Learning to see otherwise

Abstract

This article reports on data from two research projects with people whose own illness narratives and etiologies challenge the western biomedical ontology of the body. This paper argues that Reed’s ‘landscapes of meaning’ allow researchers to make sense of the invisible, causal mechanisms operating in these particular epistemic communities. If ontology is an issue of perspective, then part of the ethnographer’s task is to ‘learn to see otherwise’ by situating themselves in people’s systems of signification and thereby grasping and analyzing the causal forces at work. And yet exploring data from these cases also allows for intervention into Reed’s account of causality which lends causal primacy to symbolic systems over structural and agential ones.