Subjectivity : ethnographic investigations / edited by João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Biehl, João Guilherme.

Good, Byron.

Kleinman, Arthur.

Series:

Ethnographic studies in subjectivity ; 7.

Ethnographic studies in subjectivity ; 7

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethnology--Research.

Ethnology.

Ethnology--Philosophy.

Subjectivity.

Ethnopsychology.

Medical anthropology.

Physical Description:

xi, 464 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, [2007]

Summary:

This innovative volume is an extended intellectual conversation about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. Examining the ethnography of the modern subject, this preeminent group of scholars probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. Contributors consider 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; how new information and medical technologies reshape the relation one has to oneself; and which forms of subjectivity and life possibilities are produced against a world in pieces. The transdisciplinary conversation includes anthropologists, historians of science, psychologists, a literary critic, a philosopher, physicians, and an economist. The authors touch on how we think and write about contingency, human agency, and ethics today.

Contents:

Introduction : rethinking subjectivity / João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman

Part I. Transformations in social experience and subjectivity. The vanishing subject : the many faces of subjectivity / Amélie Oksenberg Rorty

The experiential basis of subjectivity : how individuals change in the context of societal transformation / Arthur Kleinman and Erin Fitz-Henry

How the body speaks : illness and the lifeworld among the urban poor / Veena Das and Ranendra K. Das

Anthropological observation and self-formation / Paul Rabinow

Part II. Political subjects. Hamlet in purgatory / Stephen Greenblatt

America's transient mental illness : a brief history of the self-traumatized perpetrator / Allan Young

Violence and the politics of remorse : lessons from South Africa / Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Part III. Madness and social suffering. The subject of mental illness : psychosis, mad violence, and subjectivity in Indonesia / Byron J. Good, Subandi, and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good

The "Other" of culture in psychosis : the ex-centricity of the subject / Ellen Corin

Hoarders and scrappers : madness and the social person in the interstices of the city / Anne M. Lovell

Part IV. Life technologies. Whole bodies, whole persons? : cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and biology / Evelyn Fox Keller

The medical imaginary and the biotechnical embrace : subjective experiences of clinical scientists and patients / Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good

"To be freed from the infirmity of (the) age" : subjectivity, life-sustaining treatment, and palliative medicine / Eric L. Krakauer

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780520247925

0520247922

9780520247932

0520247930

OCLC:

76183525