Abstract
To live a life in the knowledge of death is an existential conundrum that we all, as mortal beings, have to face. Yet can we really understand, let alone sense, the uncertainty and contingency that are part of a life close to death when we do not have an acute
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perspective on such a life? How can we describe what it means to live near death—especially when we are not so close to our (biological) finitude yet? The Art of Life and Death is based on long‐term ethnographic collaboration with persons, many of them artists, living with HIV/AIDS in New York City. They consented to share their lives as they experienced illness and approached death—or so they thought. But unlike many dominant academic and public discourses, this book does not merely describe or theorize these lives in terms of suffering, inability, and distress. Yes, the reader witnesses the deep existential fear, confusion, and pain of those persons confronted with their own mortality. Yet the book represents their courage, resilience, and wonderment as well as their surprise of reclaimed, continued life resulting from the antiretroviral treatment that by the turn of the millennium transformed their terminal illness into a chronic condition, meaning that they had to learn “to live again” (66). For Andrew Irving, it is perfectly clear that there is no direct access to the lived experiences of other persons. Nevertheless, he found ways to engage with and learn about the inner worlds of his research participants as they emerged from that period when they lived with the ever‐present possibility of death. The result—an experimental experience‐near ethnography of life and death—is an exceptional achievement that gets under your skin from beginning to end. Living with the uncertainty of illness involves the continuous making and remaking of one's life, which is not only a complex and mutable act but first and foremost a creative one to which the book's title refers. A second meaning of the art of life lies in the inclusion of the research participants’ artworks in the (practice of) ethnography and, with this, the close attention to their aesthetic expressions while facing mortality and experiencing bodily vulnerability. Irving's sensory‐aesthetic approach helps us engage with their social, economic, and moral expectations, their perceptions of time and finitude, as well as their alterity and new perspectives on the world. It is in this spirit that we learn about living with HIV/AIDS. But more than that, The Art of Life and Death offers a much broader exploration and, I would claim, a deeper understanding of “what it means to be a mortal being in a world of perpetual change” (31). This is made possible through an outstanding interweaving of theoretical critique and aspiration, collaborative ethnography, and methodological experimentation and innovation. Introducing the notion of “an imperiled anthropology,” Irving advocates an anthropology that “puts itself in greater peril by venturing beneath the observable and audible surfaces of social life” (70) in order to gain a better understanding of people's inner expressions, dialogues, and imaginative lifeworlds. His call stems from his critique that inner worlds are rarely explored in anthropological research despite the fact that the human propensity to engage in internal dialogue and expression is foundational for experience and action and, hence, is an “integral part of what makes us human” (71). Focusing on inner lifeworlds becomes especially important when studying the lived experiences of terminal illness, because people mostly live through its diverse dimensions through ongoing internal conversations as they struggle with such questions as, Why me? What should I do? Each chapter therefore highlights from a different angle—historical, material, political, confessional, phenomenological, aesthetic, and ironic—the imaginative lifeworlds and inner expressions of Irving's research participants. Through collaborative approaches and the coproduction of knowledge, the book shows how they navigate the challenges of living with HIV/AIDS, which often involves a reorientation of priorities, an unstable body, and a changing sense of self. The strength of Irving's ethnographic practice lies in his efforts to experiment with innovative methods, such as the walking fieldwork that was an attempt by Irving and one of his collaborators, Albert, to combine walking, narration (voice recording), and photography to recap Albert's inner dialogue after he received his diagnosis, while retracing his journey to the clinic and back home almost 20 years later. Another research method juxtaposed his collaborators’ artworks alongside their life histories in order to understand their changing perceptions and inner experiences through the art they produced during periods of illness, stability, crisis, and uncertainty. Throughout the six chapters, Irving shows how art and the senses can be used in fieldwork to reveal people's complex inner worlds and create dialogues. Moreover, he shows that fieldwork itself, like art, is a sensory‐aesthetic activity that opens up imagination and communication. On a more abstract level, each chapter starts the discussion on perceptions of finitude and time by synthesizing philosophical, phenomenological, and ethnographic approaches to these perceptions. Transcending our disciplinary boundaries is, according to Irving, necessary and entails a critical rethinking of our anthropological knowledge, especially when researching the role of lived experience and inner expression. It is sometimes disappointing that he fails to bring the discussion back to anthropological theorizing—for example, about the value and meaning of life in relation to capitalism. That said, I totally agree with him that the question of how to live a life with death is more an ethnographic and methodological issue than a theoretical one. The Art of Life and Death contributes to our understanding of life in the face of death and to the anthropology of finitude and time. This is primarily made possible through Irving's development of unconventional fieldwork methods, which makes the book inspiring, essential reading for anyone interested in new ethnographic methods to more deeply access the complex inner dimensions of human experience.
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