Jason J. Price
Social Science Research Council
Nearly four years ago, our dear friend and colleague, Sam Dubal, set off to hike the Mother Mountain Loop at the northwest corner of Mount Rainier National Park, and never returned.
He had moved to Seattle in the summer of 2020 after accepting an assistant professor of anthropology position at the University of Washington, where he was slated to play a key role in their Medical Anthropology and Global Health Program.
Enticed by the challenge and calm which came from hiking Cascadia—a fresh passion he experienced as a balm for the strains of the Covid-19 lockdown—Sam aimed to squeeze in one last solo trip before the end of the season. But the weather turned. And when he failed to reach out to family the following day, and his car was found unattended at the trailhead, a search operation commenced, which ultimately turned up nothing, save for his water bottle. It was an excruciating time, as family and friends faced the prospect that someone so vital and otherworldly may no longer be with us.
At 33, Sam was an extraordinarily promising young physician-scholar, who first gained some notoriety with the blogpost, “Being Ethical in an Unethical World: A Desperate Plea for Radical Political Medicine” (2012), which, in Sam’s words, represented “the beginning of my theoretical and practical renunciation of the humanitarian approach of Paul Farmer.” At the time, Farmer—who passed away in 2022—was enormously influential, his research and work with Partners In Health effectively providing a generation of socially concerned physicians with a road map for viable global health interventions. As a first-year medical student at Harvard in 2008, Sam was eager to take Farmer’s “Introduction to Social Medicine” course (co-taught with future World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim); but he soon became disenchanted. Having studied anthropology with James Ferguson as an undergraduate, Sam was alert to (and wary of) the unintended consequences of the depoliticization he saw at the root of humanitarian medicine. He did not want to be “in service” of the poor and marginalized in spite of history, but “in solidarity” with the brave figures reshaping it. As a result, he shifted his allegiance to the spirit and memory of the late Canadian thoracic surgeon and advocate for socialized medicine Dr. Norman Bethune, whom he saw as heralding “a more radical and explicitly politicized medicine yet-to-come,” and subsequently suspended his training at Harvard to enroll in the joint UC Berkeley/UCSF PhD program in Medical Anthropology. There, he found the time, resources, and support necessary to cultivate and refine his vision for a radical political medicine.
In line with Bethune’s commitments to life “on the frontlines,” Sam chose to conduct dissertation fieldwork in Uganda among former Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels enmeshed in a process of reintegrating into civil society. Eschewing vociferous condemnations and abject disavowals of an organization notorious for committing appalling “crimes against humanity,” Sam conferred his exquisite ethnographic attention onto what he would argue were “new forms of ethical life that arose in the course of the rebellion—forms of life beyond humanity” (2018: 5). In doing so, he aimed to salvage a potent and complex lifeway under erasure, whose value, he sensed, possessed the promise of an alternative form of healing (however counterintuitively).
Whether or not what he found among former LRA rebels was predetermined was a debatable topic among some friends and colleagues (myself included); less debatable, however, was the provocative force of his suggestion that vital forms of ethical life could arise in scenes of rebellion that possess capabilities to combat the horrors of everyday violence perpetrated by the structures and logics of white liberal humanity.
Buoyed by the ethical and political promise of rebel kinship he theorized while writing up at Berkeley/UCSF, Sam returned to Harvard, completed medical school, and matched with Harbor-UCLA’s trauma surgery residency, somehow making the time to convert his dissertation into the monograph, Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army (2018), which this forum explores in his loving memory.
Arriving at Harbor-UCLA, Sam’s plan was to follow Bethune’s example in committing to “an explicitly leftist political medicine that first and foremost abandons liberal humanity as an ethics of medicine,” but two things happened that made him reconsider continuing on this path as a trauma surgeon: first, on his way home from a grueling 28-hour shift, Sam fell asleep at the wheel, waking up to sparks flying outside the window of his vehicle as it screeched to a halt against a roadside divider; second, after working with colleagues to miraculously save the life of a young man who had arrived at the hospital riddled with gunshot wounds, he was despondent to discover the same man return, dead-on-arrival, just weeks later.
