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Ionio.gr
Bloomsbury has just published the monograph An Anthropologist on Sacks by Anna Apostolidou, Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Digital Humanities.
The book offers an anthropological reading of the work of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks (1933–2015). A controversial figure within the medical establishment of the twentieth century, Sacks worked closely with patients with rare neurological disorders and wrote numerous medical narratives, thereby reviving the holistic and descriptive tradition of nineteenth-century medical writing. Through careful observation and listening, an engaged presence, narrative breadth, and a steadfast ethical concern for the Other, Sacks developed an approach to and understanding of human experience that bears significant affinities to anthropological sensibility, even though he rarely identified himself as an anthropologist. An Anthropologist on Sacks argues that these idiosyncratic narratives function as ethnographic encounters that can renew our interest in the study of humanity, particularly in an era of increasing depersonalization in scientific discourse.
Drawing on Oliver Sacks’s published works, extensive correspondence, and lesser-known writings, this monograph highlights seven “paradoxical lessons,” analyzed in the book’s seven chapters, concerning anthropology, methodology, difference, exoticism, mediation, the writing of the Other, and reflexivity. The book thus offers an interpretation of Sacks as a representative of a humanistic science that resists reductive interpretations, recognizes the complexity of lived experience, and treats (neuro)diversity as one of the many possible ways of being. It makes a critical contribution to the study of an important nonconformist author whose thinking proves particularly timely for the humanities, raising crucial questions about the possibility of a more humane, complex, and ethically accountable approach to research.
For more information: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/anthropologist-on-sacks-9798216251217/
