• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: Antihero Care: On Fieldwork and Anthropology
  • Contributor: Yates‐Doerr, Emily
  • Published: Wiley, 2020
  • Published in: Anthropology and Humanism, 45 (2020) 2, Seite 233-244
  • Language: English
  • DOI: 10.1111/anhu.12300
  • ISSN: 1559-9167; 1548-1409
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: Summary“Antihero care” offers an approach to anthropology that emphasizes the importance of fallibility over mastery and social connections over individually acquired knowledge. I draw together Le Guin’sCarrier Bag Theory of Fictionand Mol, Pols, and Moser’sCare in Practiceto analyze the challenge of carrying out fieldwork with my children in highland Guatemala. I describe how an everyday accident led me to refuse the “killer story” of the hero and to instead embrace a script that emphasized dependency and incompletion. In my case, antihero care has changed the way I engage with holism and biomedicine in my research and writing. More broadly, reframing limitations on knowledge as a strength—not a drawback—of the discipline usefully unsettles the boundaries between fieldwork and care work.