Synopses & Reviews
The essays in this provocative volume reflect on the nature of subjectivity in the diverse places where anthropologists work at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contributors explore everyday modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of violent Basque youth, visionary Indonesian artists, bureaucrats and members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programs in China and Zaire, psychiatrists and the mentally ill in Morocco and Ireland, and persons who have suffered trauma or been displaced by violence in the Middle East and in south and Southeast Asia. The authors' analyses place the political at the heart of the psychological and the psychological at the heart of the political as the starting point for rethinking subjectivity. The volume makes a powerful case for the importance of colonialism and postcolonial theorizing in understanding contemporary modes of experience and social states of disarray associated with postcolonial politics, regimes of knowledge and power, and rampant globalization. Current forms of analysis, from psychological and psychoanalytic writings to recent feminist and postcolonial literature, are drawn together to suggest directions for a broad project of ethnographic investigations into subjectivity, one that links individual lives to collective experience amidst the disorders of contemporary social life.
Contributors:
Begona Aretxaga
Joao Biehl
David Eaton
Michael M.J. Fischer
Byron J. Good
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good
Sandra Teresa Hyde
Erica Caple James
Janis H. Jenkins
Johan Lindquist
John MacDougall
Mariella Pandolfi
StefaniaPandolfo
Sarah Pinto
Jamis Saris
Kathleen Allden
Michael Hollifield
Review
and#8220;Fascinating and elegantly composed essays.and#8221;
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and#8220;A timely, important, and extremely well-written work.and#8221;
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and#8220;Powerful and well-crafted essays (by some of the most thoughtful people in the field).and#8221;
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“Fascinating and elegantly composed essays.” Steve Odero Ouma and Aakash Singh
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“A timely, important, and extremely well-written work.” Metapsychology Online
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“Powerful and well-crafted essays (by some of the most thoughtful people in the field).” E. Wellin - Choice
Synopsis
The essays in this volume reflect on the nature of subjectivity in the diverse places where anthropologists work at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contributors explore everyday modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of Basque youth, Indonesian artists, members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programs in China and the Republic of Congo, psychiatrists and the mentally ill in Morocco and Ireland, and persons who have suffered trauma or been displaced by violence in the Middle East and in South and Southeast Asia.
Painting on book jacket by Entang Wiharso
About the Author
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good is Professor of Social Medicine at Harvard University and author of many publications, including American Medicine: The Quest for Competence (UC Press) and coeditor of Pain as Human Experience (UC Press). Sandra Teresa Hyde is Associate Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University, and the author of Eating Spring Rice: The Cultural Politics of AIDS in Southwest China (UC Press). Sarah Pinto is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and author of Where There is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India. Byron Good is Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard University, author of Medicine, Rationality and Experience, and coeditor of Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (UC Press), among other books.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Postcolonial Disorders: Reflections on Subjectivity in the Contemporary World
Byron J. Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, and Sarah Pinto
PART I: DISORDERED STATES
1. Madness and the Politically Real: Reflections on Violence in Postdictatorial Spain
Begoand#241;a Aretxaga
2. Indonesia Sakit: Indonesian Disorders and the Subjective Experience and Interpretive Politics of Contemporary Indonesian Artists
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good and Byron J. Good
3. The Political Dimensions of Emasculation: Fantasy, Conspiracy, and Estrangement among Populist Leaders in Post-New Order Lombok, Indonesia
John M. MacDougall
4. Haunting Ghosts: Madness, Gender, and Ensekirite in Haiti in the Democratic Era
Erica Caple James
5. Laboratory of Intervention: The Humanitarian Governance of the Postcommunist Balkan Territories
Mariella Pandolfi
PART II: SUBJECTIVITY IN THE BORDERLANDS
6. Everyday AIDS Practices: Contestations of Borders and Infectious Disease in Southwest China
Sandra Teresa Hyde
7. Of Maids and Prostitutes: Indonesian Female Migrants in the New Asian Hinterlands
Johan Lindquist
8. Ambivalent Inquiry: Dilemmas of AIDS in the Republic of Congo
David Eaton
9. To Live with What Would Otherwise Be Unendurable, II: Caught in the Borderlands of Palestine/Israel
Michael M.J. Fischer
PART III: MADNESS, ALTERITY, AND PSYCHIATRY
10. The Mucker War: A History of Violence and Silence
Joand#227;o Biehl
11. Institutional Persons and Personal Institutions: The Asylum and Marginality in Rural Ireland
A. Jamie Saris
12. The Knot of the Soul: Postcolonial Conundrums, Madness, and the Imagination
Stefania Pandolfo
13. Consuming Grief: Infant Death in the Postcolonial Time of Intervention
Sarah Pinto
14. Postcoloniality as the Aftermath of Terror among Vietnamese Refugees
Janis H. Jenkins and Michael Hollifield
15. Cross-Cultural Psychiatry in Medical-Legal Documentation of Suffering: Human Rights Abuses Involving Transnational Corporations and the Yadana Pipeline Project in Burma
Kathleen Allden
Contributors
Index