Abandonments, Solidarities and Logics of Care: Hospitals as Sites of Sectarian Conflict in Gilgit-Baltistan.

Using data collected over nearly three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of northern Pakistan, my paper explores hospital spaces, clinical services and treatment encounters as conduits for the expression and propagation of conflictive Shia-Sunni sectarianism. Where my prior research has investigated the political etiologies (Hamdy in Am Ethnol 35(4):553-569, 2008) associated with Gilgiti women's experiences of childbirth during 'tensions', as Shia-Sunni hostilities are locally known, this paper focuses on healthcare providers' professional and personal navigations of an episode of conflict whose epicentre was at the District Headquarter Hospital, Gilgit-Baltistan's foremost government hospital. Through critical evaluation of the impacts of Shia-Sunni tensions on the social, administrative and clinical practices and consequences of medicine, my paper analyses the complex ways that clinics in crisis serve as zones of contact (Pratt in Profession 91:33-40, 1991) and abandonment (Biehl in Soc Text 68(19):131-149, 2001; Subjectivity: ethnographic investigations, 2007), in which neglect and harm are directed along lines of sectarian affiliation to produce vulnerability, spectacular violence and death for healthcare providers and patients.