The “New Normal” after Brain Injury

Abstract

AS a medical anthropologist who regularly teaches courses where the body and personhood are prominent themes, I struggle to locate visual materials that can complement the insights embedded in ethnographic, theoretical, or clinical texts. Occasionally I might consult websites of humanitarian or patients’ rights groups, hoping to locate a short clip or a lengthier video for classroom use. Such productions, however, are limited in scope because they are designed primarily to generate potential donors, underscoring the heartache of kin, set alongside the impressive—nay, even somewhat miraculous—recoveries of carefully selected patients. The mainstream film industry, too, features, at least from time-totime, the daily struggles that plague the lives of those (sometimes suddenly) confined to wheelchairs or dependent on prosthetic limbs in stories where, invariably, a major triumph must occur (they walk again, they find love, they experience passionate sex). This range of media depends heavily on real-life personalities or fictional characters whose thinking remains intact, such that their restrictions in life are rooted in the body but where (thank heavens!) their minds still function. The success of such stories relies on a simultaneously melodramatic, gut-wrenching, and heart-warming approach.