A review of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry, Tejaswini Ganti, Duke University Press, 2012.
Imagine you are a foreign graduate student doing fieldwork in Hollywood and that you get to sit in a two-hour long interview with a major film star like Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp. This is precisely what happened to Tejaswini Ganti in the course of her graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania when she was researching the local film industry in Mumbai, now better known as Bollywood. And it happened not only once: she sat in interviews with legendary actors such as Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Shashi Kapoor, Sanjay Dutt, Amrish Puri, actress Ayesha Jhulka, as well as top producers and directors Aditya Chopra, Rakesh Roshan, and Subhash Ghai. What made this access possible? Why was a twenty-something PhD student in anthropology from New York able to meet some of the biggest celebrities in India? And what does it reveal about Bollywood? Obviously, this is not the kind of access a graduate student normally gets. Privileged access is usually granted to journalists, media critics, fellow producers, and other insiders. They observe the film industry for a reason: they are part of the larger media system, and they play a critical role in informing the public, evaluating new releases, building the legend of movie stars, and contributing to box-office success. As an anthropologist, Tejaswini Ganti’s approach to the Hindi film industry is different. As she states in her introduction, “my central focus is on the social world of Hindi filmmakers, their filmmaking practices, and their ideologies of production.” Her book explores “how filmmakers’ subjectivities, social relations, and world-views are constituted and mediated by their experiences of filmmaking.” As such, she produces little value for the marketization of Bollywood movies: her book may be read only by film students and fellow academics, and is not geared towards the general public. As befits a PhD dissertation, her prose is heavy with theoretical references. She draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic capital and his arguments about class, taste, and the practice of distinction. She uses Erving Goffman’s concept of face-work to describe the quest for respectability and avoidance of stigma in a social world associated with black money, shady operators, and tainted women. She steeps herself in industry statistics of production budgets, commercial outcomes, annual results, and box-office receipts, only to note that these figures are heavily biased and do not give an accurate picture of the movie industry in Mumbai.
Getting access
Part of Tejaswini Ganti’s success in getting access to the A-list of the Hindi film industry stems from her position of extraneity. As an “upper middle-class diasporic South Asian female academic from New York,” she didn’t benefit from “the privilege of white skin”—white European or American visitors could get access to the studios or film shoots in a way that no ethnic Indian outsider could—but she was obviously coming from outside and was not involved in power games or media strategies. For her initial contacts, she used the snowballing technique: personal friends in Philadelphia who had ties with the industry in Mumbai provided initial recommendations and helped her make her way through the personal networks and kinship relations that determine entry and access at every stage. Two different directors offered her the chance to join the team of directors assistants for two films, fulfilling the need for participant observation that remains a sine qua non in anthropology studies. People were genuinely puzzled by her academic interest in such a mundane topic (“You mean you can get a PhD in this in America?”) and eager to grant an interview to an outsider who had no stake in the game. Being a woman also helped: she “piqued curiosity and interest, often standing out as being one of the few—and sometimes only—women on a film act.” As she notes, she “did not seem to fit in any of the expected roles for women—actress, dancer, journalist, hair dresser, costume designer, or choreographer—visible at various production sites.” Contrary to common understanding about the gendered dimension of fieldwork, she actually had a harder time meeting women, specifically the actresses. She also experienced her share of sexual harassment, but as a young married woman with a strong will and a sharp wit she was able to handle unwelcome advances and derogatory remarks. Last but not least, dedicating an academic study to Bollywood provided a certain cachet and prestige to an industry that was desperately in need of social recognition. Actors and filmmakers strived not only for commercial success, but also for critical acclaim and cultural appraisal. A high-brow academic study by an American scholar gave respectability to the Hindi film industry “which for decades had been the object of much disparagement, derisive humor, and disdain.”
