Heroic Intimacies: Drowning as an Archive of Air and Water
Part of the 2024 Spring Colloquia Series
About the Speaker: Dr. Lochlann Jain is an award-winning author and Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, Visiting Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’ College London, and a Research Affiliate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. His work aims to unsettle some of the deeply held assumptions about objectivity that underlie the history of medical research. Jain is the author of Injury (Princeton UP: 2006); Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (UC Press: 2013); and a book of drawings, Things that Art: A Graphic Menagerie of Enchanting Curiosity (U of Toronto Press: 2019).is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford.
Abstract: The medical term “apparently drowned,” emerged in the mid-eighteenth century to describe a kaleidoscopic gap between potential life and potential death. The “seemingly,” or “so far as one can judge” dead, unbreathing body embodied a moment of possibility if only one knew how to actively extract it. As drowning became a focus of social attention, interest gathered around developing resuscitation methods and materials. These often focused on everything other than respiration despite the fact that the links between air, lungs, and life were one of the first concerns of experimental science in the 1600s. Professor Jain develops the history of how this question has been addressed through a series of doubling events that have defined more broadly how people have understood what it means to be alive in relation to death, animate in relation the inanimate. They track the contiguity of the apparently drowned body with other partially animated proxies: diagrams, drawings, paintings, casts, corpses, masks, dolls, models, all of which became foils by which to practice affective responses to [particular] human bodies in [particular sorts of] trouble and nodes through which community could be practiced and interpellated through ideologies of rescue and feelings of responsibility. Jain will also show some of the medals they are casting as a parallel art project.
Date and Time: Thursday, January 25, 2024 12:30pm-2:00pm, followed by a light lunch in the ANSO Lino Lounge
Location: Anthropology & Sociology Building (ANSO) Room 134, 6303 NW Marine Drive
