Life Beside Itself

Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic

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Lisa Stevenson, Margaret Elizabeth Stevenson: Life Beside Itself (2014, University of California Press)

268 pages

English language

Published 2014 by University of California Press.

ISBN:
978-0-520-28260-5
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" In Life Beside Itself, Lisa Stevenson takes us on a haunting ethnographic journey through two historical moments when life for the Canadian Inuit has hung in the balance: the tuberculosis epidemic (1940s to the early 1960s) and the subsequent suicide epidemic (1980s to the present). Along the way, Stevenson troubles our common sense understanding of what life is and what it means to care for the life of another. Through close attention to the images in which we think and dream and through which we understand the world, Stevenson describes a world in which life is beside itself: the name-soul of a teenager who dies in a crash lives again in his friend's newborn baby, a young girl shares a last smoke with a dead friend in a dream, and the possessed hands of a clock spin uncontrollably over its face. In these contexts, humanitarian policies make little sense …

4 editions

Subjects

  • Inuit, canada
  • Tuberculosis, history