Sarah Van Hoy, PhD, LAc,

I am (or once was) an anthropologist, acupuncturist, herbalist, psychotherapist, educator, and championess of creative  beings.  In my primary role on the faculty at Goddard College, I am committed to nourishing a kind of radical learning that helps to reconnect our sensual and intellectual lives. To that end, I helped to design the first graduate concentration in Embodiment Studies, which I’m rather excited about.

I am the daughter, niece, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of herbalists, farmers, factory workers, union organizers and hippy artists.  My earliest memories are of accordion music, talking to trees, spying on faeries, watching my mother collect nettles, and writing poetry on the sides of a barn. 

As a scholar, clinician, and educator I have always been curious about the way we make meaning with, from, and about our bodies and bodily experiences — particularly those experiences that feel, in some way, outside of the bounds of culturally prescribed  'normal'.  I am interested in technologies of the self and the social construction of diagnoses -- projects where we define what it means to be well or ill and where we experience, in our bodies, the personal and political implications of those definitions.

In the early 1990s, I began to explore these questions through a lens of integrative mental health — a term which did not quite exist yet, but by which I meant “attending to complexities at the intersections of body/psyche/culture/world” and "resisting the oppressive nature of psychiatry" and a bunch of other things.  I thought maybe we could bring together multiple alternative languages, practices, and perspectives on these complexities.  To that end, I became interested in various kinds of medicines, including herbal medicines and acupuncture, and various psychotherapeutic dialects.  I also became interested in critiques of the regimes and apparatuses of 'health' - in particular of the ways that power produces subjects who desire their own subjection and/or foists ableist narratives on other people. 

Eventually, in 1997, I landed in a doctoral program in medical anthropology where I explored the ways medical knowledge is produced — and reproduced — and the way this knowledge creates, in turn, subjects and subjectivities. My fieldwork in Classical Chinese Medicine had me studying technologies of diagnosis, invented traditions, therapeutic self-fashioning, medical hermeneutics, and the poetics of the body. This last piece, which continues to give me the most joy, was a little bit outside of proper anthropological reasoning when I began writing my dissertation in 2002. Now, after 15 more years, I am reclaiming those chapters and rewriting them in collaboration with other poets, healers, and teachers.

I live on a piece of land with large gardens, a pond full of frogs, two children who run fast, two dogs that bark, a cat that worries the mice, and two rabbits that make poop for the gardens. I spend the summer growing children and plants and making sure I have enough wood for the winter.  I spend the winter making sure the fire doesn’t go out.  Sometimes I partake in wild, communal rituals of art making.