Many thanks, Judy, for writing, in part:
>I _think_ everyone participating in this conversation about genre & genesis
>etc. would agree that . . . there's much to be gained from tracing the
>genesis of a text through identifiable activity networks.
>
>But I wouldn't want the emphasis on all the messiness of interactions with
>tools to distract me from noticing that, despite the indeterminateness of
>the future, more poor women are dying of AIDS than are any other group and
>they have the most inadequate medical care. How can issues like that not be
>made salient in a theory of social change? And these are issues that can be
>made salient in written and spoken texts, as medical anthropologists have shown.
>
>I see the focus on written & spoken texts to be necessary but insufficient
>for a rich analysis of cultural innovations.
I agree wholeheartedly, and I would appreciate any citation(s) you may have
on medical anthropologists making salient issues of women's health and
poverty, through written and spoken texts.
The ways people with specialized expertise (here, medical anthropologists
and, I assume, epidemiologists) (re)(co)construct disease and poverty and
gender in their professional activity--and the ways their human objects
(re)(co)act as subjects to organize political action--and the
contradictions and changes that may therefore result--all are certainly of
great salience and interest from CHAT perspectives.
David R. Russell
English Department
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
USA (515) 294-4724,fax 294-6814
drrussel who-is-at iastate.edu