Caring For Memories: Culture, Loss, Memory, Mourning and Revitalization
**This event is open to those of the Stanford community ONLY**
I am presenting a work in progress, a new book that grows out of three sources. Caring for memories is the final underdeveloped section of my book The Soul of Care. That book was based in my career-long research on social suffering and healing. This is also my final year at Harvard (my 50th), and I seek to summarize, and bring to a fullness, the contributions of the Harvard School of Medical Anthropology. Equally influential is my research over half a century in Chinese society on the interconnections between affect, history and care. The work in progress is based in 18 months of intensive engagement with the literatures of anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience concerning life, death, memory and its relation to both the unconscious and the social world. This informal talk is a first pass at synthesizing my thoughts; not inappropriate in a setting in which as a Stanford undergraduate I first came to terms with the inchoate intellectual interests that eventually cohered into my approach to medical anthropology. The talk will begin with the experience of three deaths: those of my late wife, my mother and especially my closest colleague and former student, Paul Farmer. Those deaths represent, for me, individual grief and collective mourning, but also the role of memory in the construction of the self and in the ways that local moral worlds contribute to how societies remember. My emphasis here is on the poesies and consequences of restored vitality (revitalization) of both individual mourners and communities. I am as interested in the questions from the audience as I am in the talk itself, as I continue to develop this career-culminating book.
