Crawford, C. S. Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment, and Prosthetic Technology. New York: New York University Press. 2014. 320pp. £15.99 (pbk) ISBN 978‐0‐8147‐6012‐3

Abstract

[P]etrified specters of limbs … denial-based misbehaving ghosts … limb facsimiles that waved good-bye in earnest, or … grotesque and painfully distorted “memories” (p. 179) Crawford's captivating and enlightening monograph offers a critical perspective on the phenomena of phantom limbs, prostheses, and the relationship(s) between the so-called ghost and the machine. Drawing on 805 texts published between 1870 and 2011 from fields including biomedicine, technoscience, and psychology, as well as ethnographic observations and interviews with clinicians and researchers, Crawford demonstrates how a changing medical and socio-technical landscape has influenced the perceptions and experiences of amputee embodiment. In addition to anyone with specific interests in the sociology or history of phantom limbs, amputation, or prosthetics, this book will be of great use to sociologists of medicine, disability, and the body, particularly those with an interest in biopolitics. Embodiment, rather than selfhood or psyche, is the book's primary focus, although there is interesting discussion throughout on the theorised relationships between self, body image, and phantoms. The thematically-organised chapters present and deconstruct the ‘ghost story’ of phantom limbs, once seen as the ghastly evidence of a fractured psyche, and now seen to be the vital ghosts that animate the prosthetic machine, even as they are tamed by it. In engaging, personal, and at times wryly humorous style, the book covers historical and contemporary medical debates about the perceived ontology and ‘appearance’ of phantoms; the influence of emerging medical technologies such as the McGill Pain Questionnaire on the representation and experience of phantoms; the perceived cause(s) of phantoms, from psychogenic processes in the mind to neurological processes in the brain; phantom-prosthetic relations; and the future of phantoms. With regards the latter, Crawford suggests – with a note of regret, it seems – that the phantom limb may eventually be driven to ‘theoretical extinction’ as it is tamed by increasingly sophisticated prostheses, and addresses other forms of embodiment to which the discourses of the phantom have ‘spread’ (e.g. transsexualism). In one particular highlight, and balancing the book's emphasis on professional voices, Chapter 2 offers many and varied examples of amputees' own perceptions of phantoms, via accounts from medical texts and through Alexa Wright's stunning photographic portraits, which use photo manipulation to present visual images of phantoms as described by the people who embody them. Focusing as it does on Western (primarily American) thought and practices, the book cannot be said to address phantom limbs in a totally comprehensive way; however, while attention to other cultures' ‘ghost stories’ would have been a welcome addition, the author would surely have had to sacrifice the book's tremendous depth in order to offer that breadth. Throughout the book, and accentuated in the final chapter, Crawford presents a persuasive critical argument in addition to an extremely detailed history. Drawing on theories of social constructionism, phenomenology, and biopolitics, she argues that addressing differing social and biomedical understandings about the ontology of phantoms – particularly the quest for phantom ‘authenticity’ – reveals as much about the moralities and corporeal ideologies of the time as it does about the phantom itself. In this sense, phantom limbs are a lens through which she shows us how (and whose) particular knowledge claims are (de)legitimated, how (and whose) particular bodies are privileged, and the consequent effects on real people's embodied lives. Crawford is sharply critical of the techno-fetishism and androcentrism that she demonstrates can be endemic in biomedicine and prosthetic science, and of the hegemonic masculinity that the latter can promote, and she astutely argues that the changing theories of phantom sensation are as much based on what was beneficial to clinicians and researchers as to patients themselves. Phantom Limb is a timely work, joining texts by scholars like Margrit Shildrick, Arthur Frank, and Chris Shilling in what Sparkes and Smith (2011: 357) have called the ‘somatic turn in the social sciences’. Indeed, in exposing the ‘biomedical territorialization’ (p.74) of the phantom, Crawford does for ghostly bodies what the likes of Frank and Audre Lorde before him did for fleshy ones. The book's data represent a departure from much of the recent work within the somatic turn, which has tended to have a stronger focus on patients' voices as found in autobiographies or generated through interviews. However, Crawford explains her decision not to interview amputees, and instead to focus on clinicians and researchers, as an attempt ‘to undermine knowledge claims based on the supposition of rigor, expertise, and scientific-ness’ (p. 252). This, she achieves.