Strange Distance: Towards an Anthropology of Interior Dialogue

The capacity for a complex inner life-encompassing inner speech, imaginative reverie, and unarticulated moods-is an essential feature of living with illness and a principal means through which people interpret, understand, and manage their condition. Nevertheless, anthropology lacks a generally accepted theory or methodological framework for understanding how interiority relates to people's public actions and expressions. Moreover, as conventional social-scientific methods are often too static to understand the fluidity of perception among people living with illness or bodily instability, I argue we need to develop new, practical approaches to knowing. By placing the problem of interiority directly into the field and turning it into an ethnographic, practice-based question to be addressed through fieldwork in collaboration with informants, this article works alongside women living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda with the aim of capturing the unvoiced but sometimes radical changes in being, belief, and perception that accompany terminal illness. © 2011 by the American Anthropological Association.