She also came at a critical juncture in the history of the Hindi film industry. She carried out her fieldwork for twelve months in 1996 and completed her dissertation in 2000, a period associated with the neoliberal turn in India’s political economy. She made shorter follow-up visits in 2005 and 2006, and her book was published by Duke University Press in 2012, at a time when neoliberalism was in full swing and the nationalist right was ascending. The Hindi film industry’s metamorphosis into Bollywood would not have been possible without the rise of neoliberal economic ideals in India. Along with the rest of the economy, the movie industry experienced a shift from public to private, from production to distribution, from domestic audiences to global markets, and from entertainment for the masses to gentrified leisure. The role of the state changed accordingly. At the time of independence, most leaders viewed the cinema as “low” and “vulgar” entertainment, popular with the uneducated “masses.” Gandhi declared many times that he had never seen a single film, comparing cinema with other “vices” such as satta (betting), gambling, and horseracing. Unlike Gandhi, Nehru was not averse to the cinema, but was critical of the kind of films being made at the time. He exhorted filmmakers to make “socially relevant” films to “uplift” the masses an to use cinema as a modernization tool in line with the developmentalist objectives of the state. He created a cultural bureaucracy to maximize the educational potential of movies, with institutions such as Doordarshan, the public service broadcaster, and the Films Division, the state-funded documentary film producer. Prohibitive policies such as censorship and taxation as well as bans on theater construction limited the development of commercial cinema, even though India soon became the most prolific film producing country in the world. How to explain the shift in attitudes toward mainstream cinema, from being a heavily criticized and maligned form of media to one which the state actually celebrated, touting as an example of India’s success in the international arena? There was, first, a rediscovery of cinema as national heritage, starting with the public celebrations of the cinema centenary in 1996. Cinema was also rehabilitated as an economic venture: large corporations such as the Birla Group, Tata Group, Sahara, Reliance, and others began to invest in the sector, displacing the shady operators that had associated Indian cinema with organized crime and money laundering. Multiplex construction replaced the old movie houses that had catered to the tastes and low budgets of the rural masses. Local authority started to offer tax breaks for films shot in their territory, while government agencies began to promote the export of Indian films to foreign markets. Formerly seen as a tool for social change, cinema was now envisaged as an engine of economic growth.
The gentrification of cinema
The result of this neoliberal turn was a gentrification of cinema. This transformation was reflected in the attitudes towards cinema, the ideology of industry players, the economic structure of the sector, and the content of movies themselves. One of the facts that surprised the author the she began her fieldwork in 1996 was the frequent criticism voiced by Hindi filmmakers concerning the industry’s work culture, production practices, and quality of filmmaking, as well as the disdain with which they viewed audiences. In discussions with filmmakers, the 1980s emerged as a particularly dreadful period of filmmaking, in contrast with both earlier and later periods of Hindi cinema. The arrival of VCR recorders and the advent of cable TV was hollowing out the market for theater moviegoing from both ends, resulting in a decline in cinematic quality. The upper classes completely skipped domestic cinema, the middle class increasingly turned to television and video recording, and working class audiences had access to video parlors where a simple hall with a television and a VCR replaced large-screen theaters. Filmmakers had no choice but to cater to the base instincts of the public, resulting in trashy movies with clichéd plots and dialogues, excessive violence, explicit sex, and vulgar choreography. The young ethnographer saw a marked evolution in her return visits to the field after 2000: while the Indian state recognized filmmaking as a legitimate cultural activity, filmmakers themselves began to feel pride in their work and became accepted into social and cultural elites. For Tejaswini Ganti, respectability and cultural legitimacy for commercial filmmaking only became possible when the developmentalist state was reconfigured into a neoliberal one, privileging doctrines of free markets, free trade, and consumerism. Urban middle classes were celebrated in state and media discourse as the main agents of social change as well as markers of modernity and development in India. A few blockbusters created a box-office bonanza and ushered in a new era for Bollywood movies. Released in 1995, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, better known by the initialism DDLJ, featured two young lovers (played by Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol) born and raised in Britain who elope in beautiful sceneries shot in Switzerland before facing the conflicting interests of their families in India. Love stories with extremely wealthy and often transnational characters began to replace former plots that often focused on class conflict, social injustice, and youthful rebellion. As the author notes, “through their valorization of patriarchy, the Hindu joint family, filial duty, feminine sexual modesty, and upper class privilege, the family films of the mid- to late 1990s were much more conservative than films from earlier eras; however, their visual, narrative, and performative style made them appear modern and ‘cool’.”
