ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that people think of noncompliance/adherence first and foremost as divergence that, like desire lines, registers the preferences, goals, and means of health care participants in particular contexts. It offers a series of theses and wind through several examples that illustrate the value of paying attention to the rhetoricity of divergent behaviors. In urban design and landscape architecture, when people depart or diverge from prescribed pathways, they are often thought of as tracing "desire lines" or "desire paths". In health care environments, desire lines are impressions formed by the activity of health care participants who are oriented in ways that might both diverge from and, at times, converge with official, prescribed pathways. Desire lines in health and medicine form impressions of the incorporation and enactment of knowledge that is, at once, material and discursive.
