Description
Book SynopsisConsiders what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communities are transformed or displaced by free trade economics, terrorism, and war. This book also considers how information and medical technologies reshape the relation one has to oneself.
Trade Review"Has the makings of a key reference text on a topic that will continue to provide the basis for anthropological investigation for some time." Social Anthropology/Anthropologie
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
List of Contributors
Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity
João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman
PART I. TRANSFORMATIONS IN SOCIAL EXPERIENCE AND SUBJECTIVITY
1. The Vanishing Subject: The Many Faces of Subjectivity
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty
2. The Experiential Basis of Subjectivity: How Individuals Change in the Context
of Societal Transformation
Arthur Kleinman and Erin Fitz-Henry
3. How the Body Speaks: Illness and the Lifeworld among the Urban Poor
Veena Das and Ranendra K. Das
4. Anthropological Observation and Self-Formation
Paul Rabinow
PART II. POLITICAL SUBJECTS
5. Hamlet in Purgatory
Stephen Greenblatt
6. America’s Transient Mental Illness: A Brief History of the Self-Traumatized
Perpetrator
Allan Young
7. Violence and the Politics of Remorse: Lessons from South Africa
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
PART III. MADNESS AND SOCIAL SUFFERING
8. The Subject of Mental Illness: Psychosis, Mad Violence, and Subjectivity in Indonesia
Byron J. Good, Subandi, and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good
9. The “Other” of Culture in Psychosis: The Ex-Centricity of the Subject
Ellen Corin
10. Hoarders and Scrappers: Madness and the Social Person in the Interstices of the City
Anne M. Lovell
PART IV. LIFE TECHNOLOGIES
11. Whole Bodies, Whole Persons? Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis, and Biology
Evelyn Fox Keller
12. The Medical Imaginary and the Biotechnical Embrace: Subjective Experiences of
Clinical Scientists and Patients
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good
13. “To Be Freed from the Infirmity of (the) Age”: Subjectivity, Life-Sustaining
Treatment, and Palliative Medicine
Eric L. Krakauer
14. A Life: Between Psychiatric Drugs and Social Abandonment
João Biehl
Epilogue. To Live with What Would Otherwise Be Unendurable: Return(s) to Subjectivities
Michael M. J. Fischer
Index
