Complicity Consciousness: The Dual Practice of Ethnography and Clinical Caregiving in Carceral Settings

Anthropologist-clinicians who engage in both ethnographic inquiry and clinical practice confront methodological, ethical, and epistemological predicaments that can challenge and enhance the moral practice and ethics of care inherent both to healing and to ethnography. Clinician-ethnographers often find themselves practicing within harmful systems that they also critique, such as hospitals or carceral institutions. This paper analyzes the dual practice of obstetrical care and ethnography in a county jail and a county hospital. These intertwined roles involve wrestling with sometimes conflicting vocational and ethical obligations to heal, to protect privacy, to address bodily consequences of systemic oppressions, and to critique the systems that mete human suffering. Developing a consciousness of clinical-ethnographers’ complicity, rather than disavowing it, can be aligned with approaches of abolition medicine to reimagine more just forms of healing.