Emily Cohen Ibañez | University of California, Santa Cruz (original) (raw)
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Papers by Emily Cohen Ibañez
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2016
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2016
The central locus of my study is southern California, at the nexus of the Hollywood entertainment... more The central locus of my study is southern California, at the nexus of the Hollywood entertainment industry, the rapidly growing game design world, and military training medical R&D. My research focuses on the rise of military utopic visions of mind that involve the creation of virtual worlds and hyper-real simulations in military psychiatry. In this paper, I employ ethnography to examine a broader turn to the senses within military psychology and psychiatry that involve changes in the ways some are coming to understand war trauma, PTSD, and what is now being called "psychological resilience." In the article, I critique assumptions that are made when what is being called "a sense of presence" and "immersion" are given privileged attention in military therapeutic contexts, diminishing the subjectivity of soldiers and reducing meaning to biometric readings on the surface of the body. I argue that the military's recent preoccupation with that which can ...
The central locus of my study is southern California, at the nexus of the Hollywood entertainment... more The central locus of my study is southern California, at the nexus of the Hollywood entertainment industry, the rapidly growing game design world, and military training medical R&D. My research focuses on the rise of military utopic visions of mind that involve the creation of virtual worlds and hyper-real simulations in military psychiatry. In this paper, I employ ethnography to examine a broader turn to the senses within military psychology and psychiatry that involve changes in the ways some are coming to understand war trauma, PTSD, and what is now being called "psychological resilience." In the article, I critique assumptions that are made when what is being called "a sense of presence" and "immersion" are given privileged attention in military therapeutic contexts, diminishing the subjectivity of soldiers and reducing meaning to biometric readings on the surface of the body. I argue that the military's recent preoccupation with that which can be described as "immersive" and possessing a sense of presence signals a concentrated effort aimed at what might be described as a colonization of the senses—a digital Manifest Destiny that envisions the mind as capital, a condition I am calling military utopias of mind and machine. Military utopias of mind and machine aspire to have all the warfare without the trauma by instrumentalizing the senses within a closed system. In the paper, I argue that such utopias of control and containment are fragile and volatile fantasies that suffer from the potential repudiation of their very aims. I turn to storytelling, listening, and conversations as avenues towards healing, allowing people to ascribe meaning to difficult life experiences, affirm social relationships, and escape containment within a closed language system.
Colombia, a country at civil war for over 50 years, has one of the highest rates of landmine inju... more Colombia, a country at civil war for over 50 years, has one of the highest rates of landmine injury in the world. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted at the Amputation and Rehabilitation Unit of Bogota's Central Military Hospital. Through an ethnographic description of surgical amputation and rehabilitation, I examine medical understandings of vitality and masculinity in respect to the senses -primarily that of pain in the act of amputation.
http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/669-scenes-from-colombian-minefields
Colombia, a country at war for over fifty years, has one of the highest rates of landmine injurie... more Colombia, a country at war for over fifty years, has one of the highest rates of landmine injuries in the world. For decades, landmine victims have remained outside the nation's popular consciousness. Today, landmines and rehabilitative medicine profoundly shape public life. This article shows how the seemingly mundane activity of walking becomes a strangely familiar experience among amputees and an increasingly technical one among medical practitioners in Colombian rehab units. It's worth noting that when patients and medical staff discussed how they or their patients learned how to walk using prostheses, they also often talked about their experiences with phantom limbs. As subjective as bodily sensations are I argue that they are nonetheless implicated in social relations of power and political and economic change. Within rehab medicine, clinicians frequently see phantoms as part of a patient's healing process and sometimes worry that failing to experience the amputated limb as a felt presence makes recovery more difficult. Without a missing object, there is no object to desire, they presume. Rather than treat phantom limb sensation as a kind of psychosis, this essay explores how the Colombian medical establishment talks about rehabilitation with prostheses as a form of social, physical, and psychological integration. I also show how patients, meanwhile, experience a kind of ambivalence-marked by oscillating feelings of strangeness and naturalness-regarding limb loss and the prostheses they use to manage it.
