Pot and Power

The Role of the Nonhuman in a Very Human Business

  • Lucia Artner University of Hildesheim
  • Isabel Atzl Berlin Museum of Medical History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2016.1119
Keywords: defecation, object-centered research, nursing history, dirty body work, praxeological approach, material culture

Abstract

The daily care and nursing of people of various ages with disabilities or illnesses constitutes historical and contemporary socio-cultural contexts which are said to be ‘human-centered.’ The formation of practices, politics, and the distribution of knowledge within care and nursing has always been deeply intertwined with the very formation of culture and cultures. This is apparent when focusing upon issues of cleanliness in nursing and care, which are considered to be civilized and ‘cultured,’ and includes the way we handle excrement. Notwithstanding, there is a profound lack of understanding of the significance and impact that ‘non-humans,’ such as material objects, had and have in nursing interactions. Based on empirical research on historical and contemporary institutional settings of the ‘dirty work’ of nursing (derived from material culture studies, object-centered historical analyses, and multi-sited ethnography), we analyze the complex intermingling of humans and artifacts in the ‘delicate’ endeavor of supported excretion. As we will show, material objects do play a significant role in supporting those that are unable to undertake their (delicate) business autonomously. However, they also help to transform the dirty work of supported excretion into an object-controlled mode of action.

Author Biographies

Lucia Artner, University of Hildesheim

Lucia Artner studied Cultural Anthropology, European Ethnology, and Recent History at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. She currently works as a research assistant at the Institute of Social Work and Organizational Studies at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. Her research interests include material culture studies and science and technology studies, nursing and care work, feminist and gender studies, transnationalism, and organizational research.

Isabel Atzl, Berlin Museum of Medical History

Isabel Atzl worked for ten years as a trained nurse before studying History and Philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Since 2005 she has worked as a freelance exhibition curator for various museums and institutes in Germany and Switzerland. She currently works at the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité on the history of medicine within the research project “Care and Things” (Pflegedinge). Her research interests include the history of medicine, the history of nursing, object-centered research and historical scientific collections.

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Issue
No 2 (2016): The Nonhuman
Section
_Articles