Abstract

This talk brings together research piglets in an experimental setting and preterm infants in intensive care in Denmark to investigate questions about nearness. In one setting, research piglets become near human as experimental subjects. In the other setting, infants become near human due to their premature birth and precarity. I attend to how nearness is not only a question of coming close, but of maintaining difference. I show how in both the experimental and the clinical setting caregivers substitute themselves to the neonate in question (human or animal), compensating for its inabilities, imagining its futures, and—through this physical and emotional proximity—taking responsibility for that life. These affective and intimate practices of substitution involve distance, selection, borders, and movements. I end the talk by drawing connections to Denmark’s strict migration policies and discussing nearness as a space for investigating valuations of life. I suggest that as much as the ‘anthropology of nearness’ asks us to consider what it takes to be near, it also prompts us to discuss what is not allowed to enter the category of the near in the empirical worlds we investigate and in the analytical frameworks we employ. 
 

Bio

Mette N. Svendsen is Professor of medical anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has an extensive publication record in leading international journals of cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies. She has pioneered several team-based, multisited, multispecies, and interdisciplinary research projects, generating surprising insights about how human lives and societies are shaped alongside animals. She is the author of Near Human: Border Zones of Life, Species, and Belonging published by Rutgers University Press (2022).