to prison over TB treatment. If you watch the video or read the article, she explains how she was not missing her treatment, but she wasn't always able to check-in at the clinic to take the treatment there. She was not contagious.
The comments surrounding that article show how minimal the education of the general public is on the atrocities committed by the Canadian government on Indigenous TB patients, and the lasting impact colonialism and systemic racism have on health outcomes.
This book is so important, as it sheds light on not only the horrific mistreatment faced by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people but the Canadian government, but on the lasting and intergenerational impacts that such mistreatment has on communities. It wasn't until 2019 that the Canadian government "apologized" for the treatment of Indigenous TB patients during the 1940s-1970s, but considering behaviour like what just happened in Manitoba is still acceptable to the government, that apology is worth nothing.
Two days ago, CBC published a story about how a God's Lake First Nation woman in northern Manitoba was sent to prison over TB treatment. If you watch the video or read the article, she explains how she was not missing her treatment, but she wasn't always able to check-in at the clinic to take the treatment there. She was not contagious.
The comments surrounding that article show how minimal the education of the general public is on the atrocities committed by the Canadian government on Indigenous TB patients, and the lasting impact colonialism and systemic racism have on health outcomes.
This book is so important, as it sheds light on not only the horrific mistreatment faced by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people but the Canadian government, but on the lasting and intergenerational impacts that such mistreatment has on communities. It wasn't until 2019 that the Canadian government "apologized" for the treatment of Indigenous TB patients during the 1940s-1970s, but considering behaviour like what just happened in Manitoba is still acceptable to the government, that apology is worth nothing.
February 14, 2021
‘Life always trumps the possibility of a life after death- and it may be that any hope on has lies beyond life itself’
Life Besides Itself is an ambitious ethnographic text that transposes its reader directly to the world of Canadian Artic, among its denizens, the Inuit and their social life. There are lines of flight in the text that makes you walk along the Artic Bay, under the metallic gleam of a ‘finger-nail moon’ and as you take a deep ‘inspiration’, the aroma of barbecued seal meat might divine your nostrils. You look up at the northern night sky, peering into an unlit blueish darkness, let your eyes adjust to the intensities of what is coming from beyond. A star like hope manifests itself and pulls you towards- an inoculating nothingness, where like the circumference the end and the beginning is a single point. May be that is how it is for people who have been suicidal. Cannot be sure. And this is a kind of an uncertainty which is the mode of the book. To investigate into this mode, Lisa Stevenson devices unconventional methods- imagistic anthropology is what she calls it; a way of doing ethnographical listening that calls ‘attention to the images through which we think and live’. Her object is ‘care’, precisely speaking it is forms of bureaucratic care ‘that may be best characterised as “biopolitical”’, a logic that treats individuals as members of a population.
To make her case, she moves in and out of two historical moments that characterised the Canadian North. One is that of tuberculosis epidemic (1940s- 1960s) and the other is the suicide epidemic (1980s- present). And in so doing she conceptualises a ‘psychic life of biopolitics’- a form of biopolitics that dilacerates its way about the institutions and mechanisms that conjures it, enveloping them as well as its subjects, orchestrating their conduct, taking ‘a life of its own’. Digging into the archival reports of the tuberculosis epidemic, Stevenson finds the government system of assigning discs to the Inuit, turning them into statistics, a thin graphism. The discs can be thought of as prefixes in modern Chinese that seem to grope for a form somewhere between noun (Eskimo) and adjectives (Inuit). They are like name searchers that precede nouns with sketchy outline (an Eskimo who is a diseased, unclean Inuit). Needless to say, such techniques of marking population are reminiscent of the Holocaust, and the serialisation is in effect synonymous to animality. However, the crucial point that Stevenson makes is that the aforementioned system by which care is deployed, makes it impersonal by erasing the question of ‘who’ is being cared for. She takes this up in the chapter ‘anonymous care’ which describes the discourse of suicide hotline which is coterminous to the present discourse of suicide epidemic.
