Hospitals Otherwise

This article revisits hospitals as spaces and places of biomedicine, ethnographic fieldwork, and anthropological thinking. We argue that hospitals and technoscientific biomedicine, in their globalized, capitalized, and financialized forms, simultaneously reproduce and aim to alleviate unequal entitlements to life that are infused by violent and emancipatory histories. Anthropological scholarship on hospitals evolved from a preoccupation with the cultural diversity of medical practice, research, and technology within hospitals across the world, to a focus on the political and economic conditions of hospital medicine, to an ontological and political interrogation of hospitals as haunted infrastructures with temporal, affective, and nonworldly dimensions, in which hospitals are conceived of as more-than-human and more-than-disciplined nodes of a globally stratified (bio)medical enterprise. While hospitals crystallize the reproduction of the unequal value of lives, they are also potential sites of the otherwise and undiscipline, where more just futures could be enabled.