Annemarie Mol

Annemarie Mol is a Dutch ethnographer and philosopher, born on 13 September 1958, who is Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam. Her early work explored the performativity of health care practices, arguing that medical realities are generated within particular practices and that, because practices differ from one another, the realities they generate differ too. She expressed this through the idea that the body is multiple, more than one but also less than many, since the different versions of a body produced across different health care practices still overlap, and she developed the related concept of ontological politics, the argument that because realities vary across practices they are not simply given but can be contested and changed.