In this essay, I review the works of filmmakers Bill Morrison and Gregorio Rocha and contextualiz... more In this essay, I review the works of filmmakers Bill Morrison and Gregorio Rocha and contextualize their work within a growing apocalyptic cultural movement of film preservationists who identify as "orphanistas." As orphanistas they struggle to reshape and reproduce cultural memory and heritage through reviving "orphans"-films abandoned by their makers. Moving images mimic cognitive memory, yet, depending on reproductive technologies, copies of moving images may organize mass publics and influence cultural imaginaries. Traditionally considered conservative, preservation in the midst of destruction is not only a creative but also an avant-garde act of breathing new life into storytelling and the reproduction of cultural memory. In this essay, I discuss how the surrealist works of Morrison and Rocha radically confront dominant cultural imaginings of race and nation, and I argue that film preservation has the potential of being socially transformative. An interview with Gregorio Rocha follows.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2016
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2016
The central locus of my study is southern California, at the nexus of the Hollywood entertainment... more The central locus of my study is southern California, at the nexus of the Hollywood entertainment industry, the rapidly growing game design world, and military training medical R&D. My research focuses on the rise of military utopic visions of mind that involve the creation of virtual worlds and hyper-real simulations in military psychiatry. In this paper, I employ ethnography to examine a broader turn to the senses within military psychology and psychiatry that involve changes in the ways some are coming to understand war trauma, PTSD, and what is now being called "psychological resilience." In the article, I critique assumptions that are made when what is being called "a sense of presence" and "immersion" are given privileged attention in military therapeutic contexts, diminishing the subjectivity of soldiers and reducing meaning to biometric readings on the surface of the body. I argue that the military's recent preoccupation with that which can ...
The central locus of my study is southern California, at the nexus of the Hollywood entertainment... more The central locus of my study is southern California, at the nexus of the Hollywood entertainment industry, the rapidly growing game design world, and military training medical R&D. My research focuses on the rise of military utopic visions of mind that involve the creation of virtual worlds and hyper-real simulations in military psychiatry. In this paper, I employ ethnography to examine a broader turn to the senses within military psychology and psychiatry that involve changes in the ways some are coming to understand war trauma, PTSD, and what is now being called "psychological resilience." In the article, I critique assumptions that are made when what is being called "a sense of presence" and "immersion" are given privileged attention in military therapeutic contexts, diminishing the subjectivity of soldiers and reducing meaning to biometric readings on the surface of the body. I argue that the military's recent preoccupation with that which can be described as "immersive" and possessing a sense of presence signals a concentrated effort aimed at what might be described as a colonization of the senses—a digital Manifest Destiny that envisions the mind as capital, a condition I am calling military utopias of mind and machine. Military utopias of mind and machine aspire to have all the warfare without the trauma by instrumentalizing the senses within a closed system. In the paper, I argue that such utopias of control and containment are fragile and volatile fantasies that suffer from the potential repudiation of their very aims. I turn to storytelling, listening, and conversations as avenues towards healing, allowing people to ascribe meaning to difficult life experiences, affirm social relationships, and escape containment within a closed language system.
Colombia, a country at civil war for over 50 years, has one of the highest rates of landmine inju... more Colombia, a country at civil war for over 50 years, has one of the highest rates of landmine injury in the world. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted at the Amputation and Rehabilitation Unit of Bogota's Central Military Hospital. Through an ethnographic description of surgical amputation and rehabilitation, I examine medical understandings of vitality and masculinity in respect to the senses -primarily that of pain in the act of amputation.
http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/669-scenes-from-colombian-minefields
Colombia, a country at war for over fifty years, has one of the highest rates of landmine injurie... more Colombia, a country at war for over fifty years, has one of the highest rates of landmine injuries in the world. For decades, landmine victims have remained outside the nation's popular consciousness. Today, landmines and rehabilitative medicine profoundly shape public life. This article shows how the seemingly mundane activity of walking becomes a strangely familiar experience among amputees and an increasingly technical one among medical practitioners in Colombian rehab units. It's worth noting that when patients and medical staff discussed how they or their patients learned how to walk using prostheses, they also often talked about their experiences with phantom limbs. As subjective as bodily sensations are I argue that they are nonetheless implicated in social relations of power and political and economic change. Within rehab medicine, clinicians frequently see phantoms as part of a patient's healing process and sometimes worry that failing to experience the amputated limb as a felt presence makes recovery more difficult. Without a missing object, there is no object to desire, they presume. Rather than treat phantom limb sensation as a kind of psychosis, this essay explores how the Colombian medical establishment talks about rehabilitation with prostheses as a form of social, physical, and psychological integration. I also show how patients, meanwhile, experience a kind of ambivalence-marked by oscillating feelings of strangeness and naturalness-regarding limb loss and the prostheses they use to manage it.
In this essay, I review the works of filmmakers Bill Morrison and Gregorio Rocha and contextualiz... more In this essay, I review the works of filmmakers Bill Morrison and Gregorio Rocha and contextualize their work within a growing apocalyptic cultural movement of film preservationists who identify as "orphanistas." As orphanistas they struggle to reshape and reproduce cultural memory and heritage through reviving "orphans"-films abandoned by their makers. Moving images mimic cognitive memory, yet, depending on reproductive technologies, copies of moving images may organize mass publics and influence cultural imaginaries. Traditionally considered conservative, preservation in the midst of destruction is not only a creative but also an avant-garde act of breathing new life into storytelling and the reproduction of cultural memory. In this essay, I discuss how the surrealist works of Morrison and Rocha radically confront dominant cultural imaginings of race and nation, and I argue that film preservation has the potential of being socially transformative. An interview with Gregorio Rocha follows.