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University of California Press

Subjectivity

Ethnographic Investigations
by João Biehl (Editor), Byron J. Good (Editor), Arthur Kleinman (Editor)
Paperback eBook
Price: $34.95 / £30.00
Publication Date: Apr 2007
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 477
ISBN: 9780520247932
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 19 b/w photographs
Series:
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About the Book

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.

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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

Reviews

“Has the makings of a key reference text on a topic that will continue to provide the basis for anthropological investigation for some time."
— Social Anthropology/Anthropologie
“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