Everyday attentiveness: understanding diabetes in Vietnam through literary displacement

Professor Tine Gammeltoft has contributed to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute with the article 'Everyday attentiveness: understanding diabetes in Vietnam through literary displacement'.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern Vietnam, the article aims to depict the lifeworlds in which diabetes attentiveness unfolds.

World-wide, diabetes is taking on epidemic proportions. This is a debilitating disease that damages and destroys bodily systems unless blood sugar levels are kept close to normal, and patients are therefore urged to practise attentive self-management.

Seeking to capture the inchoate ways in which diabetes alters everyday lives, the article develops literary displacement as an experimental mode of writing-cum-inquiry that combines standard ethnography with ethnographic fiction.

Gammeltoft takes diabetes in Vietnam as a case to show how literary displacement can contribute to cultivating ethnographic as well as analytical sensibilities, and suggests that literary

The article is published in Volume 28, Issue 2 of the Journal of the Anthropological Institute.

Read the article (open access): Everyday attentiveness: understanding diabetes in Vietnam through literary displacement