What kind of politics was possible in a life so absorbed by the operating theater? Sam seemed to be asking. What good is there in devoting so much of one’s life to treating downstream violence when the upstream causes of these deathworlds could so swiftly undo such work?
After a brief period of reflection, Sam decided to withdraw from the trauma surgery residency at the end of his first year and return to Berkeley, where he took up a position as Visiting Scholar at the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine. Back near friends and family, he got a few articles out, mapped a second project, immersed himself in gardening, and applied for anthropology jobs. Instead of a scholar-physician, Sam would become a physician-scholar, offering him “time and space to craft alternative imaginaries” removed from the realm of “biological-individualizing discourse” and “acute biomedical emergency” (2018: 225). He received a number of job offers, but none more promising than in the Medical Anthropology and Global Health Program at UW.
Before leaving for Seattle, Sam visited me in Berkeley carrying three books: Jodi Dean’s Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (2019) and Aimé Césaire’s Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès (2020) for me, and Silly Jokes for Silly Kids (2016) for my four-year-old daughter. The jokes were delightfully terrible (so much better than his standup routine, I teased). He shrugged and smiled and said I needn’t worry, as he had lined up a new hobby. “I found this amazing old guidebook for hiking the Pacific Northwest!” he said enthusiastically. “I’m going to hit some trails on the way up!” he followed. I noted the pull of the lum—”the space where humans are not supposed to live”—that figured so centrally in his ethnography. He nodded, and encouraged me to join him when I could. I hoped to, but reminded him we’d probably next meet over Zoom, for a virtual session about his book at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting. He remembered, but appeared much more interested in discussing his anthropology of soccer syllabus, the first class he was slated to teach in the fall. I was impressed with the labor-based grading system he was instituting, and told him so, before remembering to grab the pint of vegan ice cream I had gotten him as a going away gift. He received it, as ever, with a mix of sincere shock and deep gratitude. We hugged and said our goodbyes. He waved as he got into his car. “Goodbye Uncle Sam!!” my daughter shouted as he pulled away. And just like that, he was gone.
A few days after the search and rescue operation was called off, I reached out to the AAA regarding the author interview session we had planned about Against Humanity. The idea of turning the session into a memorial space had come up. In the midst of the lockdown, collective mourning had become a challenge. I sent out an email to those who could speak to Sam’s work and character, inviting them (and others) to use the slot to reflect on Sam’s influence within the context of his book. The entries that follow are those submissions, written in the immediate wake of Sam’s disappearance, and only minimally revised. They engage both his life and his book and some of the dimensions of our respective relationships with him that are difficult to disentangle from any sort of scholarly engagement.
Some time later, Sam’s UCSF adviser, Vincanne Adams, suggested these reflections would do well to exist in the world. So she, Melina Salvador, Michael D’Arcy, and I (who knew him well during his grad school days at Berkeley/UCSF) came together to edit the collection. For those who knew Sam, we hope it is comforting. For those who did not, we hope it may serve as an invitation to the kind of kinship in discomfort that Sam believed was necessary as a condition for collective healing.
One of the questions I hoped to ask Sam in the session we never got to have was one that Françoise Vergès asks Aimé Césaire in the volume he gifted me before he left for Seattle: “In your theatrical work, the figure of the rebel, the Promethean figure who defies time and humankind, appears frequently. Do you see yourself in this figure?”
At the time, I didn’t know how Sam would answer. Upon reflection, I think he would say that his work was meant to encourage us all to see ourselves in that figure; and in so doing, to open up the possibility of a vital and redemptive experience of rebel kinship—that form of life that has the power to create, as Césaire argued, “another world, another sun, another conception of life.”
Works Cited
Aimé Césaire. 2020 [2005]. Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès. Medford, MA: Polity Press.
Dubal, Sam. 2012. “Being Ethical in an Unethical World: A Desperate Plea for Radical Political Medicine,” https://samdubal.blogspot.com/. Accessed 30 June 2024.
Dubal, Sam. 2018. Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Oakland: University of California Press.