All That Was not Her

This beautiful, smart, and unique book cuts into ethnography and race in powerful and necessary ways, stepping off the plane of current critical race theory into risky, generative thinking and writing. An intimate, frank account of a situation and relationship beyond the convenient stability of an understanding or meaning, All That Was Not Her is an absolutely compelling read. -- Kathleen Stewart, coauthor of * The Hundreds * All That Was Not Her is an exceptionally compelling reflection on the long-term complicated relationship through time between an anthropologist and a key interlocutor. Todd Meyers remarkably gets at the fraught, complex, and entangled forms of connection and difference, offering a new understanding of the interpersonal, ethical, and epistemological dimensions of work undertaken in contemporary medical and sociocultural anthropology. This is an altogether necessary book for these times. -- Robert Desjarlais, author of * The Blind Man: A Phantasmography * Meyers's conscience-driven reflections regarding the utility of his work, the shifting parameters of the researcher-interlocutor relationship, and the special challenges of communicating across gaps of class and race, form the heart of the book. He makes academic writing his leaping-off point for a deeply thoughtful, lyrically expressed ethical and philosophical enquiry. This is a book that can be slotted into many non-fiction categories, but don't be put off: it is a unique work of literature. -- Ian McGillis * Montreal Gazette * Meyers' writing is compelling for its beauty and for the honesty of his descriptions. More than anything, I took from this its head-on confrontation with the uneasiness inherent in the relationship between the ethnographer and their subject that should be familiar to anyone with experience of doing ethnographic fieldwork. -- Esca van Blarikom * Sociology of Health & Illness * The book is not about truth but about swimming in ambiguity. It is not even about the cliche conflict between 'truth' and 'accuracy,' as even these terms begin to disintegrate in the text. Meyers asks us to sit with discomfort and dwell in the fraught nature of ethnography. In this sense, the book is not quite an ethnographic portrait. It is rather an ethnography of ethnography itself-and where ethnography starts to break down. -- Emily Lim Rogers * American Ethnologist *