Abstract
This paper establishes a framework for the reading of an ecological identity by focusing on the author’s sabbatical experience working as a medical student with patients at Anandgram – the Village of Joy – in 1991. Anandgram is a leprosy hospital and rehabilitation center situated on the outskirts of Pune, India. It is home to a unique community of outcasts ravaged by the disease. Despite overwhelming odds, these people have overcome the constraints of a singular identity – that of the leper – and reclaimed a productive future for themselves. The ways that Anandgram’s residents have forged new kinds of existence have far-reaching implications for the built environment through their impact on identity, technology, ecology, culture, materiality, and the production of spaces. With this in mind, the aim is to present a portrait of the leprous body not as a machine but as an “ecological being,” a dynamic model of human anatomy that is in continual flux and deeply embedded with the environment.
Notes
1 “Leprosy,” by Chris Casaba (2014). Available online: http://allpoetry.com/poem/10981685-Leprosy-by-Kalesa/.
2 Rachel Armstrong, “An Unexpected Guest,” in More Women Travel: Adventures and Advice from More than 60 Countries, a Rough Guide Special, ed. Natania Jansz and Miranda Davies (London: Rough Guides, 1995), 310–318.
3 “Dropped foot” is a medical term for nerve or muscle damage that causes people to scrape the front of the foot on the ground.
4 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm, 2003); Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Alresford: Zero, 2011).
5 Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
6 S. Kauffman, “Evolving by Magic,” Arup Thoughts (May 17, 2012). Available online: http://thoughts.arup.com/post/details/200/evolving-by-magic (accessed August 21, 2015).
7 L. Hooper, L. Gorgon, and J. Gordon, “Commensal Host–Bacterial Relationships in the Gut,” Science 292, no. 5519 (May 11, 2001): 1115–1118.
8 R. Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New York: Broadway, 2011).
9 G. Jones, The Universe of Things (Seattle, WA: Aqueduct, 2010).