LICENTIA COGITATIONIS

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Experimental: a spider’s story

Part 1 "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun...," writes Clifford Geertz, Father of Interpretive and Symbolic Anthropology. Geertz was adapting from Max Weber, emphasizing that culture isn’t something external to us; it’s the meaning-making structures humans create (language, rituals, symbols, institutions) and then live within. The “webs of significance” metaphor suggests that we are both the makers of culture and constrained by it. Geertz’s “webs of significance” show that meaning is never fixed but constructed, contingent, and unstable . These webs overlap, clash, and shift with context, making truth a matter of discourse and power rather than universal essence. In this sense, culture is not a stable structure but a fluid play of interpretations. In this story, the webs become more literal. They are symbolic of competing systems of meaning. The spider spins its own “web of significance,” and neither is inherently truer than the other; i...

Under the Covers: Unpacking Sex Ed

Talking Sex with Noe and Clay There are the three questions we chose for our first Sex Talk on InstaLive or somewhere. We are both health educators, who primarily teach about sexuality. Each question is frame as academic or accessible; so that nuances and particularities can be discussed alongside universal commons. The goal is to bridge the gap between what people are thinking and discussing among themselves and their peers, and what has been built by scholarship. ☭ All we want is a cutsie revolution ☭ HIV & Stigma How can we teach about HIV in a way that breaks down stigma, instead of making it seem more shameful or different than other STIs? Answer: For me, the distinction itself distracts from the primary points I want people to take away from lesson on HIV. Currently, I talk about HIV in the context of other STIs, because that is the lesson. I typically break them down into 3 categories: vaccine preventable, cureable, and treatable- which is Hepatitis a...

Surveillance Series VI: Alius mundus and the Abolition of Surveillance

Public health has long been shackled to surveillance, counting, monitoring, and extraction of data from communities who rarely see justice in return. We are told that without surveillance, there can be no health. But what if the opposite is true? A world without epidemiological surveillance would not be ignorant of health; it would be deeply attentive to suffering. But instead of tracking illness to control populations, it would mobilize care to eliminate the conditions that make people sick in the first place. The measure of public health would not be numbers on a dashboard but whether communities live with dignity, security, and joy. “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Anansi This quote written by my favorite anthropologist, the late David Graeber, in his book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucrac y exemplifies how I think about and move...

Surveillance V: Assembling the Eyes

The Surveillance System I'm listing the basic data collection tools used by local and state health departments- which report to CDC- first. Then I'll discuss how the epistemophilia of this assembling inquisition machine is used. Here are the primary sources of information on PLHIV in the US that are collected and reported to CDC; and reused in other areas, the extend of which is unknown . The Medical Monitoring Project collects data on, and provides information about the behaviors, clinical outcomes, quality of care, and barriers to care and viral suppression among people with diagnosed HIV in the United States. Currently, 23 project areas (16 state health departments, 6 local health departments, and the Puerto Rico Department of Health) conduct MMP. eHARS stands for Enhanced HIV/AIDS reporting system. It is the system used for HIV surveillance. eHARS collects data on all people living with HIV (PLWH) at the local and state level; and shares it ...

My Experience with Limpieza de cuyada in the Andes

Embodied Diagnostics and the Limits of Participant Observation By sharing this story, I want to consider the boundaries that anthropologists set, or have set, for themselves when conducting fieldwork. I'm talking about operations that move us beyond the limits of our discomfort: the ethically ambiguous, illegal & illicit, dangerous, or simply intersecting with an experience-area you don't want to go into. How do we say "this is okay for you, but not for me" without having informants lose faith in us? It's a part of fieldwork to be uncomfortable, and overcoming that discomfort is a sign that you're becoming more aware of yourself in relation to the community about whom you are writing. I remember discussing this in my Anthropological Fieldwork Methods and Research Design course, and arguing an "ends justifies the means" approach to participant observation that would have anyone explore anything they wanted to. This is largely, still my perspecti...

Surveillance IV: Novus ordo seclorum

A Life Surveilled by: A Part of the Cluster It is us now soon it will be you, and then the world entire. If my body is no longer mine, if the code that shapes me is seized, observed, controlled I vanish. Not shadow, not echo, not life nothing. A hollow absence, a void where self once clung, a cog grinding without purpose, a life drained of meaning, a silence that swallows even the memory of my name. Molecular HIV surveillance renders intimate biology legible to power, translating private viral histories into instruments of population control. The body is no longer sovereign; it is subsumed into circuits of governance, where consent is irrelevant and unfreedom is embedded in the very architecture of knowledge. By extracting genetic sequences from within the body, molecular HIV surveillance makes the intimate biology of infection- sex, sharing syringes, tattooing, breastfeeding, giving birth (the expressions of love, art, life itself )- legible to the state. The genome b...

Surveillance III: Corpus mysticum

Surveilling the Unseen Body Biopolitics, Capital, and The Surveillance System I'm taking a detour to describe the way I see all of this. Molecular HIV Surveillance (MHS) and Cluster Detection and Response (CDR) are not simply tools of public health, but systems of disciplinary control,entangled in state power, capitalist interest, and ideological domination. From data collection to analysis, reporting and visualization, the entire system functions not neutrally, but as a technology of governance targeting those already socially marked: queer folks, Black and Brown bodies, trans people, sex workers, the HIV+ and HIV-risk labeled-people, for having lives that deviate from the normative scripts of capitalist biopolitics. Biopolitics is term used to describe how modern states exercise power not just over individuals, (a sovereign power) but over populations, by managing life itself, health, reproduction, risk, death. In this way populations beco...

The Problem with Categories: Towards A Relational Epidemiology

Beyond Identity Epidemiologists and biostaticians need to think about they produce knowledge, not just how they describe it. If we stripped away traditional identity categories like race, gender, and age, epidemiology and biostatistics would look profoundly different. And, I think that's a good thing. It is time for us to look at shared experiences, (or exposures), as inclusion criterion and the define our populations, stratifications and categories, in ways that acknowledge real cultural differences and contextuality; not just what the government puts on your driver's license. The imposition of taxonomies predisposed identities, without consideration for the subjectivities of the individuals for whom the categories is set to represent. These representational strategies are then used to make generalizing statements, or snap shots, about people whose experiences are not embedded in the research. I'll give an example, then talk about the age-old Structure/Agency debate, and...