Revolution as a care plan: Ethnography, nursing and somatic solidarity in Honduras

While diagnosis is not within the biomedical scope of a nurse's work, assessment—an inherently ethnographic exercise—is. In Honduras, as in the United States, nurses' proximity with patients, in terms of both time spent at the bedside and shared class identification (embodied as habitus), mean that nurses are often more effective than physicians in assessment and healing. Following the 2009 coup that brought a violently repressive regime to power in Honduras, subjectivation as citizen healers brought many nurses to assess patient health as a function of neoliberal and political violence. This assessment framed radical struggle that required nurses to block political violence with their own bodies as being a necessary part of patient care. Similarly, as ethnographer, I came to share with nurses and other Hondurans certain violent processes of subjectivation (albeit from a privileged subject position) that strengthened my solidarity with them as well as my deeply embodied investment in their care plan of organizing for radical social change. This paper examines the politicizing impact of the 2009 coup on Honduran auxiliary and professional nurses and the ways in which nurse assessment and ethnographic analysis can overlap and combine in somatic and political solidarity with patients and others resisting state and political violence through their bodies.