Abstract
Focusing on ‘chronic kidney disease of unknown origin’ (CKDu), this paper revisits ethnographic preoccupations with ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ descriptions in the context of the unexplained emergence of this unruly disease. CKDu has recently emerged in impoverished sites across the Global South as a ‘medical enigma’ that defies easy description. Despite growing research efforts from various quarters, however, the search for specific causes using conventional forms of analysis has made little progress. Taking CKDu as a residual category and a contemporary case of society–environment–body entanglements (Latimer and Gomez, 2019; Latour, 2018), we engage Heather Love’s descriptive turn as a provocation to examine what it is that is encountered in encounters with ‘the enigma of CKDu’. In doing so, we highlight the role of thick and thin descriptions (cf. Love, 2013) in terms of the political relations they make differently visible. We argue both are critical to the ‘art of noticing’ (Tsing, 2015).
Highlights
In her essay Biography: True and False, Iris Origo, the English-born biographer, offers advice to those embarking on a career in the life-writing trade
While the condition is rapidly on the rise across the so-called Global South in particular, it frequently eludes those seeking to describe it as the necessary first step to further courses of action and intervention. We focus on this problem in the context of Mexico to ask what descriptions of different kinds add to our understanding of this yet-to-be-explained category
The aim of this paper is to explore the various types of descriptions in play around this disease in its contexts so as to better understand what is being described when chronic kidney disease of unknown origin (CKDu) is invoked, how descriptions come to count and what lessons can we take from these descriptions when it comes to the ethnographic enterprise
Summary
The young biographer who has upon her desk her first intriguing pile of papers will do well to arm herself with humility and let them speak for themselves. The literary critic Heather Love (2010) takes up and challenges the preference for depth over surface as a way to critically reflect on interpretive dilemmas in the humanities, principally English literature She does this via her encounters with description in the social sciences, notably sociology and anthropology and science and technology studies besides. Love’s invitation treats the work of description as an interdisciplinary meeting point, one that draws the humanities and social sciences into direct conversation by questioning the methodological requirement that we penetrate beneath the surface, forgoing what is superficial and thin in an effort to uncover meanings, unveil truths, and establish underlying structures, motivations and causes This is, in part, driven by her readings of the recent wave of literary studies which emphasise ‘distant reading’ (Moretti, 2000). In response to Love’s provocation and the ongoing debates within anthropology, rather than oppose thin and thick, surface and depth, description and interpretation, our paper looks at how modes of attentiveness are fostered at the points of intersection and interplay between them
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