UCIS Central Calendar

What does it mean to solve a city through bodies? This paper draws from ongoing ethnographic research in a municipal public hospital trauma ward in Mumbai. The talk centers on a key figure in this context, the “Unknown” patient — this is the term for a patient who arrives to the ward without clear identity. Unknown patients underscore the challenge of trying to survive without kin. As mysteries of personhood get worked out alongside resuscitation, surgery, and intensive care, the ward's ethics and actions cut through different genres of sociality, including state bureaucracy, hospital emergency drama, detective mystery, and pulp crime. Problems of the city become problems for medicine and law to solve together. Knowing and feeling noir urbanism meshes with knowing and feeling bodily injury and repair. Ultimately, this raises broader questions about how to understand bodies and cities in tandem.