The suicide prevention apparatus in Nunavut is a broad category of techniques and methods deployed to protect the Inuit youth from committing suicide. Part of its project include organising social programs in schools and other kind of public and institutional spaces organising workshops to motivate possible suicidal subjects, to live. A significant part of this apparatus is the suicide hotline, in which people volunteer to talk with people who are suicidal. Though anonymity is the code of conduct for this organisation. Stevenson, then shows the precariousness of this indifferent system in a place where sociality is principally structured on intimate interpersonal relations evident in the fact that the doors (of dwelling places) in Inuit communities are always unlocked. Rather, the unintended but a grave consequence of this system is that through relentless speaking of death by suicide, the regime- of life has infused an ‘anticipation of death’ in the imaginaries of the Inuit youth. All of this gets more complicated by Nunavut’s settler colonialist past whereby the colonial subjects were made to cooperate by instituting in them a desire to cooperate. Revisiting the days of the past, of the tuberculosis epidemic Stevenson shows how the colonial administrators prescribed the Inuit with a manifesto for ‘better way of life’ that would save their population from degenerescence, and make them live. The results were that by 1980s, less Inuit died of childbirth and other health problems, though ironically it was also the time the suicide epidemic erupted. These deaths then were perceived as the failure of the Canadian state and the Inuit became an anathema for the bureaucrats, the agents of the state. In other parts of the book, Stevenson discusses the meaning of death conceptualised by the Inuits and in so doing she develops the idea of ‘mournful lives’ a way of living in which death itself becomes ‘a possibility of living’. She discerns this way of doing by carefully studying the Inuit naming practices- members in the Inuit communities are named after ancestors, relatives, friends, and others. They have multiple names called aatiq, life of the name- of people who have passed away. This is a technique of constituting and reconstituting libidinal attachments of which Freud suggests, in The Ego and The Id- ‘the refusal to let go of the image of the lost object- may actually be essential to work of mourning and to the constitution of the ego’.
Here the names serves as ‘images’ which in a complex and even in contradictory ways suggest the way multiple lives, thus multiple temporalities are connected. The Inuit way of life calls into question- whether the facts of matter, reality testing; grounded on the logics of rationalism, the foundation on which the modern Western Knowledge stands- is all that is to life? May be it is true that the refusal to let go, is in effect a way of caring, an act of love. Nevertheless, it is certainly an acknowledgement of the persistence of ‘images’ beyond its physical (real) referent and its power that holds, us.
Building on the line, Stevenson tells us that the way to care for the suicidal (and generally speaking also) is not by instituting changes by means of surveillance mediated by impersonal technologies. But by listening and acknowledging the subject, precisely at points where facts seems to falter. In other words, caring can never be an ‘operationalisable concept- something that can be measure and evaluated’. Caring demands prescense. In other words the processes of caring requires the caregiver to be moved, displaced, and be affected- and in so doing form a pact of solidarity with the one who is at the receiving end.
Life Besides Itself is an ambitious ethnographic text that transposes its reader directly to the world of Canadian Artic, among its denizens, the Inuit and their social life. There are lines of flight in the text that makes you walk along the Artic Bay, under the metallic gleam of a ‘finger-nail moon’ and as you take a deep ‘inspiration’, the aroma of barbecued seal meat might divine your nostrils. You look up at the northern night sky, peering into an unlit blueish darkness, let your eyes adjust to the intensities of what is coming from beyond. A star like hope manifests itself and pulls you towards- an inoculating nothingness, where like the circumference the end and the beginning is a single point. May be that is how it is for people who have been suicidal. Cannot be sure. And this is a kind of an uncertainty which is the mode of the book. To investigate into this mode, Lisa Stevenson devices unconventional methods- imagistic anthropology is what she calls it; a way of doing ethnographical listening that calls ‘attention to the images through which we think and live’. Her object is ‘care’, precisely speaking it is forms of bureaucratic care ‘that may be best characterised as “biopolitical”’, a logic that treats individuals as members of a population.
