strengths and weaknesses of Imagining Care

strengths and weaknesses of Imagining Care

Introduction

Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic is written by Lisa Stevenson. The book was published in August 2014 by the University of California Press. It has 272 pages, and it is a historical book since it details the history of the tuberculosis pandemic in Canada Inuit. The purpose of the analysis of the book is to summarise the key points and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the book by evaluating whether the author has supported the argument with sufficient evidence.

Summary of the content

Living Beside Itself: Imagining Life in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014) tells us this by analyzing conceptions and traditions of life, death, and treatment in the history and ethnography of Canadian policy and attitudes towards the Inuit during two epidemics, a tuberculosis outbreak (1940s-early 1960s), and a suicide outbreak (1980s-present). The book is about history beside Itself, Lisa Stevenson leads us on a surreal ethnographic quest through two seminal times when history had begun to unravel for the Canadian Inuit: the tuberculosis outbreak (the 1940s to early 1960s) and the resulting suicide crisis (1980s to the current time). Two neck-singing women and one listening king open the new novel. If we hear them sitting at a regular dinner night (as the women) or browsing the pages of a short story from Italo Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun (as the King), hearing to these voices will theoretically change our notion of listening and our perception of what a “person” is and may become.

Stevenson makes it obvious that Inuit will tend to feel unenthusiastic about the state and medicinal initiatives, which are worried that Inuit remain alive as Canadian people but not (enough) about whether Inuit know on themselves or whether they choose to survive and die. In Chapter 1 (Facts and Images)and Chapter 2 (Cooperating).Similar complexities in biomedicine medical care are theorized astutely in Chapter 3 (Anonymous Care). Here Stevenson examines universal suicide reduction strategies that aim to identify groups at risk and include a series of guidelines that will allow participants to communicate at a distance with the suicidal without having to address existential uncertainty or the complexity of the pain of others. “Suicide is not only an answer to life without suspense for these young people but also a plunge towards a new form of being in time” (p.147). Stevenson further mentions that “it doesn’t matter who you are, you just remain alive” (p. 7) to show the magnitude of the situation. Stevenson points out, “no special requirements are needed apart from that is a loving human being” p.87. Despite the lack of formal review of its efficacy, medical treatment never faced a threat. Stevenson also explains the hypocrisy of programs for intervention, which seek to inform Inuit youth of their suicidal tendencies.

Stevenson argues how, for Inuit, mortality is understood to be something beyond a purely biological reality, where the dying openly join a newborn’s life by naming (Chapter 4: Life-of-the-Name). Inuit also believes that the form of mechanical time enforced by the (post)colonial system is continuously challenged by the Inuit sense of time woven along with their perceptions of the Arctic’s sublime beauty. Such following chapters offer an interesting indication of what depression an ethnography could look like, as Stevenson approaches her personal affective life with an emphasis on adolescents who took part in her effort to produce suicide awareness films (Chapter 5: Why Two Clocks?). Chapter 6 (Song), which tracks a boy’s life whose suicide attempt is all too obvious, but whose confidence of regeneration may stun the reader, seems to point to a likelihood of redemption

Evaluation and Conclusion

The book is easy to read because Stevenson has used a simple language. The sentences are clear and easy to read. Stevenson appeals to the logic of the reader by offering a perception of what life is and what it means to provide for another’s life. By paying close attention to the illustrations in which we believe and dream and make sense of the world, Stevenson describes an environment in which life is next to itself. The soul of a boy who dies in an accident lives again in the unborn infant of his friend; a young girl enjoys the last cigarette in a vision with a dying classmate, and the haunted hands of a clock spin hysterically over her nose. Humanitarian strategies make no sense in these situations, as they aim to save lives purely by keeping the brain active. Life is “somewhere else” for the Inuit, and maybe for all of us, and the challenge is to expressways of treatment for others relevant to the reality.

The arguments in the book are supported by evidence because Stevensons discusses various types of “treatment” when juxtaposing the two cases, institutional and otherwise. Stevenson works as a picture curator in her archival and ethnographic studies, giving keen consideration to how they provide meaning to life itself, also and especially amid ambiguity and misunderstanding. The book’s first three chapters examine the secret treatment activities that marked the two outbreaks in question, given how the Canadian North has operated as a vast laboratory for turning Inuit into Canadian people. What makes her ethnography convincing is her creative approach that juxtaposes usage with ethnography of archaeological artifacts and literary works to bring our anthropological focus back to inventive rather than discursive ways of learning (p. 10). Stevenson painstakingly recreates the past of public health initiatives by relocating Inuit suffering from tuberculosis to asylums in the south, where many remain buried secretly (or have been embraced by Canadian citizens without the approval in their own family).

The main weakness of the book is that it details explicit information about the coirposes which is quite scary. The biopolitical experiment focused on tubercular or suicidal topics, the conceptualization of Inuit people as serialized corpses had to be taken back to safety. Life Beside Itself reveals that Inuit have never been entirely turned into biopolitical subjects despite this: then, we get to know the friends and associates who drive Stevenson’s work while they develop various ways of life. The other concern I have with this segment is the heavy utilization literary sources, which threaten creating a certain feeling of frozenness in time, even though this is what helps to establish a common understanding of Inuit psychological suffering.

I would recommend the book to someone else. It is a stunning and insightful novel that will attract a wide variety of readers, whether they come to it with an interest in health care and its history, in ways of life and death in the Canadian North, or merely in a stirring and beautifully told tale. The audience that the book would suit best are graduates and undergraduates who are intererted in learning about youth suicide.