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Recent Books of Interest
Authors I-K
Index by author | title | date
Browse:
Authors: A-B | C-F | G-H | I-K | L-M | N-S | T-Z | new & forthcoming
Psychological Anthropology Reconsidered - Ingham
Embattled Selves - Jacobson
Questions of Competence - Jenkins & Angrosino, eds.
Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity - Jenkins & Barrett, eds.
Ethnography and Human Development - Jessor and Colby, eds.
Oedipus Ubiquitous - Johnson with Price-Williams
The Road to Clarity - Keller
The Soul of Popular Culture - Kittelson, ed.
The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis - Kirchner
Mind over Mind - Klass
Rethinking Psychiatry - Kleinman
Writing at the Margin - Kleinman
Social Suffering - Kleinman et al., eds.
Exchanging the Past - Knauft
From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia & Anthropology - Knauft
Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology - Knauft
Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers - Kronenfeld
American Individualisms - Kusserow
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Psychological Anthropology Reconsidered
SPA Publication No. 8
by John M. Ingham
Cambridge University Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0521559189
John M. Ingham reviews recent developments in psychological anthropology and argues for an inclusive approach that finds room for psychoanalytic, dialogical, and social perspectives on personality and culture. The argument is devloped with special refernce to human nature, child development, personality, and menatl disorder, and it draws on studies set in many different cultures. He also shows the relevance of some recent work in psychoanalysis and child development to current concerns in anthropology with agency and rhetoric.
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Embattled Selves:
An Investigation into the Nature of Identity through Oral Histories of Holocaust Survivors
by Ken Jacobson.
Grove/Atlantic, 1994.
ISBN: 087113571X
Nazi Germany's Final Solution confronted Jews caught in its web with the ultimate challenge to identity - all those who fit the Nazis' purportedly racial notion of "Jew" were placed under sentence of death, irrespective of how they lived, what they believed, or who they took themselves to be. Their very origins having become an inexorable threat to their existence, these people were forced to come to grips - consciously or unconsciously, in word or deed - with their Jewishness. Embattled Selves presents the life stories of fifteen men and women who discovered, concealed, embraced, or rejected their Jewishness as a result of Nazi persecution. Theirs are atypical stories, the stories of people whose physical and spiritual survival came to depend on the mutability of the self. In these pages we meet those who shed their Jewishness to become lost in the crowd; those who, never having considered themselves Jews, had Jewishness thrust upon them; those who defiantly proclaimed their Jewishness despite the consequences; and those who went beyond concealment to join the forces of genocide. Told against the backdrop of the horrors of World War II, these narratives combine the tantalizing suspense of adventure stories with the vivid detail of the best of oral history. Throughout, however, the focus is on identity. The words these survivors speak as they recreate the historical and mental universe in which they lived, as they tell of the choices they made and the paths they took, dramatically highlight questions that concern all of us. In today's world of ethnic reawakening and shifting political boundaries, these stories have a particular urgency.
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Questions of Competence:
Culture, Classification and Intellectual Disability
edited by Richard Jenkins and Michael V. Angrosino
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
ISBN: 0521623030
Intellectual disability - more commonly described as 'mental retardation' or 'learning difficulties' - is a socially constructed phenomenon that varies in important respects cross-culturally. This collection of original essays examines the classification of people as competent and incompetent in the United States, England, Wales, Greece, Greenland, Uganda and Belize. The contributors, anthropologists and sociologists, argue that it is time for a new understanding of intellectual disability. In contrast to medical and psychological models, a social model of intellectual disability emphasises the cultural and individual variability of incompetence, the intimate relationship between cultural categories of competence and incompetence, and the role of social interaction and networks in its social construction.
from the publisher
Contents
Culture, classification and (in)competence
Mental disability in the United States: an interactionist perspective
(In)competence in America in comparative perspective
Risk, resilience and competence: parents with learning difficulties and their children
Constructing other selves: (in)competences and the category of learning difficulties
Work, opportunity and culture: (in)competence in Greece and Wales
Slow cookers and madmen: competence of heart and head in rural Uganda
States and categories: indigenous models of personhood in northwest Greenland
Learning to become (in)competent: children in Belize speak out
Towards a social model of (in)competence
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Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity:
The Edge of Experience
edited by Janis H. Jenkins and Robert J. Barrett
Cambridge University Press, November 2003.
