While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone-what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly's life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist's engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their ending.
Industry Reviews
"This beautiful, smart, and unique book cuts into ethnography and race in powerful and necessary ways, stepping off the plane of current critical race theory into risky, generative thinking and writing. An intimate, frank account of a situation and relationship beyond the convenient stability of an understanding or meaning, All That Was Not Her is an absolutely compelling read." -- Kathleen Stewart, coauthor of * The Hundreds *
"All That Was Not Her is an exceptionally compelling reflection on the long-term complicated relationship through time between an anthropologist and a key interlocutor. Todd Meyers remarkably gets at the fraught, complex, and entangled forms of connection and difference, offering a new understanding of the interpersonal, ethical, and epistemological dimensions of work undertaken in contemporary medical and sociocultural anthropology. This is an altogether necessary book for these times." -- Robert Desjarlais, author of * The Blind Man: A Phantasmography *
"Meyers's conscience-driven reflections regarding the utility of his work, the shifting parameters of the researcher-interlocutor relationship, and the special challenges of communicating across gaps of class and race, form the heart of the book. He makes academic writing his leaping-off point for a deeply thoughtful, lyrically expressed ethical and philosophical enquiry. This is a book that can be slotted into many non-fiction categories, but don't be put off: it is a unique work of literature." -- Ian McGillis * Montreal Gazette *
"Meyers' writing is compelling for its beauty and for the honesty of his descriptions. More than anything, I took from this its head-on confrontation with the uneasiness inherent in the relationship between the ethnographer and their subject that should be familiar to anyone with experience of doing ethnographic fieldwork." -- Esca van Blarikom * Sociology of Health & Illness *
"The book is not about truth but about swimming in ambiguity. It is not even about the cliche conflict between 'truth' and 'accuracy,' as even these terms begin to disintegrate in the text. Meyers asks us to sit with discomfort and dwell in the fraught nature of ethnography. In this sense, the book is not quite an ethnographic portrait. It is rather an ethnography of ethnography itself-and where ethnography starts to break down." -- Emily Lim Rogers * American Ethnologist *
"I thoroughly enjoyed reading All That Was Not Her, by Todd Meyers. The book is beautiful to look at, with artwork unusual in an academic publication. Meyers writes well as he shares with the reader what might most easily be described as a case study. . . . This is an excellent text to prompt critical thought and debate around the important topics of ethics, power relations, and the positioning of the researcher within research that involves people as participants." -- Khyati Tripathi * H-Death, H-Net Reviews *
"What his account of Beverly gets her to think about, even though she can't really grasp it, is the importance of reading for negativity even in those most crushed by the violences of late liberalism. In such an enterprise, our politics will have to be vandalized, experiments in academic writing will need to be undertaken, and the failures depicted in All That Was Not Her will remain beautiful, venerable, and worthy of preservation." -- Elizabeth A. Wilson * Somatosphere *
"I was moved by Meyers's reflections on the unfinished: the errors, failures, and obsessions inherent to the work of an anthropologist." -- Margaux Fitoussi * Somatosphere *
"All That Was Not Her is an unsentimental yet vulnerable reckoning of fieldwork. An ethnography of ethnography." -- Andres Romero * Somatosphere *
