In The Body Multiple, Annemarie Mol presents a juxtaposition of two texts. The first being an ethnography of disease and the second being a reflection on relevant literature in a variety of fields including medical anthropology, sociology, philosophy, science and technology studies, feminist theory and political theory. Mol argues for a move away from epistemology in which a physical object is forever waiting to be represented in a way that is aligned with an absolute reality. The problem with this approach is that all that is known about the object is a variety of interpretations and the object remains untouched. Mol attempts to overcome this and uncover “disease” itself by focusing on the way in which it is enacted in various practices. …show more content…
Moving between the outpatient clinic, operation theater, department of pathology and hematology lab, she found that what “atherosclerosis” meant differed from one situation to the next. The conclusion that is drawn from this is that because it is being enacted as something different from practice to practice, the disease multiplies. The manifoldness of an object such as a disease does not imply that it is fragmented however, because there are not plural objects. Mol points out that there is enough coherence between the different enactments of an object that they somehow hold together. An object enacted is “more than one—but less than many” (55). After all, people are able to communicate about many different versions of an object, or disease, as if it is the same …show more content…
It is not possible to make observations without creating interference and manipulating the object. Reality, in other words, is not simply waiting there passively to be observed or revealed. Because the reality of an object is not a given but is, instead, constantly enacted through practice, it is inevitably enacted differently in different places and by different actors. Thus, the ontology of atherosclerosis that is uncovered in this study is situated in “hospital Z,” it doesn’t necessarily apply everywhere. From this perspective, the scientific processes and philosophical attempts to uncover a universal truth are unrealistic and unhelpful in figuring out how to continue living on a day-to-day