David Napier (Social Anthropologist, Professor, UCL)
Non-self Help
The classical immunological paradigm is predicated upon the body’s ability to recognize and eliminate "non-self". However, the “self/non-self” model has yet to facilitate any resolution of the field’s major concerns, and may thus prove to be of limited use. Merely discarding it is no solution, as the juxtaposition of “self” and “non-self” persists in research practice, in clinical settings, and in everyday practice despite the best efforts of theoretical immunologists. Instead, the very conception of “selfhood” may prove to be key. Replacing immunology’s prior and persistent “self” with less static concepts derived from non-Western contexts not only resolves immunology’s famous paradoxes, but offers a new and more accurate model that allows immunology to reframe what may become an outmoded Enlightenment construct of “self”. In such a new paradigm, immunology’s well-known system of protection and defense is replaced with a view in which non-self becomes not only the body’s enemy, but its primary mechanism for the creative assimilation of difference. This incorporative model not only resolves outstanding paradoxes, but complies more accurately with contemporary knowledge and research practice. In so doing it serves as a mechanism for advancing a more consistent understanding of difference in research, in medical practice, and in treatment.
David Napier received his first graduate degree in Philosophy (Leuven) and his DPhil in Social Anthropology (Oxford). He has taught or been a fellow at several universities (Oxford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, New York University, and now University College London). He is the author of four books (two on culture and wellbeing, and two on health, illness experience, and personal transformation), many book chapters, articles, and review articles on medical education, primary health care interactions, empathic training for clinicians, and illness experience. He has engaged in more than two decades of fieldwork: with doctors in clinical settings; with issues of cultural competence in clinical care; with the elderly in rural and remote locations; and among disadvantaged populations and the homeless. He has been a consultant or co-investigator on a number of projects relating to health-care in developing settings (Bhutan, Indonesia, Native North America, Romania), vulnerable populations (Myanmar) migration, trafficking, and return-migration (Albania), immunization and disease control (Pasteur Institute), and the relationship between environment and health (The Lancet Commission on Climate Change and Health). He is a founding member of The Green College Centre for Environmental Policy and Understanding, and the Foundation for Ethnobiology, the Network for Student Activism, and Indigenous Legal Mentoring Unlimited. Currently he directs the Medical Anthropology graduate programme at University College London, as well as oversees the University College London Centre for Applied Global Citizenship of which he is its founding Director. He is also the founding Director of Students of Human Ecology, a registered non-profit that facilitates academically-integrated, university-level internships in the areas of medicine, environment, and culture.
My academic field interests have largely unfolded in the context of Buddhist-Hindu South and Southeast Asian studies, though these have been augmented by projects in rural primary care, among bench and theoretical immunologists, and with clinicians. I have also studied over several years the trials and tribulations of the homeless.
In addition to these writing projects and related research, I maintain an active interest in applied medical anthropology through the directing of Students of Human Ecology, a registered non-profit organization that oversees a number of projects in mentored learning, but especially in the areas of medicine, environment, and culture. This year we will, for instance, sponsor projects in rural primary care, in paediatrics among ethnic minorities, in nutrition in East Africa, among Native Americans, and in Tibetan medical botany. We also will soon launch through the Public Anthropology website www.publicanthropology.org "The "Network for Student Activism" - a site designed to assist students in becoming directly involved in public debate as it relates to issues of human rights and cross-cultural understanding.
Finally, an ongoing interest in the problem of what constitutes "just remunerations" for indigenous knowledge and cultural property has led to the completion of a manuscript in applied anthropology on intellectual property and indigenous rights.
