Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations » (1st Edition)

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.

"This volume is destined to set the tone and agenda for discussion of subjectivity for a considerable time. It illuminates the threads that span the vast existential space between the edifice of technologized global institutions and the nuanced particularities of individual experience. This is a dynamic (definite, state-of-the art) contribution to anthropology and the human sciences by a stellar cast of authors." —Thomas Csordas, author of Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement

"This is a timely and much needed volume. No other works address the cultural, political, and social dimensions of subjectivity in such a fresh and conceptual way." —Robert Desjarlais, author of Sensory Biographies

Acknowledgments     vii
List of Contributors     ix
Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity   Joao Biehl   Byron Good   Arthur Kleinman     1
Transformations in Social Experience and Subjectivity     25
The Vanishing Subject: The Many Faces of Subjectivity   Amelie Oksenberg Rorty     34
The Experiential Basis of Subjectivity: How Individuals Change in the Context of Societal Transformation   Arthur Kleinman   Erin Fitz-Henry     52
How the Body Speaks: Illness and the Lifeworld among the Urban Poor   Veena Das   Ranendra K. Das     66
Anthropological Observation and Self-Formation   Paul Rabinow     98
Political Subjects     119
Hamlet in Purgatory   Stephen Greenblatt     128
America's Transient Mental Illness: A Brief History of the Self-Traumatized Perpetrator   Allan Young     155
Violence and the Politics of Remorse: Lessons from South Africa   Nancy Scheper-Hughes     179
Madness and Social Suffering     235
The Subject of Mental Illness: Psychosis, Mad Violence, and Subjectivity in Indonesia   Byron J. Good   Subandi   Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good     243
The "Other" of Culture inPsychosis: The Ex-Centricity of the Subject   Ellen Corin     273
Hoarders and Scrappers: Madness and the Social Person in the Interstices of the City   Anne M. Lovell     315
Life Technologies     341
Whole Bodies, Whole Persons? Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis, and Biology   Evelyn Fox Keller     352
The Medical Imaginary and the Biotechnical Embrace: Subjective Experiences of Clinical Scientists and Patients   Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good     362
"To Be Freed from the Infirmity of (the) Age": Subjectivity, Life-Sustaining Treatment, and Palliative Medicine   Eric L. Krakauer     381
A Life: Between Psychiatric Drugs and Social Abandonment   Joao Biehl     397
Epilogue. To Live with What Would Otherwise Be Unendurable: Return(s) to Subjectivities   Michael M. J. Fischer     423
Index     447