To make her case, she moves in and out of two historical moments that characterised the Canadian North. One is that of tuberculosis epidemic (1940s- 1960s) and the other is the suicide epidemic (1980s- present). And in so doing she conceptualises a ‘psychic life of biopolitics’- a form of biopolitics that dilacerates its way about the institutions and mechanisms that conjures it, enveloping them as well as its subjects, orchestrating their conduct, taking ‘a life of its own’. Digging into the archival reports of the tuberculosis epidemic, Stevenson finds the government system of assigning discs to the Inuit, turning them into statistics, a thin graphism. The discs can be thought of as prefixes in modern Chinese that seem to grope for a form somewhere between noun (Eskimo) and adjectives (Inuit). They are like name searchers that precede nouns with sketchy outline (an Eskimo who is a diseased, unclean Inuit). Needless to say, such techniques of marking population are reminiscent of the Holocaust, and the serialisation is in effect synonymous to animality. However, the crucial point that Stevenson makes is that the aforementioned system by which care is deployed, makes it impersonal by erasing the question of ‘who’ is being cared for. She takes this up in the chapter ‘anonymous care’ which describes the discourse of suicide hotline which is coterminous to the present discourse of suicide epidemic.
The suicide prevention apparatus in Nunavut is a broad category of techniques and methods deployed to protect the Inuit youth from committing suicide. Part of its project include organising social programs in schools and other kind of public and institutional spaces organising workshops to motivate possible suicidal subjects, to live. A significant part of this apparatus is the suicide hotline, in which people volunteer to talk with people who are suicidal. Though anonymity is the code of conduct for this organisation. Stevenson, then shows the precariousness of this indifferent system in a place where sociality is principally structured on intimate interpersonal relations evident in the fact that the doors (of dwelling places) in Inuit communities are always unlocked. Rather, the unintended but a grave consequence of this system is that through relentless speaking of death by suicide, the regime- of life has infused an ‘anticipation of death’ in the imaginaries of the Inuit youth. All of this gets more complicated by Nunavut’s settler colonialist past whereby the colonial subjects were made to cooperate by instituting in them a desire to cooperate. Revisiting the days of the past, of the tuberculosis epidemic Stevenson shows how the colonial administrators prescribed the Inuit with a manifesto for ‘better way of life’ that would save their population from degenerescence, and make them live. The results were that by 1980s, less Inuit died of childbirth and other health problems, though ironically it was also the time the suicide epidemic erupted. These deaths then were perceived as the failure of the Canadian state and the Inuit became an anathema for the bureaucrats, the agents of the state. In other parts of the book, Stevenson discusses the meaning of death conceptualised by the Inuits and in so doing she develops the idea of ‘mournful lives’ a way of living in which death itself becomes ‘a possibility of living’. She discerns this way of doing by carefully studying the Inuit naming practices- members in the Inuit communities are named after ancestors, relatives, friends, and others. They have multiple names called aatiq, life of the name- of people who have passed away. This is a technique of constituting and reconstituting libidinal attachments of which Freud suggests, in The Ego and The Id- ‘the refusal to let go of the image of the lost object- may actually be essential to work of mourning and to the constitution of the ego’.
Here the names serves as ‘images’ which in a complex and even in contradictory ways suggest the way multiple lives, thus multiple temporalities are connected. The Inuit way of life calls into question- whether the facts of matter, reality testing; grounded on the logics of rationalism, the foundation on which the modern Western Knowledge stands- is all that is to life? May be it is true that the refusal to let go, is in effect a way of caring, an act of love. Nevertheless, it is certainly an acknowledgement of the persistence of ‘images’ beyond its physical (real) referent and its power that holds, us.
Building on the line, Stevenson tells us that the way to care for the suicidal (and generally speaking also) is not by instituting changes by means of surveillance mediated by impersonal technologies. But by listening and acknowledging the subject, precisely at points where facts seems to falter. In other words, caring can never be an ‘operationalisable concept- something that can be measure and evaluated’. Caring demands prescense. In other words the processes of caring requires the caregiver to be moved, displaced, and be affected- and in so doing form a pact of solidarity with the one who is at the receiving end.
October 8, 2024
"Recognizing that suicide is not always a failure of imagination does not lead us to nihilism or to stop caring for those who are suffering profoundly. It allows us to listen differently to the lives and imaginations of the people who matter to us."
February 18, 2025
Introduction, ch4, 5, epilogue. So so so good.
