Corpo-real ethnographies: bodies, dissection planes, and cutting. Ethnography from the anatomy laboratory and the public morgues in Colombia

Abstract

Is there a mode to our doing ethnography together that we should be thinking about conceptually? This was the guiding question, of sorts, that opened the path for this text. We suggest there is one, and we call it corpo-real ethnography. Out of our ethnographic fieldworks in an anatomy laboratory and the public morgues in Colombia, here we conceptualize how that mode takes form and what it does to the practice of doing ethnography. Drawing from Marylin Strathern’s notion of the ethnographic moment and building on Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action, we suggest that by cutting each other’s work -in likeness to the manner in which cadavers are cut in dissection planes during the scientific practices that take place in the laboratory and the morgue – we can find new and unexpected conceptual and ethnographic surprises that allow for the emergence of our collective ethnographic conceptual work. Cutting each other’s work takes the form of letting ourselves be affected wholly by the ethnographic work of the other insofar as it generates a collective empirical site from where to do ethnographic work together – corpo-real ethnography.

Keywords

• anatomy
• forensic science
• ethnographic work
• bodies