"Naming the Cause: A Cultural Critique of the Alzheimer's State" by Alan Walker Drew

Alan Walker Drew

Deposited 1998

Abstract
From 20 months of fieldwork involving all aspects of this disease as it exists in contemporary urban and suburban Miami I have come to the conclusion that a certain clash between social science, social work and medical science is responsible for the lack of any significant progress towards a cure. I frame this clash, which is the narrative subject of my ethnography and analysis, in terms of particular hegemonic cultural orientations toward causality. Chapter one introduces various cultural and historical perspectives of particular persons with the disease and those who care for them via ethnographic interviews and descriptions. Chapter two outlines the epistemology of Walter Benjamin and the position of Georges Bataille regarding language in a critical weave with ethnographic analyses. In chapter three strong cultural assumptions within natural science regarding the human body and the physical nature of this disease are analyzed and challenged by way of comparison and contrast to the work of anti-Platonist missionary Maurice Leenhardt. Chapter four takes a critically informed approach to areas within the history of science which pertain to the long-standing clash between social theory/praxis and medical science. Chapter five addresses some of the shortcomings of phenomenology in understanding the experiences of those with this disease. Chapter six is more science-critical, involving issues of microscopy, perception and photographic representation of the nervous system. Chapter seven addresses the pathology of this disease and the clash surrounding its "cause" in terms of a critique of the disease as a language disorder (aphasia). Chapter eight addresses the dilemmas of a woman caregiver with a violent and obsessive husband in terms of possession and in terms of her relation to the state. Chapter nine addresses the role of state power in building subjectivity amongst those who care or persons with this disease and amongst those who diagnose, treat and construct scientific research on it. Chapter ten concerns the role of culturally specific linguistic theory in ethnographic analysis and how this theory informs and fails to inform my critique of this disease as an aphasia. In chapters eleven and twelve European philosophical and ethnographic analysis is used in combination with comparative African ethnological/philosophical work to offer a solution to the problems which the clash of social theory and praxis with medical science has brought about.