Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations

Front Cover
Joćo Guilherme Biehl, Byron Good, Arthur Kleinman
University of California Press, Apr 11, 2007 - Philosophy - 464 pages
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.

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Contents

Rethinking Subjectivity
1
PART I TRANSFORMATIONS IN SOCIAL EXPERIENCE AND SUBJECTIVITY
25
The Many Faces of Subjectivity
34
How Individuals Change in the Context of Societal Transformation
52
Illness and the Lifeworld among the Urban Poor
66
4 Anthropological Observation and SelfFormation
98
PART II POLITICAL SUBJECTS
119
5 Hamlet in Purgatory
128
Psychosis Mad Violence and Subjectivity in Indonesia
243
The ExCentricity of the Subject
273
Madness and the Social Person in the Interstices of the City
315
PART IV LIFE TECHNOLOGIES
341
11 Whole Bodies Whole Persons? Cultural Studies Psychoanalysis and Biology
352
Subjective Experiences of Clinical Scientists and Patients
362
Subjectivity LifeSustaining Treatment and Palliative Medicine
381
Between Psychiatric Drugs and Social Abandonment
397

A Brief History of the SelfTraumatized Perpetrator
155
Lessons from South Africa
179
PART III MADNESS AND SOCIAL SUFFERING
235
Returns to Subjectivities
423
Index
447
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