ISBN: 0521536413
Based on international research, this collection incorporates a critical analysis of World Health Organization cross-cultural findings. Contributors share an interest in subjective and interpretive aspects of illness, while maintaining the concept of schizophrenia that addresses its biological aspects. The volume is of interest to scholars in the social and human sciences, and of practical relevance not only to psychiatrists, but all mental health professionals encountering the clinical problems bridging culture and psychosis.
book description
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Ethnography and Human Development:
Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry
edited by Richard Jessor and Anne Colby.
University of Chicago Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0226399036
Studies of human development have taken an ethnographic turn in the 1990s. In this volume, leading anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists discuss how qualitative methodologies have strengthened our understanding of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development, and of the difficulties of growing up in contemporary society. Part 1, informed by a post-positivist philosophy of science, argues for the validity of ethnographic knowledge. Part 2 examines a range of qualitative methods, from participant observation to the hermeneutic elaboration of texts. In Part 3, ethnographic methods are applied to issues of human development across the life span and to social problems including poverty, racial and ethnic marginality, and crime. Restoring ethnographic methods to a central place in social inquiry, these twenty-two lively essays will interest everyone concerned with the epistemological problems of context, meaning, and subjectivity in the behavioral sciences.
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Oedipus Ubiquitous:
The Family Complex in World Folk Literature
by Allen W. Johnson with Douglas Price-Williams
Stanford University Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0804725772
Whether or not the "Oedipus complex" is universal has been the subject of controversy ever since Freud made it the centerpiece of psychoanalytic theory. He argued that every boy passes through a phase in which he wishes to kill his father in order to marry his mother, and that even though the growing boy learns to control and reject these unacceptable wishes, the old desires are not abolished but repressed; they live on in the unconscious. Though the strict version of the Freudian oedipal story is not very common in world folk literature, a looser version is: the struggle between an older, fatherlike man and a younger man who stands in a sonlike relationship to him, and an inappropriate closeness, often erotic, between the younger man and a motherly woman. Along with father-daughter and brother-sister incest tales, it is one of several varieties that the authors call "family complex folktales." In Part I, the authors reexamine the debate over the universality of the Oedipus complex through an analysis of the widespread occurrence of family complex folktales. Part II is a collection of 139 such tales from every world culture area and every level of social complexity, the largest such collection ever made.
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The Road to Clarity:
Seventh-Day Adventism in Madagascar
by Eva Keller
Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.
ISBN: 1403970769
In recent years, millions of people have joined churches such as the Seventh-day Adventist which prosper enormously in different parts of the world. The Road to Clarity is one of the first ethnographic in-depth studies of this phenomenon. It is a vivid account based on almost two years of participation in ordinary church members' daily religious and non-religious lives. The book offers a fascinating inquiry into the nature of long-term commitment to Adventism among rural people in Madagascar. Eva Keller argues that the key attraction of the church lies in the excitement of study, argument, and intellectual exploration. This is a novel approach which challenges utilitarian and cultural particularist explanations of the success of this kind of Christianity.
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The Soul of Popular Culture:
Looking at Contemporary Heroes, Myths, and Monsters
edited by Mary L. Kittelson
Open Court Publishing Company, 1997.
ISBN: 0812693639
Contents
Heroes and Myths: The Deep Structure of Ourselves
Elvis Presley: Fama and the Cultus of the Dying God
The Feminine Hero of The Silence of the Lambs
The New American Hero: Made in Japan
The Hercules Complex: The O.J. Simpson Story
Coming Home: Hyper-Images of the Hero and Child in America
Cinemyths: Contemporary Films as Gender Myth
By Jove! There's More to British Comedies than Meets the Eye
Shadows and Shades: Dealing with the Dark
The Mists of Lake Wobegon: The Archetypal Function of an American Storyteller
Taking the Dark with Open Eyes: Hidden Dimensions of a Psychology of Abortion
Deconstructing the American Shadow: A Review of Pulp Fiction
Pulp Fiction: From Shadowland to Heartland
Vampires, Eroticism, and the Lure of the Unconscious
The Dragon and the Man-Machine: Reflecting on Jurassic Park and Frankenstein
Ain't No Angel: AIDS and the Abandoned Soul
Looking through the Keyhole: Recollecting and Reflecting America's Soul in Paris, Texas
The Mirror of Culture: Finding Ourselves Within
The Piano: From Constriction to Connection
Another Look at Co-dependency
Dirty Politics, Clean Voters?
False Memories, True Memory, and Maybes
No One Wins: The Miss America Pageant and Sports Contests As Failed Initiations
Peering into the Possible
A Psychology for the Age of the Internet
Its Continuing Mission: Star Trek's Machine Mythology and the Quest for Self
Star Trek and the Intimate Alien
Holy Madness at Heaven's Gate
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The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis:
Individuation and Integration in Post-Freudian Theory
by Suzanne R. Kirschner
Cambridge University Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0521555604
Demonstrating that they are Western constructions, this study considers the cultural and religious sources of contemporary psychoanalytic theories of the development of the self. Thus, it raises provocative questions about the status of psychoanalytic theories as knowledge and as science.
from the publisher
Contents
Introduction
Towards a cultural genealogy of psychoanalytic developmental psychology
The assenting echo: Anglo-American values in contemporary psychoanalytic developmental psychology
The developmental narrative: The design of psychological history
Theological sources of the idea of development
The Christian mystical narrative: Neoplatonism and Christian mysticism
Jacob Boehme: Towards worldly mysticism
Romantic thought: From worldly mysticism to natural supernaturalism
Personal supernaturalism: The cultural genealogy of the psychoanalytic developmental narrative
Conclusion
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Mind over Mind:
The Anthropology and Psychology of Spirit Possession
by Morton Klass
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
ISBN: 0742526771
Mind Over Mind explores the phenomenon of spirit possession from both anthropological and psychological perspectives. Spirit possession is ritually important in many cultures from India to Brazil to Madagascar, but has tended to be narrowly regarded from modern American and European perspectives as a psychopathological problem of multiple personality disorder. This book proposes an integration of anthropological and psychological approaches, concluding with a new analytical framework for understanding spirit possession and resolving the controversy surrounding the "reality" of possession. The issues raised are thus essential to both the anthropology of religion and the psychology of altered states of consciousness. At the same time, Mind over Mind confronts the most challenging philosophical issues of human consciousness and human identity, which can not be properly formulated without the insights of social and cultural anthropology. At the most general level, this study argues for the unequivocal importance of an interdisciplinary approach to spirit possession and for the integral significance of anthropology for the other human sciences.
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Rethinking Psychiatry:
From Cultural Category to Personal Experience
by Arthur Kleinman
The Free Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0029174422
Examines the impact of cultural meanings on psychiatric diagnosis & the relationship of psychiatry to social science
Contents
Prologue Why Anthropology?
What Is a Psychiatric Diagnosis?
Do Psychiatric Disorders Differ in Different Cultures? The Methodological Questions
Do Psychiatric Disorders Differ in Different Cultures? The Findings
Do Social Relations and Cultural Meanings Contribute to the Onset and Course of Mental Illness?
How Do Professional Values Influence the Work of Psychiatrists?
How Do Psychiatrists Heal?
What Relationship Should Psychiatry Have to Social Science? 142
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Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine
by Arthur Kleinman
University of California Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0520209656
This is a collection of essays in medical anthropology written over the past five years. The volume includes "revised versions of seven previously published essays. Three center around critiques of biomedicine, of mainline bioethics, and of epidemiologic fixations on 'objectivity' in international health. . . . Four essays {aim to} define or redefine suffering as an interpersonal (not solely individual) experience and posit that suffering is closely tiedto social contexts of violence, poverty, societal pressures, and inequality."
Choice
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Social Suffering
edited by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret M. Lock
University of California Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0520209958
"Social suffering" takes in the human consequences of war, famine, depression, disease, torture-the whole assemblage of human problems that result from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people-and also human responses to social problems as they are influenced by those forms of power. In the same way that the notion of social suffering breaks down boundaries between specific scholarly disciplines, this cross-disciplinary investigation allows us to see the twentieth century in a new frame, with new emphases. Anthropologists, historians, literary theorists, social medicine experts, and scholars engaged in the study of religion join together to investigate the cultural representations, collective experiences, and professional and popular appropriations of human suffering in the world today. These authors contest traditional research and policy approaches. Recognizing that neither the cultural resources of tradition nor those of modernity's various programs seem adequate to cope with social suffering in our times, they base their distinctive vision on the understanding that moral, political, and medical issues cannot be kept separate.
