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 into the present following her death. 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 her the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside Beverly. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their end.

Book Information
ISBN 9781478015277
Author Todd Meyers
Format Hardback
Page Count 208
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press