I Gave My Child Life but I Also Gave Her Death

Bibliographic Data

ID11618798
AuthorsA Irving (0000-0002-5213-8234, University of Manchester, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume22
Issue3
Pages332-350
Publication date2011-09-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Australian Journal of Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1035-8811 • E-ISSN: 1757-6547
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1757-6547.2011.00149.x
OpenAlexW1861529379
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited22

The capacity for a complex inner life—encompassing inner speech, imaginative reverie and unarticulated moods—is an essential feature of living with illness and a principal means through which people interpret, understand and manage their condition. Nevertheless, as Nigel Rapport has pointed out in a recent edition of The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2008: 19 (3)), interiority largely remains a ‘terra‐incognita’ for social science, while anthropology lacks a generally accepted theory or methodological framework for understanding how interiority relates to people’s public actions and expressions. Moreover, as conventional social‐scientific methods are often too static to understand the fluidity of perception among people living with illness or bodily instability, I argue we need to develop new, practical approaches to knowing. By placing the problem of interiority directly into the field and turning it into an ethnographic, practice‐based question to be addressed through fieldwork in collaboration with informants, this article works alongside women living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda with the aim of capturing the unvoiced but sometimes radical changes in being, belief and perception that accompany terminal illness

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Ethnography · Field (mathematics · Perception · Principal (computer security · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology