The essays in this volume reflect on the nature of subjectivity in the diverse places where anthropologists work at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contributors explore everyday modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of Basque youth, Indonesian artists, members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programs in China and the Republic of Congo, psychiatrists and the mentally ill in Morocco and Ireland, and persons who have suffered trauma or been displaced by violence in the Middle East and in South and Southeast Asia.
Painting on book jacket by Entang Wiharso
Postcolonial Disorders
About the Book
Reviews
“Fascinating and elegantly composed essays.”—Steve Odero Ouma and Aakash Singh Metapsychology Online
“A timely, important, and extremely well-written work.”—E. Wellin Choice
“Powerful and well-crafted essays (by some of the most thoughtful people in the field).”—Common Knowledge
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Postcolonial Disorders: Reflections on Subjectivity in the Contemporary World
Byron J. Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, and Sarah Pinto
PART I: DISORDERED STATES
1. Madness and the Politically Real: Reflections on Violence in Postdictatorial Spain
Begoña Aretxaga
2. Indonesia Sakit: Indonesian Disorders and the Subjective Experience and Interpretive Politics of Contemporary Indonesian Artists
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good and Byron J. Good
3. The Political Dimensions of Emasculation: Fantasy, Conspiracy, and Estrangement among Populist Leaders in Post-New Order Lombok, Indonesia
John M. MacDougall
4. Haunting Ghosts: Madness, Gender, and Ensekirite in Haiti in the Democratic Era
Erica Caple James
5. Laboratory of Intervention: The Humanitarian Governance of the Postcommunist Balkan Territories
Mariella Pandolfi
PART II: SUBJECTIVITY IN THE BORDERLANDS
6. Everyday AIDS Practices: Contestations of Borders and Infectious Disease in Southwest China
Sandra Teresa Hyde
7. Of Maids and Prostitutes: Indonesian Female Migrants in the New Asian Hinterlands
Johan Lindquist
8. Ambivalent Inquiry: Dilemmas of AIDS in the Republic of Congo
David Eaton
9. To Live with What Would Otherwise Be Unendurable, II: Caught in the Borderlands of Palestine/Israel
Michael M.J. Fischer
PART III: MADNESS, ALTERITY, AND PSYCHIATRY
10. The Mucker War: A History of Violence and Silence
João Biehl
11. Institutional Persons and Personal Institutions: The Asylum and Marginality in Rural Ireland
A. Jamie Saris
12. The Knot of the Soul: Postcolonial Conundrums, Madness, and the Imagination
Stefania Pandolfo
13. Consuming Grief: Infant Death in the Postcolonial Time of Intervention
Sarah Pinto
14. Postcoloniality as the Aftermath of Terror among Vietnamese Refugees
Janis H. Jenkins and Michael Hollifield
15. Cross-Cultural Psychiatry in Medical-Legal Documentation of Suffering: Human Rights Abuses Involving Transnational Corporations and the Yadana Pipeline Project in Burma
Kathleen Allden
Contributors
Index