Subjectivity : ethnographic investigations
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
Print Book, English, ©2007
University of California Press, Berkeley, ©2007
Aufsatzsammlung
xi, 464 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780520247925, 9780520247932, 0520247922, 0520247930
1128813180
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