More than the content of films themselves, the material conditions of film-viewing and filmmaking were quoted as the main impetus for elite and middle-class audiences to return to cinema halls. The 1990s saw the advent of the era of the multiplex: with their smaller seating capacities, location in urban centers, and much higher ticket prices, multiplex theaters transformed the cinematic experience and allowed filmmakers to produce movies that would not have been commercially viable in the previous system. “What the multiplex has done today is release the producer from having to cater to the lowest common denominator,” says veteran actress Shabana Azmi. Indian middle-class norms of respectability and morality were embraced by the cinematic profession who sought to redeem its image formerly associated with organized crime, loose morals, and vulgar audiences. Girls from “good families” began to enter the industry as actresses, dancers, or assistants, their chastity protected by chaperones and new norms of decency on film sets: “while actresses frequently had to wear sexy, revealing clothing in certain sequences, once they were off camera their body language changed, going to great pains to cover themselves and create a zone of modesty and privacy in the very male and very public space of the set.” Male actors and directors also “performed respectability” and accomplished “face-work” by emphasizing their higher education credentials and middle-class lifestyle that cast them apart from “filmi” behavior—with the Indian English term filmi implying ostentation, flamboyance, crudeness, and amorality. Many individuals whose parents were filmmakers explained to the author that their parents had consciously kept them away from the film world. But many actors and directors were second-generation professionals who entered the industry through family connections and kinship networks. In Bollywood, cinema remains a family business, and while the Hindi film industry is very diverse in terms of linguistic, regional, religious, and caste origins of its members, the unifying characteristic of the contemporary industry is its quasi-dynastic structure. Getting a foothold into the profession requires connections, patience, and, at least in the stereotypical view associated with female actresses, a reliance on the “casting couch.”
An ethnography of Bollywood
This is why the kind of unmediated access, direct observation, and participatory experience that Tejaswini Ganti was able to accumulate makes Producing Bollywood a truly exceptional piece of scholarship. The author provides a “thick description” of an average day on an Hindi film set, rendering conversations, power relations, and social hierarchies. She emphasizes the prevalence of face-to-face relations, the significance of kinship as a source of talent, and the highly oral style of working. She depicts the presence of Hindi rituals, which have become incorporated into production routines, as well as the tremendous diversity—regional, linguistic, and religious—of members of the film industry. The movie industry is often analyzed through the lenses of Hollywood norms and practices: her ethnography of Bollywood aims at dislodging Hollywood from its default position by describing a different work culture based on improvisation, on-the-job training, and oral contracts. Films, deals, and commitments are made on the basis of face-to-face communication and discussion between key players, rather than via professional mediators or written materials. Actors, directors, writers, or musicians do not have any formal gatekeepers or agents as proxies for attaining work. If a producers wants a particular star for a film, he speaks directly with him. Heroines are usually chosen after the male star, director, and music director have been finalized for a film project, and are frequently regarded as interchangeable. Spending time on a Hindi film set, it is hard to miss the stark contrast between stars and everyone else around them, especially the way stars are accorded a great deal more basic comfort than the rest of the cast and crew. Chorus dancers and extras—referred to as “junior artists”—often do not have access to makeup rooms or even bathrooms. At any given point in time, only about five or six actors are deemed top stars by the industry, based on their box-office draw and performance. This makes the kind of access that the junior ethnographer enjoyed all the more exceptional.
Cinema is a risky business, and managing the uncertainty endemic to the filmmaking process is a key part of how the movie industry operates. Hindi filmmakers aim to reduce the risks and uncertainties involved with filmmaking in a variety of ways, from the most apparently superstitious practices—from conducting a ritual prayer to Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god regarded as the remover of obstacles, to breaking a coconut to celebrate the first shoot of the day—to more perceptible forms of risk reduction, such as always working with the same team of people or remaking commercially successful films from the Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam film industries. Although the driving force within the Mumbai industry is box-office success, it is a difficult goal, achieved by few and pursued by many. The reported probability of a Hindi film achieving success at the box-office ranges from 10 to 15 percent every year. The entry of the Indian corporate sector in the twenty-first century has infused the industry with much-needed capital and management skills. Many of the new companies have integrated production and distribution, which reduces uncertainties around the latter. Measures such as film insurance, coproductions, product placement, and marketing partnerships with high-profile consumer brands have also mitigated some of the financial uncertainties of filmmaking. The gentrification of cinema and the growth of multiplexes have helped to reduce the perception of uncertainty associated with filmmaking by reducing the reliance on mass audiences and single-screen cinemas. With their high ticket prices, social exclusivity, and material comforts, multiplexes have significantly transformed the economics of filmmaking. So has the growing importance of international audiences, with the South Asian diaspora providing one of the most profitable markets for Bollywood filmmakers. Diasporic audiences, especially in North America and the United Kingdom, are perceived as more predictable than domestic audiences. Not only has the multiplex and the gentrification of cinema created new modes of sociability and reordered public space, but it has also reshaped filmmakers’ audience imaginaries. Filmmakers still strive to produce the “universal hit,” a movie that can please “both aunties and servants,” but at the same time they complain that audiences are not “mature” enough to accept more risqué stories or artistically ambitious productions. This definition of the public as divided between “the masses and the classes” operates as a form of doxa—that which is completely naturalized and taken for granted—within the film industry.
The role of the state
The Hindi film industry offers a living proof example that competing against Hollywood’s dominance does not require huge barriers on imported films nor the provision of massive subsidies to domestic movies. In the movie industry as in other sectors, the role of the government is to set the broad economic environment promoting a sound and stable legal regime that is required by film companies. On this basis, film companies develop their business strategies, in particular they take the high risks inherent with this industry. A healthy domestic market requires that films from all origins compete on a level playing field to attract the largest number of domestic moviegoers. But very often the intervention of governments in the film industry goes beyond the provision of a level playing field. Public support such as subsidies, import restrictions, screen quotas, tax relief schemes, and specialized financial funds holds a preeminent place in the film policies of many countries. A generous film subsidy policy or certain import quotas can inflate the number of domestic films produced; but they rarely nurture a sustainable industry and often translate into a decline in film quality and viewers’ experience. In India, the government took the opposite direction to regulating the sector. Instead of subsidizing the industry, economic policies have treated cinema as a source of tax revenue rather than as an engine of growth. The main bulk of taxation is collected by individual state governments through the entertainment tax, which is a sales tax imposed on box-office receipts, ranging from 20 to 75 percent. India’s cinema industry has faced other regulatory hurdles, such as restrictions on screen construction that have hindered the expansion of cinemas, especially in smaller towns and cities. Even after being accorded official status as a private industry in 2001, moviemakers had tremendous difficulty in obtaining institutionalized funding, except for those already established companies that don’t need the capital and that can capitalize on lower bank interest rates compared to private financiers. The influx of capital from established financial institutions and business groups also brought in much needed management skills and planning capabilities. As a result, Bollywood has outperformed most of its competitors across a range of key dimensions (number of films produced, box office revenues, etc.) with much lower level of subsidies than the other countries and—above all from a cultural perspective—with an increase in quality and popular appeal of movies when compared to an earlier period or to foreign productions. Put that to the credit of neoliberalism.
How to witness a drone strike? Who—or what—bears witness in the operations of targeted killings where the success of a mission appears as a few pixels on a screen? Can there be justice if there is no witness? How can we bring the other-than-human to testify as a subject granted with agency and knowledge? What happens to human responsibility when machines have taken control? Can nonhuman witnessing register forms of violence that are otherwise rendered invisible, such as algorithmic enclosure or anthropogenic climate change? These questions lead Michael Richardson to emphasize the role of the nonhuman in witnessing, and to highlight the relevance of this expanded conception of witnessing in the struggle for more just worlds. The “end of the world” he refers to in the book’s title has several meanings. The catastrophic crises in which we find ourselves—remote wars, technological hubris, and environmental devastation—are of a world-ending importance. Human witnessing is no longer up to the task for making sense, assigning responsibility, and seeking justice in the face of such challenges. As Richardson claims, “only through an embrace of nonhuman witnessing can we humans, if indeed we are still or ever were humans, reckon with the world-destroying crises of war, data, and ecology that now envelop us.” The end of the world is also a location: Michael Richardson writes from a perch at UNSW Sydney, where he co-directs the Media Futures Hub and Autonomous Media Lab. He opens his book by paying tribute to “the unceded sovereignty of the Bidjigal and Gadigal people of the Eora Nation” over the land that is now Sydney, and he draws inspiration from First Nations cosmogonies that grant rights and agency to nonhuman actors such as animals, plants, rocks, and rivers. “World-ending crises are all too familiar to First Nation people” who also teach us that humans and nonhumans can inhabit many different worlds and ecologies. The world that is ending before our eyes is a world where Man, as opposed to nonhumans, was “the unexamined subject of witnessing.” In its demise, we see the emergence of “a world of many worlds” composed of humans, nonhumans, and assemblages thereof.
