Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations(7 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.

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

About the Author :
Joao 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.

Review :
"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