I am hospitalized while I am typing this, waiting to be seen for cervical vertebral disease, which is causing a daily numbing sensation in both hands. The wait time in the hospital provides me with a perfect chance to do autoethnography—to observe how I, as a patient, experience the medical system. I find that waiting is one of the main themes in my hospitalizing experience. The medical system dehumanizes me by means of turning me into a bed number and I have to take actions to be human again while waiting in the system.
Care
Single Shot: Interspecies Care and Responsibility
Dog keeping is a polluted, unholy, and prohibited practice in rural Pakistan. Many Sunni Muslims belonging to Hanfi jurisprudence consider the dog’s mere presence in a house a symbol of misfortune and distance from God. If a person touches a dog, s/he is asked to wash hands seven times, and if they touch a wet dog, they must take a bath.
Making an Academic ‘Coven’
Hierarchies persist, which is why factions, such as covens, coalesce in the first place. They emerge from a place of need. A need to counteract isolation, disparate power within disciplines, or the worlds anthropologists inhabit as part of fieldwork, and the worlds that meld and twist as part of the analytical process.