Full Description
While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone-what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly's life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist's engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their ending.
Contents
Undoing ix
1. These Moments Formed between Us 1
2. Still Life 13
3. The Accident of Contact 41
4. Resuscitations 63
5. A Living Room 85
6. Thoughts of Suicide 97
7. [ . . . ] 123
8. Breathing Feels like a Falsehood 133
9. Notes on a New Moralism 151
10. Black Figurine 175
Reassembling 199
Notes 203
Bibliography 215
