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ABSTRACT
Urban hospitals constitute an example of what is arguably the most visible site in anthropology these days-the border zone. Negotiating health care requires trafficking in tricky spaces where patients and their families must pay vigilant attention about when to submit, when to resist, and how to collaborate. Drawing from ethnographic research carried out over the past nine years among African American families who have children with severe illnesses and disabilities, I examine how children's popular culture operates in the fraught borderland that constitutes the urban clinic. Global icons like a Disneyfied Pocahantas can function as a lingua franca, offering a language of publicly available symbols on which families, health professionals, and children can draw to create a shared imaginative space across race and class divides and across the sometimes even more radical divide between sufferer and healer. [Keywords: health care, cultural icons, narrative, child identity, modes of communication]
THE FIRST time I met Pocahontas in a hospital was in the mid-1990s. Of course, as a U.S. citizen, I had known her since childhood. But I had forgotten all about her until she appeared, quite unexpectedly, in hospitals in Chicago and Los Angeles where I was carrying out research. She looked very different than I remembered. Older, and less, well, historical. She had been dusted off, Disneyfied, transformed into a gorgeous teenage beauty with a head of the most magnificent black hair and a body as enviably proportioned as Barbie. She could sing too. And it was Disney who sent her to the clinic. For not only was she a larger-than-life figure in a popular animated movie, she was packaged into craft sets, costumes, dolls, and an array of other cultural artifacts that began to find their way into all sorts of children's places-including children's hospitals. She traveled internationally as well. I saw her once, resplendently arrayed, hair flowing, on a large poster board in a duty free shop at the Copenhagen airport. Internet chat rooms carried on worldwide conversations about her adventures. Pocahontas had gone global.
This apparently frivolous example of the circulation of global goods has special and, indeed, profound significance in the context of health care, as I have gradually come to realize. Drawing from ethnographic research carried out over the...