April 2, 2015
I read this book for my anthropology class and feel sort of ambivalent about the whole thing. It definitely wasn't a bad book, although I wasn't reading it because it was bad or good (or for pleasure), so that might sway how I feel. It was very interesting and super related to what I want to do with my life in terms of the public health aspect, but it didn't feel like it flowed very well. It's an ethnography so of course it's not really got a plot like one thinks of in a fiction novel, but each chapter could somewhat tie together (which to a certain extent it did) - it just felt kind of choppy to me. What I really enjoyed about the story was how she didn't try to be overly academic, it's accessible to all readers (not just the anthropology majors/buffs or the people reading it for a class). It was also enjoyable because she had a lot of interesting stories and background information about the Inuit way of life, which is a culture that I knew virtually nothing about beforehand.
One of the last chapters discusses Inuit throat singing. If you've never heard throat singing before, I HIGHLY suggest you check out this video :)
One of the last chapters discusses Inuit throat singing. If you've never heard throat singing before, I HIGHLY suggest you check out this video :)
March 22, 2021
This really changed the way I think about life, bureaucracy, colonialism, and anthropology. Required reading for anyone interested in any of these things. Honestly a good read for anyone--a little heavy, but in a weirdly hopeful way.
September 13, 2018
Careful ethnographic writing, but at times overextended theoretical elaboration.
April 13, 2020
Beautifully written must-have for those interested in care.
August 6, 2021
This was the assigned textbook for the anthropology class I just finished, it was one of the two classes I took summer before freshman year of college at the city college. It wasn't until the midterm of the anthropology class that I realized I was supposed to be reading this textbook, which was when I rushed to buy it online, then it didn't come until after the midterm, haha. When it did come, I started reading it and it's pretty good as a book to just read, not necessarily for a class. It's an ethnography and very much written like that, it's very much, like, a paper, like that Rebel Without a Cause book I read sophomore year to research analyses of that film for my sophomore thesis. But the concepts and discussions, while hard to process and understand, are very universal and interesting. It's kind of difficult to get through, but when you do, it's very universal-truth-y.
March 20, 2025
在殖民主義的政策邏輯中，生存應是無條件的好事，因此加拿大政府透過「照護」確保因紐特人能夠存活下來，然而這種存活僅止於維持肉體的存活，與照護相關的人員不在意你是誰，僅僅是執行政策命令。在這樣的生命政治之下，因紐特人被當成需要照護的物而非人。這讓我想到台灣許多對於新住民、無家者與原住民的政策與看法，生存是件好事，而這個好事的前提須建立在我們對彼此有充分的理解與尊重，不論是尊重他願意生意或是死。而因紐特人對於名字與記憶的看法正扣緊了因紐特文化如何看待生死，對因紐特人來說，死並非離開，而是用另一個樣態與他所屬的社會重新互動。姓名是我們進入社會的敲門磚，它讓我們與他人產生連結，這個連結也包含了期望與羈絆，而在因紐特人的文化中，名字存在著更廣闊的意義，它是將生者與死者相聯繫的媒介，將逝者的姓名賦予新生兒，不僅意味著一個人等於群體，也意味著我們將不斷記憶逝者，將它召喚到我們身邊，它不曾離去。最後，關於陪伴，是我在這本書中讀到最溫柔也最動人的觀點。
歌的意義是僅感受他人的存在而不將之固定。
歌的意義是僅感受他人的存在而不將之固定。
July 25, 2020
Not my normal read, but was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. My only complaint is that the author can be pretty repetitive (literally using the same sentences multiple times in the story) and it makes it hard to not skim when that happens. I know it was most likely for emphasis, but it still decreased my enjoyment a bit.
January 24, 2023
Creative, compassionate, erudite work. Really fascinating ideas and way of constructing her anthropological work. Much for me to reflect on also in its intersections with enchantment.
As a Christian, I would have loved to tease out some strands at different points; maybe at some point I will have the opportunity to chat with the author!
As a Christian, I would have loved to tease out some strands at different points; maybe at some point I will have the opportunity to chat with the author!
March 26, 2025
Those who like ethnography with personal investment and emotionally compelling theory should read. FFO spirit catches you, but is heavier on the theory.
Hard to put the beauty of this book into words.
Hard to put the beauty of this book into words.
