Subjectivity

Ethnographic Investigations
1. Auflage 2007
ISBN: 978-0-520-24793-2
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 477 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 154 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 635 g

Reihe: Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Biehl, João

Good, Byron J.

Kleinman, Arthur

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Umwelt und Kultur, Kulturökologie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Forschung und Information Forschungsmethodik, Wissenschaftliche Ausstattung
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Religionsethnologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Ethnographie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Physische Anthropologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

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

Über Autor(innen)

João Biehl is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (UC Press) and Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival. His website is www.joaobiehl.net. Byron Good is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Departments of Social Medicine and Anthropology at Harvard University. He is the author of Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective and co-editor of several volumes, including Culture and Depression (UC Press). Arthur Kleinman is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture; Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine (both from UC Press); and, most recently, What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life amidst Uncertainty and Danger. Among his coedited volumes are Social Suffering (UC Press) and Global Pharmaceuticals.