Search results for ""Veena Das" "Affliction""

Book SynopsisFocusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, this book stitches together three different sets of issues. It examines the different trajectories of illness: What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal putting resources, relationships, and even one's world into jeopardy?Trade Review"Told with delicacy, vigour and a sharply criticial eye, this compelling account of the everyday events of illness in low income neighborhoods [in Delhi] shows what anthropological attentiveness can do. If its power comes from the evident power of the mind behind it, it also comes from a modestly understated account of how to be both in the company of people and a recorder of affliction. Above all, it is a work of exquisite attention to the incoherences and normalizations that disease makes of family circumstances, medical practices, state provisioning, singular lives, and that these make of it. Socially sensitive and world-alert at the same time, Das's narrative holds the reader in (gripping, edifying) suspense between its different planes. No less perhaps than one would expect from this author, but a model of social science writing all the same." -- -Marilyn Strathern University of Cambridge "Reading Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty is like observing a master at work. [This is a] formidable piece of scholarship immersed in more than a decade of ethnographic engagement etched in stunningly crafted anthropological prose. This longitudinal immersion in the everyday lives of urban poor produces a tender and intimate account without lapsing into unwitting sentimentality. An ethnographic and theoretical tour de force!" -- -Aditya Bharadwaj The Graduate Institute, Geneva Veena Das offers a complex ethnographic meditation on illness among the urban poor and the diverse kinds of response (practical, methodological, ethical) it invites. As Das so precisely attends to affliction, readers have the privilege of following one of anthropology's most distinctive and distinguished voices." -- -Michael Lambek University of Toronto "...a compelling read that should be of interest to scholars working in medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, and the anthropology of South Asia" -- Leslie Jo Weaver -Anthropology Quarterly "Veena Das' book, 'Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty' provides an important, ethnographically powerful, laddering of scenes of instructions for us all." -- Michael M.J. Fischer -Somatosphere "Over four decades Veena Das has established herself as one of the most imaginative and sensitive writers to be found in any of the human sciences. In this brilliant book, she attends to the everyday work of care and endurance that makes up the life of the poor in Delhi. As ever, her ear is attuned to the fateful turn of phrase, the pause, the silence. But in this new volume she attends to other voices as well-[not only] the voices of health professionals and economists, struggling to put their understanding of the objective conditions that shape the experience of health and poverty to practical use but also the voices of fellow anthropologists wrestling with the limitations of their theoretical and descriptive language. Affliction is a work of great generosity and no little beauty. It is, if anything even more remarkable than its predecessors in Das's remarkable oeuvre." -- -Jonathan Spencer University of Edinburgh "This is a must read for scholars and researchers who work on matters related to health and illness and for those in the academy who see their research as being inherently applied and interdisciplinary in nature." -SCTIW Review "In this beautiful volume, Veena Das continues her quest into the minor events and enduring suffering, the mundane intensity of the present and remembrance of things past that constitute ordinary human existence, thus opening a novel line of reflection and research in what can be called an anthropology of life." -- -Didier Fassin author of Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the PresentTable of ContentsPreface 1. Affliction: An Introduction 2. How the Body Speaks 3. A Child Learns Illness and Learns Death 4. Mental Illness, Psychiatric Institutions, and the Singularity of Lives 5. Dangerous Liaisons: Technology, Kinship, and Wild Spirits 6. The Reluctant Healer and the Darkness of our Times 7. Medicines, Markets, and Healing 8. Global Health Discourse and the View from Planet Earth 9. Epilogue Note Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn her role as devoted wife, the Hindu goddess Parvati is the divine embodiment of viraha, the agony of separation from one''s beloved, a form of love that is also intense suffering. These contradictory emotions reflect the overlapping dissolutions of love, family, and mental health explored by Sarah Pinto in this visceral ethnography.Daughters of Parvati centers on the lives of women in different settings of psychiatric care in northern India, particularly the contrasting environments of a private mental health clinic and a wing of a government hospital. Through an anthropological consideration of modern medicine in a nonwestern setting, Pinto challenges the dominant framework for addressing crises such as long-term involuntary commitment, poor treatment in homes, scarcity of licensed practitioners, heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and the ways psychiatry may reproduce constraining social conditions. Inflected by the author''s own experience of separation and singlTrade Review"Pinto’s complex and moving ethnography explores women’s lives in the context of different psychiatric care settings in a North Indian city. Woven together with Pinto’s own experiences of love’s breakdowns between India and Boston, Daughters of Parvati centres on the ways women take on the vulnerabilities and dependencies of marriage and family, and how psychiatric care, pharmaceuticals, and institutions mediate when relationships fall apart. [A]n illuminating ethnography [and] a complex and intimate example of feminist ethnography at its most vulnerable and powerful….[A] magisterial contribution to anthropological studies of global psychiatry and of kinship and care. It is also a moving and intimately reflexive book suggesting the power of ethnographic writing in its limits and possibilities." * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *"“[A] compelling ethnography about women’s engagement with Western psychiatric care in North India. In bearing witness to the difficult lives of women on the verge of mental and relational breakdowns, Pinto offers a nuanced account of the gendered particularities of everyday psychiatric practice in India. Her observations of the Indian context open windows onto global anthropological debates about the ethics of institutional care and medical therapeutics, the vicissitudes of biopolitical power and subject making, and the challenges of reflexive research in conditions of human crises and abuses.…[S]ome of the most sophisticated anthropological writings on the subject." * American Anthropologist *"Daughters of Parvati is critical reading for scholars of medical anthropology, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, and feminist methodologies...Pinto’s work reveals not only the limits and constraints of our ethnographic methodologies (and, in turn, clinical and diagnostic settings) but also, crucially, their possibilities. " * Isis *"One of the most compelling ethnographies I have read in recent years." * Veena Das, Medical Anthropology Quarterly *"A poignant, compelling, complex, and provocative example of anthropological storytelling. Based on original and evidently difficult fieldwork focused on the treatment of women's mental illnesses in north India, the book offers a gendered reading of psychiatry. It is also very much an intimate and intensely reflexive ethnography." * Ann Grodzins Gold, Syracuse University *"An important book, making interventions in how we think about choreographies of clinical mental health work with families broken and repaired. Its ethnographic specificities have to do with India, but its accounts of medical, familial, and narrative crises are of broad theoretical import." * Michael M. J. Fischer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology *Table of ContentsNote on Transliterations Introduction: Love and Affliction Chapter 1. Rehabilitating Ammi Chapter 2. On Dissolution Chapter 3. Moksha and Mishappenings Chapter 4. On Dissociation Chapter 5. Making a Case Chapter 6. Ethics of Dissolution Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisIn her role as devoted wife, the Hindu goddess Parvati is the divine embodiment of viraha, the agony of separation from one's beloved, a form of love that is also intense suffering. These contradictory emotions reflect the overlapping dissolutions of love, family, and mental health explored by Sarah Pinto in this visceral ethnography. Daughters of Parvati centers on the lives of women in different settings of psychiatric care in northern India, particularly the contrasting environments of a private mental health clinic and a wing of a government hospital. Through an anthropological consideration of modern medicine in a nonwestern setting, Pinto challenges the dominant framework for addressing crises such as long-term involuntary commitment, poor treatment in homes, scarcity of licensed practitioners, heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and the ways psychiatry may reproduce constraining social conditions. Inflected by the author's own experience of separation and single motherhood during her fieldwork, Daughters of Parvati urges us to think about the ways women bear the consequences of the vulnerabilities of love and family in their minds, bodies, and social worlds.Trade Review"Pinto’s complex and moving ethnography explores women’s lives in the context of different psychiatric care settings in a North Indian city. Woven together with Pinto’s own experiences of love’s breakdowns between India and Boston, Daughters of Parvati centres on the ways women take on the vulnerabilities and dependencies of marriage and family, and how psychiatric care, pharmaceuticals, and institutions mediate when relationships fall apart. [A]n illuminating ethnography [and] a complex and intimate example of feminist ethnography at its most vulnerable and powerful….[A] magisterial contribution to anthropological studies of global psychiatry and of kinship and care. It is also a moving and intimately reflexive book suggesting the power of ethnographic writing in its limits and possibilities." * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *"“[A] compelling ethnography about women’s engagement with Western psychiatric care in North India. In bearing witness to the difficult lives of women on the verge of mental and relational breakdowns, Pinto offers a nuanced account of the gendered particularities of everyday psychiatric practice in India. Her observations of the Indian context open windows onto global anthropological debates about the ethics of institutional care and medical therapeutics, the vicissitudes of biopolitical power and subject making, and the challenges of reflexive research in conditions of human crises and abuses.…[S]ome of the most sophisticated anthropological writings on the subject." * American Anthropologist *"Daughters of Parvati is critical reading for scholars of medical anthropology, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, and feminist methodologies...Pinto’s work reveals not only the limits and constraints of our ethnographic methodologies (and, in turn, clinical and diagnostic settings) but also, crucially, their possibilities. " * Isis *"One of the most compelling ethnographies I have read in recent years." * Veena Das, Medical Anthropology Quarterly *"A poignant, compelling, complex, and provocative example of anthropological storytelling. Based on original and evidently difficult fieldwork focused on the treatment of women's mental illnesses in north India, the book offers a gendered reading of psychiatry. It is also very much an intimate and intensely reflexive ethnography." * Ann Grodzins Gold, Syracuse University *"An important book, making interventions in how we think about choreographies of clinical mental health work with families broken and repaired. Its ethnographic specificities have to do with India, but its accounts of medical, familial, and narrative crises are of broad theoretical import." * Michael M. J. Fischer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology *Table of ContentsNote on Transliterations Introduction: Love and Affliction Chapter 1. Rehabilitating Ammi Chapter 2. On Dissolution Chapter 3. Moksha and Mishappenings Chapter 4. On Dissociation Chapter 5. Making a Case Chapter 6. Ethics of Dissolution Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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