Preface
The contributors to Narrative, Otherwise were participants in the Fall 2014 course in Graphic
Medicine at the University of California, Riverside. Our goal for the class was to bring an
anthropological lens to the work of graphic medicine and graphic narratives more generally. The
field of graphic medicine is a new and vibrant community of comics artists, humanities scholars,
public health and health professionals. Graphic medicine is a term coined by physician,
cartoonist, and medical humanities scholar Ian Williams and is defined as “the role that comics
can play in the study and delivery of healthcare” (Graphicmedicine.org 2013). Williams
launched the graphic medicine website in 2007 as an effort to recognize the increasing number of
illness narratives in comic form since the mid 1990s. For the anthropological lens we chose
Elizabeth’s Povinelli’s book Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in
Late Liberalism (2011). Since comics are an ideal medium to visualize chronology and the
ordinary, we were curious to understand how the graphic narratives in comics would enhance
Povinelli’s arguments. How do graphic narratives contribute to our understanding of the
“ordinary, chronic, and cruddy”? How are graphic narratives entangled in biomedical
hegemonies and production of suffering, exhaustion and endurance? The papers and comics in
Narrative, Otherwise consider how graphic narratives are embedded in processes of
biomedicalization, how the narratives are empowering, how they visualize conditions of
endurance or exhaustion, and what anthropology and its methods can contribute to graphic
medicine.
The drawings that make up the cover of our journal are in response to the prompt “How did you
read Economies of Abandoment?” Interestingly, some of the drawings are literal visualizations of
how the respondent read Povinelli – in the bathtub, on the sofa, and in the process of trying to
engage the material. They are terrific examples of the “ordinary, chronic and cruddy.” Other
drawings engaged concepts of ethical substance, or the lack thereof, kinds of perspectives across
time, and others visualized the possibilities of monsters and the meaning of enfleshment. These
drawings are an introduction to our collective conversation on the potential of anthropology,
suffering, and graphic narrative.
Juliet McMullin
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