February 14, 2023
Beautiful, haunting ethnography
March 23, 2024
this book is so beautiful highly recommend
Read
February 25, 2025有個膚淺的想法，「我的創作論述有救了！」
Read
February 10, 2022read for class => culture and politics of mental health (fall 2021)
May 4, 2025
This is the best ethnography on suicide I have ever read, and I think will likely be the best ethnography written from a write perspective I will ever read. I think anyone who is a clinician in the imperial core, but especially in the US and Canada, ought to read this book.
Life Beside Itself is an ethnography about Canada's disease model from the tuberculosis epidemic in the 1960s among Inuit communities being applied to the "suicide epidemic" that followed in the 1980s. Stevenson is a psychologist and social worker that lives with an Inuit community during this time, and this resulting ethnography analyzes the way the Canadian health state (and other can be extrapolated to other health hegemonies) measures, controls, and colonizes the concept of a "life." Stevenson details the friction between the people that Canada is attempting to colonize with the various sciences and logics of the immediate Inuit she lives with over months and months, and her own rupture in her logic of care work.
Stevenson also brings in a lot of critical studies into Life Beside Itself, which sometimes disrupts the pace of her ethnographic narrative, but I found to be fairly necessary. This book is ultimately more about the Canadian state (and colonial states in general) than it is the Inuit she lives with, and for that she brings in ample texts to tie together the ethnographic narrative with her critical theory. All in all, Stevenson manages to do what I can imagine is the only right thing she could do: to do her best to make sense of the violence around her upon realizing it was not in suicide itself.
Fair warning, this book is brutal, exhausting. I had to take multiple breaks throughout it to manage. Nonetheless, I still believe it is required reading for anyone who works with mental health and its state apparatus to do our best to defy them for the sake of learning what care really is.
Life Beside Itself is an ethnography about Canada's disease model from the tuberculosis epidemic in the 1960s among Inuit communities being applied to the "suicide epidemic" that followed in the 1980s. Stevenson is a psychologist and social worker that lives with an Inuit community during this time, and this resulting ethnography analyzes the way the Canadian health state (and other can be extrapolated to other health hegemonies) measures, controls, and colonizes the concept of a "life." Stevenson details the friction between the people that Canada is attempting to colonize with the various sciences and logics of the immediate Inuit she lives with over months and months, and her own rupture in her logic of care work.
Stevenson also brings in a lot of critical studies into Life Beside Itself, which sometimes disrupts the pace of her ethnographic narrative, but I found to be fairly necessary. This book is ultimately more about the Canadian state (and colonial states in general) than it is the Inuit she lives with, and for that she brings in ample texts to tie together the ethnographic narrative with her critical theory. All in all, Stevenson manages to do what I can imagine is the only right thing she could do: to do her best to make sense of the violence around her upon realizing it was not in suicide itself.
Fair warning, this book is brutal, exhausting. I had to take multiple breaks throughout it to manage. Nonetheless, I still believe it is required reading for anyone who works with mental health and its state apparatus to do our best to defy them for the sake of learning what care really is.
April 8, 2024
In Life Beside Itself, anthropologist Lisa Stevenson goes into detail about Inuit healthcare (or lack thereof) and the effects this has on native community members.
She writes about the tuberculosis and suicide epidemics that have each had devastating consequences for the tribes in Canada's northern region. In the book, she dives into issues of what it means to care for others, what it means to live and be alive (and also dead), and how the ways we express values and valuing life go beyond individual relationships.
She goes into an enormous amount of detail and this book is a dense read at times (mostly because I'm a community college undergrad). But despite the fact I had to reread some pages more than once, this has been a very eye-opening and enriching read. I'm excited to see how the knowledge I've gleaned from this book will help me when I move to a native community next year for a semester.
She writes about the tuberculosis and suicide epidemics that have each had devastating consequences for the tribes in Canada's northern region. In the book, she dives into issues of what it means to care for others, what it means to live and be alive (and also dead), and how the ways we express values and valuing life go beyond individual relationships.
She goes into an enormous amount of detail and this book is a dense read at times (mostly because I'm a community college undergrad). But despite the fact I had to reread some pages more than once, this has been a very eye-opening and enriching read. I'm excited to see how the knowledge I've gleaned from this book will help me when I move to a native community next year for a semester.
April 29, 2023
I would say 2.5 stars. I read it for class, and it wasn't my favorite, both because the subject matter was hard for me to read and because the ethnographer's writing style wasn't for me.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews