Maryon McDonald (University of Cambridge, mem26@cam.ac.uk)
‘If my mother could see me now…’ The articulation of bodies and cadavers in anatomical dissection classes
This paper draws on anthropological fieldwork in Anatomy dissection classes in the UK, alongside medical students and teachers. In Anatomy classes, students are required to coordinate a range of different images and at the same to acquire particular bodily properties and proprieties. There is a mutual articulation of bodies and cadavers. A form of detachment or objectivity is part of the moral and epistemological propriety acquired and, whilst this detachment is not unproblematic, it is treated in this paper not as an object long since ripe for anthropological derision but as one of ethnographic interest. Boundaries and their transgression are inherent to this learning process.
Maryon McDonald studied social anthropology at Oxford University, was Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University, and since 1997 has been Fellow in Social Anthropology at Robinson College, Cambridge. Her research interests include nationalism, language, medical anthropology, anthropologies of science, the EU and questions of accountability. She has acted as advisor to the European Commission on a range of issues, and her fieldwork has been conducted in France, in EU institutions, and in the UK. She has published widely on questions of identity, addiction and health, the anthropology of the EU and most recently has co-edited Social Bodies (Berghahn 2009) and is editor of Languages of Accountability (Berghahn, forthcoming). She is currently engaged in a large Leverhulme-funded project examining changing perceptions of “the body.”
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Maryon McDonald studied social anthropology at Oxford University, was Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University, and since 1997 has been Fellow in Social Anthropology at Robinson College, Cambridge. Her research interests include nationalism, language, medical anthropology, anthropologies of science, the EU and questions of accountability. She has acted as advisor to the European Commission on a range of issues, and her fieldwork has been conducted in France, in EU institutions, and in the UK. She has published widely on questions of identity, addiction and health, the anthropology of the EU and most recently has co-edited Social Bodies (Berghahn 2009) and is editor of Languages of Accountability (Berghahn, forthcoming). She is currently engaged in a large Leverhulme-funded project examining changing perceptions of “the body.”
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