Byron J. Good & Arthur Kleinman 
Subjectivity [PDF ebook] 
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.

Inhoudsopgave

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 Del Vecchio 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 Del Vecchio 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

Over de auteur

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.