Laura A. Meek Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Canada (E-mail: laura.meek@ubc.ca) Abigail H. Neely Department of Geography, Dartmouth College (E-mail: Abigail.H.Neely@Dartmouth.edu) Beyond the Limits: Medicine, Healing, and Medical Anthropology This collection contemplates that which resides at the limits of the anthropology of health and medicine. By “limit,” we mean that “outside which there is nothing to be found” and “inside of which everything is to be found” (de la Cadena 2015: 14, citing Ranajit Guha 2002: 7). Our work takes place within many kinds of limits: epistemological frameworks, ethical and moral commit- ments, disciplinary norms, ontological certainties, political economies, writing conventions, and the ends of life, to name a few. In this collection of essays and accompanying conversations, we consider how medicine and health are performed in ways that appear beyond such limits—as im- possible, unreal, unscientifc, irresponsible, unthinkable, nonacademic, non-replicable, fctitious, unethical, unruly, or untrue—but which, nonetheless, are. In so doing, this collection moves to- ward the speculative to examine the potential it holds for displacing our sedimented ways of thinking and producing knowledge in and about medicine, health, and healing. Our speculative orientation draws on and augments broader anthropological interventions that experiment with doing, thinking, and writing otherwise. 1,2 This collection also attends to how multiplicity takes shape by following and tracing rela- tions, tensions, convergences, and divergences between worlds of health and healing. We maintain that recognizing such multiplicity requires that we create conditions for tellability that “push up against familiar understandings of ‘reality’ and take us beyond a division of the world into ratio- nal/irrational, real/imagined, and either/or” (Mittermaier 2011: 29). The essays in this collection draw on disqualifed types of knowledge and minor practices (including incantations, oracles, and witchcraft, care and gentleness, and fugitive science) and “play them out against the regimes of knowledge on whose terms we have come to understand them as anomalous, irrational, unrealis- tic, or simply implausible” (Palmie 2002: 20, see also Klima 2019; McLean 2017). Such interventions have been important for thinking more capaciously about medicine, health, and healing, yet they do little, directly, to unsettle medical anthropology itself—to help us rethink how we tell stories that are legible to the subdiscipline and the institutions in which we are em- ployed. To do that work—of storying otherwise—our collection takes the form of a conversation, quite literally. This conversation took place among all the authors as we explored the various lim- its that shape our feldwork and writing. In producing this collection, one of the trickiest limits we came up against is that of the conventional journal article, with its norms of discrete vignette fol- lowed by separate analysis. In this convention—and there are some examples of this form among our essays—authors build on the work of others through citational practices. As critical recent interventions by groups like #CiteBlackWomen (Cite Black Women Collective 2022) and The MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Vol. 00, Issue 0, pp. 1–4, ISSN 0745-5194, online ISSN 1548- 1387. © 2023 The Authors. Medical Anthropology Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/maq.12745 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1