Todd Meyers

All That Was Not Her

Stefanos Geroulanos

Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War

The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe

Richard Baxstrom

Baxstrom and Meyers examine how violence and an unmarked, stubbornly persistent conception of 'nature' weave into the fabric of the human in the recent work of three important filmmakers. For Werner Herzog, the salience of prehistory links new cinematic formulations to a long Western tradition of metaphysics, marking man's break with nature, his fall into consciousness and history, and his impossible effort to grasp the violence of his descent. In Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, the display of seemingly 'unrepresentable' violence rendered through reenactments of killings performed by the original perpetrators against Indonesian 'communists' in 1965-66 operates according to logics of trauma and shame, advancing a troubling ontotheology that seeks to neutralize politics and ethics in favor of a vague, curative transcendence. And finally, the films of Lucien Castaing-Taylor offer a picture of nature as a radically open, colossally empty present--nature not as a domain of redemption or restoration for us, but something that overwhelms us, evades us, and crushes us in its path.

Violence's Fabled Experiment

Realizing the Witch follows the unfolding of Benjamin Christensen's visual narrative in his 1922 film, H©xan (The Witch). Through a close reading of H©xan, Baxstrom and Meyers examine the study of witchcraft from historical and anthropological perspectives, as well as the intersection of popular culture, artistic expression and scientific ideas. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible

Realizing the Witch

By following a group of adolescents from the time they enter drug rehabilitation treatment through their reentry into the outside world--the clinic, their homes and neighborhoods, and other institutional settings--Meyers traces patterns of life that become mediated by pharmaceutical intervention. The book is at once a meditative work of anthropology, a demonstration of the theoretical and methodological limits of medical research, and a forceful intervention into the philosophy of therapeutics at the level of the individual.

addiction, adolescents, and the afterlife of therapy

The Clinic and Elsewhere

While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone—what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly’s life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist’s engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their ending.

The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover? In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the vast differences in patient responses they occasioned. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of ideas became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics. Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world the Great War ushered in.

John Weber

Andrew Dunlop

Paige Raibmon

Timothy P. Bowman

Kristin Hoganson

Laura Hooton

Josh MacFadyen

Peter S Morris

Alicia Marion Dewey

Sonia Hernández

Rosa E Cobos

Matt Caire-Pérez

Jason McCollom

Thomas D Isern

Suzzanne Kelley

Anthony Carlson

Stephen Mumme

Tisa Anders

Farming across Borders uses agricultural history to connect the regional experiences of the American West, northern Mexico, western Canada, and the North American side of the Pacific Rim, now writ large into a broad history of the North American West. Case studies of commodity production and distribution, trans-border agricultural labor, and environmental change unite to reveal new perspectives on a historiography traditionally limited to a regional approach. Sterling Evans has curated nineteen essays to explore the contours of “big” agricultural history. Crops and commodities discussed include wheat, cattle, citrus, pecans, chiles, tomatoes, sugar beets, hops, henequen, and more. Toiling over such crops, of course, were the people of the North American West, and as such, the contributing authors investigate the role of agricultural labor, from braceros and Hutterites to women working in the sorghum fields and countless other groups in between. As Evans concludes, “society as a whole (no matter in what country) often ignores the role of agriculture in the past and the present.” Farming across Borders takes an important step toward cultivating awareness and understanding of the agricultural, economic, and environmental connections that loom over the North American West regardless of lines on a map. In the words of one essay, “we are tied together . . . in a hundred different ways.”

A Transnational History of the North American West

Farming across Borders

Todd Meyers

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