Anthrograph

Class notes

Week 4: The body is in the eye of the doctor

Ryan Schram

August 29, 2025

Week 4: The body is in the eye of the doctor

ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs—Technology and society (Semester 2, 2025)
August 29, 2025

Main reading: Mol (2003b); Mol (2003a)

Other reading: Law and Mol (1995); Mol (2008)

Notes

On the one hand, humans are extremely plastic and adaptable, and so the ways of life and forms of society we create are incredibly diverse and ever-changing. On the other, we all eat, breathe, sleep, get sick, get old and die. Health and illness are perfect topics for anthropologists. At first glance, they sit on the boundary between nature and culture, and so offer a privileged site for investigating what is universal and what is particular, and what is constant and what contingent. Yet, in a network paradigm, we can’t assume that nature and culture are absolutely different and hence that there is a boundary for us to find.

In response to this, Annemarie Mol continues the tradition of ethnographic following. She follows doctors, patients, and disease in a hospital. For Mol, it is not enough to simply say that humans have a body and mind. Bodies are in the eye of beholder, like health professionals and their technologies of observation. Sickness is not a state of being. (And “sick” is not just a cultural construct.) People do illness and wellness, and they do it in concert with others in institutional settings according to social patterns. As a result, bodies are made and unmade in the encounter with medical science.

Her other work with John Law brings together some of the main ideas from the last few weeks into a framework for the study of networks that crosscut material, social, and symbolic dimensions.

Keywords

ontology, material semiotics

Learning outcomes

  • Understand the idea of material semiotics and its implications for ontological assumptions about nature and society.
  • Be able to explain the connections between an analysis of material semiotics and actor-networks.

References

Law, John, and Annemarie Mol. 1995. “Notes on Materiality and Sociality.” The Sociological Review 43 (2): 274–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1995.tb00604.x.
Mol, Annemarie. 2003a. “Different Atheroscleroses.” In The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, 29–51. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822384151.
———. 2003b. “Doing Disease.” In The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, 1–27. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822384151.
———. 2008. “I Eat an Apple. On Theorizing Subjectivities.” Subjectivity 22 (1): 28–37. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.2.