Kimberly A Arkin
Biographic Data
| ID | 128567 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kimberly A Arkin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kimberly A |
| FAMILY NAME | Arkin |
| SIGNATURE | ARKIN K A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Boston University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3842-8200 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 9 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The limits of relationality in palliative care
This article uses case studies to explore the nature and limits of accompagnement, the self-consciously "relational" care practiced by palliative care providers in Montagnac, a town in southern France. Medical anthropologists have attended to the ways that care premised on individual choice often fails as care, particularly for marginalized patient groups presumed to be incapable of making "good" decisions. This paper asks when, where, and why se…
Only God knows the hour of your death
Palliative care often positions itself as an alternative to the hubris of curative medicine, claiming to centre the patient rather than the physician's authoritative knowledge. This article examines that claim through the lens of ‘epistemological modesty’ and the long‐debated question of ‘medical truth telling’, drawing on fieldwork with Parisian oncologists treating West African women with breast cancer and with palliative care practitioners in …
Genetic Afterlives
Reviewed by: Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa by Noah Tamarkin Kimberly A. Arkin Noah Tamarkin, Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 280 pp. Noah Tamarkin's Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa is a fascinating exploration of why and how the Lemba of South Africa became interested in and engaged with genetic studies of Jewishness. In …
What Can Words Do? Debating a "Good" Death in French Palliative Care
This article explores the ambivalent ways that care providers in a southern French hospital (the Center) thought about patient subjectivities and the power and role of language as they argued about how to orchestrate a "good" death in palliative care. By analyzing the case of Monsieur Rami, a 67-year-old Moroccan-born immigrant who died of metastatic cancer in the summer of 2017, I argue against the presumption that individual autonomy, rational …
Making secular 'French' medical ethics
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with physicians and nurses working in two state-funded southern French hospitals, this article explores why and how medical care providers connected their everyday deliberations about patient care to what they considered to be distinctively French forms of medical responsibility. Many healthcare professionals saw French medical morality in opposition to 'Anglo-Saxon' discourses of individual autonomy and transact…
Historicity, Peoplehood, and Politics
Drawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the 'European' Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could tal…
Jews, Jesus, and the Problem of Postcolonial French Identity
In 2004 a French Jewish student union ran an ad against anti-Semitism using defaced images of Jesus and Mary. Denounced by an antiracist organization affiliated with Jewish interests, the ad was immediately pulled. Why? While the union intended the campaign to be provocative for what it suggested about anti-Semitism, it may ultimately have been most problematic for what it implied about "Frenchness." This article argues that the campaign's polyse…
Judging Mohammed
Rhinestone aesthetics and religious essence
I explore the paradoxical construction of race through fashion among the Parisian children and grandchildren of upwardly mobile immigrant North African Jews. Faced with the conflation of North Africanity and inassimilable difference, Sephardi youth escaped some forms of French racism by enacting others. By essentializing and individualizing Jewishness through conspicuous consumption, they made Frenchness possible for "Arab Jews" in ways foreclose…
Rhinestone aesthetics and religious essence
I explore the paradoxical construction of race through fashion among the Parisian children and grandchildren of upwardly mobile immigrant North African Jews. Faced with the conflation of North Africanity and inassimilable difference, Sephardi youth escaped some forms of French racism by enacting others. By essentializing and individualizing Jewishness through conspicuous consumption, they made Frenchness possible for "Arab Jews" in ways foreclose…
Making secular 'French' medical ethics
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with physicians and nurses working in two state-funded southern French hospitals, this article explores why and how medical care providers connected their everyday deliberations about patient care to what they considered to be distinctively French forms of medical responsibility. Many healthcare professionals saw French medical morality in opposition to 'Anglo-Saxon' discourses of individual autonomy and transact…
What Can Words Do? Debating a "Good" Death in French Palliative Care
This article explores the ambivalent ways that care providers in a southern French hospital (the Center) thought about patient subjectivities and the power and role of language as they argued about how to orchestrate a "good" death in palliative care. By analyzing the case of Monsieur Rami, a 67-year-old Moroccan-born immigrant who died of metastatic cancer in the summer of 2017, I argue against the presumption that individual autonomy, rational …
Historicity, Peoplehood, and Politics
Drawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the 'European' Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could tal…
Jews, Jesus, and the Problem of Postcolonial French Identity
In 2004 a French Jewish student union ran an ad against anti-Semitism using defaced images of Jesus and Mary. Denounced by an antiracist organization affiliated with Jewish interests, the ad was immediately pulled. Why? While the union intended the campaign to be provocative for what it suggested about anti-Semitism, it may ultimately have been most problematic for what it implied about "Frenchness." This article argues that the campaign's polyse…
Rhinestone aesthetics and religious essence
I explore the paradoxical construction of race through fashion among the Parisian children and grandchildren of upwardly mobile immigrant North African Jews. Faced with the conflation of North Africanity and inassimilable difference, Sephardi youth escaped some forms of French racism by enacting others. By essentializing and individualizing Jewishness through conspicuous consumption, they made Frenchness possible for "Arab Jews" in ways foreclose…
Judging Mohammed
Jews, Jesus, and the Problem of Postcolonial French Identity
In 2004 a French Jewish student union ran an ad against anti-Semitism using defaced images of Jesus and Mary. Denounced by an antiracist organization affiliated with Jewish interests, the ad was immediately pulled. Why? While the union intended the campaign to be provocative for what it suggested about anti-Semitism, it may ultimately have been most problematic for what it implied about "Frenchness." This article argues that the campaign's polyse…
Historicity, Peoplehood, and Politics
Drawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the 'European' Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could tal…
What Can Words Do? Debating a "Good" Death in French Palliative Care
This article explores the ambivalent ways that care providers in a southern French hospital (the Center) thought about patient subjectivities and the power and role of language as they argued about how to orchestrate a "good" death in palliative care. By analyzing the case of Monsieur Rami, a 67-year-old Moroccan-born immigrant who died of metastatic cancer in the summer of 2017, I argue against the presumption that individual autonomy, rational …
Making secular 'French' medical ethics
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with physicians and nurses working in two state-funded southern French hospitals, this article explores why and how medical care providers connected their everyday deliberations about patient care to what they considered to be distinctively French forms of medical responsibility. Many healthcare professionals saw French medical morality in opposition to 'Anglo-Saxon' discourses of individual autonomy and transact…
Genetic Afterlives
Reviewed by: Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa by Noah Tamarkin Kimberly A. Arkin Noah Tamarkin, Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 280 pp. Noah Tamarkin's Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa is a fascinating exploration of why and how the Lemba of South Africa became interested in and engaged with genetic studies of Jewishness. In …
The limits of relationality in palliative care
This article uses case studies to explore the nature and limits of accompagnement, the self-consciously "relational" care practiced by palliative care providers in Montagnac, a town in southern France. Medical anthropologists have attended to the ways that care premised on individual choice often fails as care, particularly for marginalized patient groups presumed to be incapable of making "good" decisions. This paper asks when, where, and why se…
Only God knows the hour of your death
Palliative care often positions itself as an alternative to the hubris of curative medicine, claiming to centre the patient rather than the physician's authoritative knowledge. This article examines that claim through the lens of ‘epistemological modesty’ and the long‐debated question of ‘medical truth telling’, drawing on fieldwork with Parisian oncologists treating West African women with breast cancer and with palliative care practitioners in …
Sociology (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · History (4 works) · Judaism (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Archaeology (3 works) · Art (3 works)