In April 2015, the Institut Français in Hanoi held a photography exhibition, Reporters de Guerre (War Reporters), marking the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Curated by Patrick Chauvel, an award-winning photographer who had covered the war for France, the exhibition showcased the work of four North Vietnamese photographers (Đoàn Công Tính, Chu Chi Thành, Tràn Mai Nam, and Hùa Kiêm) whose documenting of the Vietnam War was often overshadowed by photographers from the Western press working from the South. The poster for the cultural event at L’Espace used an iconic image: a black-and-white picture of North Vietnamese soldiers climbing a rope against the spectacular backdrop of a waterfall, taken in 1970 along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Đoàn Công Tính, the photographer, had caught a moment of timeless beauty and strength, an image of mankind overcoming physical hindrances and material obstacles in the pursuit of a higher goal. However, a scandal erupted when Danish photographer Jørn Stjerneklar pointed out on his blog that this iconic image was doctored. He compared two versions, the recent print that appeared in the exhibition and the “original,” which was published in Tính’s 2001 book Khoảnh Khắc (Moments). Tính apologized profusely for “mistakenly” sending the photoshopped image, claiming that the original negative had been damaged and that he accidentally included a copy of the image with a photoshopped background in a CD to the exhibition’s organisers. But in a follow-up article on his blog, Stjerneklar pointed out that even the “original” had been retouched, as evidenced by the repeating pattern of the waterfall, and was likely a montage of another photograph which is displayed at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Stjerneklar’s story was picked up worldwide and ignited a lively debate around the presumed objectivity of photojournalism and the role of photography in propaganda.
The “flash of capital” refers to the way the underlying structure of a national economy “flashes” or reverberates through the films it produces, and how cinema critique can highlight the relations between culture and capitalism, film aesthetics and geopolitics, movie commentary and political discourse, at particular moments of their transformation. A flash is not a reflection or an image, and Eric Cazdyn does not subscribe to the reflection theory of classical Marxism that sees cultural productions as a mirror image of the underlying economic infrastructure. Karl Marx posited that the superstructure, which includes the state apparatus, forms of social consciousness, and dominant ideologies, is determined “in the last instance” by the “base” or substructure, which relates to the mode of production that evolves from feudalism to capitalism and then to communism. Transformations of the mode of production lead to changes in the superstructure. Hungarian philosopher and literary critic György Lukács applied this framework to all kinds of cultural productions, claiming that a true work of art must reflect the underlying patterns of economic contradictions in the society. Rather than Marx’s and Lukács’ reflection theory, Cazdyn’s “flash theory” is inspired by post-marxist cultural theorists Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson, and by the work of Japan scholars Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian (the two editors of the collection at Duke University Press in which the book was published). For Cazdyn, how we produce meaning and how we produce wealth are closely interrelated. Cultural productions such as films give access to the unconscious of a society: “What is unrepresentable in everyday discourse is flashed on the level of the aesthetic.” Films not only reflect and explain underlying contradictions but, more importantly, actively participate in the construction of economic and geopolitical transformations.
My Japanese alma mater, Keio University at Shonan Fujisawa, has a Faculty of Environment & Information. Next to it stands a Graduate School of Media & Governance. Putting two distant words together, like “environment” and “information” or “media” and governance”, creates new perspectives and innovative research questions while breaking boundaries between existing disciplines. Yuriko Furuhata uses the same approach in Climatic Media. What is climatic media? How did media become articulated with climate in the specific context of Japan? In what sense can we consider the climate, and atmospheric phenomena, as media? What new research questions arise when we put the two words “climate” and “media” together? Which disciplines are summoned, and how are they transformed by the combination of climate and media? How does climatic media relate to Watsuji Tetsurō’s concept of Fūdo, to take the title of his 1935 book translated as Climate and Culture? Can we use certain media to manage the climate, to predict and to control it? What is the genealogy of these technologies of atmospheric control, and can we trace them back to previous projects of territorial expansion and imperial hegemony? If we call “thermostatic desire” the desire to control both interior and exterior atmospheres, how does this desire “scale up” from air-conditioned rooms to smart buildings, district cooling systems, domed cities, geoengineering initiatives, orbital space colonies, and terraformed planets? In what sense can we say that air conditioning is people conditioning? These are some of the questions that Yuriko Furuhata raises in her book, which I found extremely stimulating. My review won’t provide a summary of the book’s chapters or an assessment of its contribution to the field of media studies, but will rather convey a personal journey made through Climatic Media and, indirectly, back to my formative years at Keio SFC.