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Exchanging the Past:
A Rainforest World of Before and After
by Bruce M. Knauft
University of Chicago Press, 2002.
ISBN: 0226446352
Twenty years ago, the Gebusi of the lowland Papua New Guinea rainforest had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Bruce M. Knauft found then that the killings stemmed from violent scapegoating of suspected sorcerers. But by the time he returned in 1998, homicide rates had plummeted, and Gebusi had largely disavowed vengeance against sorcerers in favor of modern schools, discos, markets, and Christianity.
In this book, Knauft explores the Gebusi's encounter with modern institutions and highlights what their experience tells us more generally about the interaction between local peoples and global forces. As desire for material goods grew among Gebusi, Knauft shows that they became more accepting of and subordinated by Christian churches, community schools,and government officials in their attempt to benefit from them--a process Knauft terms "recessive agency." But the Gebusi also respond actively to modernity, creating new forms of feasting, performance, and music that meld traditional practices with Western ones, all of which Knauft documents in this fascinating study.
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From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology
by Bruce M. Knauft
University of Michigan Press, 1999.
ISBN: 0472066870
Contents
Melanesia as "Culture Area"
Bodily Images in Melanesia: Cultural Substances and Natural Metaphors
Warfare and History in Melanesia
Gender and Modernity in Melanesia and Amazonia
Post-Melanesian Studies? A Contemporary Look at the Anthropology of Melanesia
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Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology
by Bruce M. Knauft
Routledge, 1996.
ISBN: 0415912644
In the wake of tensions between modern and postmodern sensibilities, what larger directions now emerge in cultural anthropology? In this major work, Bruce Knauft takes stock of important recent initiatives in cultural and critical theory. By combining critical reviewsand ethnographic engagements with fresh readings of major figures and approaches, the work develops a larger vantage point for considering the dispersing influence of practice theories, postmodernism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, modern/post-positive feminism, andmulticultural criticisms.
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Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers:
Semantic Extension from the Ethnoscience Tradition
by David Kronenfeld
Oxford University Press 1996.
ISBN: 0195094085
Meaning seems to shift from context to context; how do we know when someone says "grab a chair" that an ottoman or orange crate will do, but when someone says "let's buy a chair," they won't? In Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers, Kronenfeld offers a theory that explains both the usefulness of language's variability of reference and the mechanisms which enable us to understand each other in spite of the variability. Kronenfeld's theory, rooted in the tradition of ethnoscience (or cognitive anthropology), accomplishes three things. First, it distinguishes prototypic referents from extended referents. Second, it describes the various bases of semantic extensions. Finally it details how we use the situational context of usage, the linguistic context of opposition and inclusion, and the conceptual context of knowledge about the world to interpret communicative events.
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American Individualisms:
Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods
SPA Series on Culture, Mind and Society
by Adrie Kusserow
Palgrave Macmillan 2004.
ISBN: 1403964807
What are hard and soft individualisms? In this detailed ethnography of three communities in Manhattan and Queens, Kusserow interviews parents and teachers (from wealthy to those on welfare) on the types of hard and soft individualisms they encourage in their children and students. American Individualisms explores the important issue of class differences in the socialization of individualism in America. It presents American individualism not as one single homogeneous, stereotypic life-pattern as often claimed to be, but as variable, class-differentiated models of individualism instilled in young children by their parents and preschool teachers in Manhattan and Queens. By providing rich descriptions of the situational, class-based individualisms that take root in communities with vastly different visions of the future, Kusserow brings social inequality back into previously bland and generic discussions of American individualism.
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Index by author | title | date
Browse:
Authors: A-B | C-F | G-H | I-K | L-M | N-S | T-Z | new & forthcoming
http://www.aaanet.org/sections/SPA/bkauthik.htm -- Revised: February 20, 2008
Designed by Stephen C. Leavitt: leavitts@union.edu
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