Anthropologist, heal thyself: Toward an anthropology of healing through relational interbeing

Abstract I call for an anthropology that confronts its own woundedness. Anthropologists often bear witness to suffering but rarely examine how our own grief, trauma, and institutional distress shape the affective tone of our work. Drawing on fieldwork with Runa (Quechua) women affected by forced sterilization in Peru and guided by my collaborator and elder, Hilaria Supa, I ask what it means to live and work within what bell hooks calls the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” without reproducing its psychic violence. Anthropology's emotional habitus conceals the toll of our labor, reinforcing distance, cynicism, and despair. In conversation with Indigenous and decolonial feminist thinkers such as Dian Million and María José Méndez, I propose an anthropology of healing grounded in acuerpamiento—an embodied ethic of reciprocity and shared vulnerability. Relation and interbeing are not metaphors but methods: practices that resist isolation and the heroics of detachment. Healing becomes both political and methodological—a way to sustain life, care, and accountability within our scholarship. Moving beyond the wound as the central analytic, an anthropology of healing insists on hopeful relation as the condition of transformation.