“I can’t breathe!” These were the last words uttered by Eric Garner, a Black resident of Staten Island who, on July 17, 2014, was put in a deadly chokehold by an NYPD officer for allegedly selling “loosies” or single cigarettes on the street. Garner suffered from asthma, a condition that, according to epidemiological data, disproportionately affects African Americans. Garner’s last words were also those of Elijah McClain and George Floyd, two other Black men killed by police just a few years later. “I can’t breathe” has become a rallying cry for our times and is used as an expression of the asphyxiating atmosphere in which activists declare that Black Lives Matter. The unability to breathe can be understood as both a metaphor and material reality of racism, which constrains not just life choices and opportunities, but the environmental conditions of life itself. It draws our attention to breathing as a political act: the capacity to breathe, or its preclusion, defines a new form of biopolitics in which some lives are deemed worthy of inhaling fresh air and some aren’t. Reclaiming ownership of the means of respiration, literally and figuratively, may delineate a new kind of respiratory politics that recognizes breathing as an unalienable right. For Jean-Thomas Tremblay, an art critic and professor of environmental humanities, breathing is, more than ever, in the air. Of course, breathing is in the air. But it specifically is, now, in the Zeitgeist. It is a sign of the times that breathing’s intensity and its variations—submitting breathing subjects to chokehold or waterboarding, refraining from inhaling certain substances, filtering inhaled air through face masks, measuring one’s carbon dioxide emissions—now feature in our political imaginary as an expression of agency and control. For Jean-Thomas Tremblay, the crisis in breathing predates the climate urgency, the Covid-19 epidemic, or the BLM movement. He sees its emergence and intensification around the 1970s, and tracks its expression in marginal, underground, or minoritarian art productions that may have escaped the radar screen of art historians but that, more than mainstream creations or popular art, may help us to capture what is at stake in the current inability to breathe.
“Dada” exists in the Japanese language as a category outside the realm of aesthetics and art history. The word “dada”, as in the expression dada wo koneru, is used to describe selfish behavior that lacks sense. It is also an idiom for “spoiling.” A kid throwing a tantrum can be called “dada”, or a teenager’s prank, or an adult acting childish. A popular theory derives the expression from Dadaism, the avant-garde art movement born in Zürich in 1916, but real etymology and kanji characters actually connect it to the Japanese language. Perhaps the false etymology is not wrong after all. Dadaism always had a special affinity with Japan. In the German language as in Japanese, the term may have derived from baby talk or child’s speak. Tristan Tzara’s affirmation “Dada means nothing” echoes the teachings of Zen masters and the Japanese concept of mu, or nothingness. The Dada artistic movement entered Japan soon after its birth in Europe during the First World War: in 1923, Mavo, a Dada group founded by Japanese artists 
I do not want to brag, but I am in a league of my own when it comes to reading habits. I am not a professional reader, teacher, academic, or publisher, and yet I achieved to read 365 books in 2020—the year of the great lockdown. What started out as a silly gambit on January 1st—my “one-book-a-day” challenge—turned out to be a transformative experience. If “frequent readers” are said to read twelve to forty-five books a year, and “avid readers” read fifty or more books a year, I propose to create the category of “voracious reader” for those who read more than a hundred books per year,
Susan M. Squier believes drawings, cartoons, and comic strips should play a role in science and in medicine. Not only in the waiting room of the medical doctor or during the pauses scientists take from work, but straight into the curriculum of science students and in the prescriptions given to ailing patients. She even has a word for it: graphic medicine, or the application of the cartoonist’s art to problems of health and disease. Her point is not only that laughing or smiling while reading a comic book may have beneficial effects on the patient’s morale and health. Works of graphic medicine can enable greater understanding of medical procedures, and can even generate new research questions and clinical approaches. Cartoons can help treat cancer; they might even contribute to cancer research. Pretending otherwise is to adhere to a reductionist view of science that excludes some people, especially women and the artistically inclined, from the laboratory. In order to make science more inclusive, scientists should espouse “explanatory pluralism” and remain open to nonverbal forms of communication, including drawings and pictures. Comics and cartoons are a legitimate source of knowledge production and information sharing, allowing for an embodied and personal experience to be made social. They are providing new ways to look at things, enabling new modes of intervention, and putting research content in visual form. In comics, body posture and gesture occupy a position of primacy over text, and graphic medicine therefore facilitates an encounter with the whole patient instead of focusing on abstract parameters such as illness or diagnosis. Studies are already suggesting that medical students taught to make their own comics become more empathetic caregivers as doctors. Health-care workers, patients, family members, and caregivers should be encouraged to create their own comics and to circulate them as a form of people-centered mode of knowledge creation.
The Duke Reader 