Subjectivity And Suffering In American Culture

Winner ofThe Boyer Prize from the Society for Psychological Anthropology!!! This book explores the experience of suffering in order to shed light on the nature of the human self. Using an intimate life history approach, it examines ways people struggle to cope with experiences that can shatter their lives: a diagnosis of cancer, the death of a spouse, a parent s mental illness. The volume takes readers deep into private worlds of suffering in American culture, and invites reflection on what the subjectivity of suffering tells us about being human. Addressing universal themes in a way that fully recognizes the individuality of those who experience a personal crisis, Parish shows how individuals personalize the cultural and psychological resources in which they find their possible selves.

Talks about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. This book examines the ethnography of the modern subject, probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. It considers what happens to individual subjectivity when environments such as communities are transformed.

The Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, now in its second edition, maintains a strong benchmark for understanding the scope of contemporary anthropological field methods. Avoiding divisive debates over science and humanism, the contributors draw upon both traditions to explore fieldwork in practice. The second edition also reflects major developments of the past decade, including: the rising prominence of mixed methods, the emergence of new technologies, and evolving views on ethnographic writing. Spanning the chain of research, from designing a project through methods of data collection and interpretive analysis, the Handbook features new chapters on ethnography of online communities, social survey research, and network and geospatial analysis. Considered discussion of ethics, epistemology, and the presentation of research results to diverse audiences round out the volume. The result is an essential guide for all scholars, professionals, and advanced students who employ fieldwork.

This volume intends to re-establish social gerontology as a discipline that has pragmatic links to policy and practice. Collectively, the chapters enrich public debates about the moral, cultural and economic questions surrounding aging, thereby ameliorating the “problems” associated with aging societies. This volume is uniquely cross-cultural, theory-driven and cross-disciplinary. It fills a gap in the gerontological scholarship of the global south that is predominantly descriptive and empirical. Based on original research, this volume examines in particular the sociological question of inequality and its intersection with age, gender, health, family and social relations. In the process, the studies herein highlight the unique historical, institutional and social systems that govern the subjective experience of aging in diverse contexts globally. Specifically, societies in transition including India, Lebanon, Nigeria, Japan, China, Israel and in Europe are studied while connecting the micro-social experience of aging (loneliness, wellbeing, discrimination, relationships and resilience) with larger temporal and political contexts. This exercise generates intellectual capital that reformulates links between aging research and policy in innovative ways. Overall, the volume echoes the global scientific commitment to understand the socio-cultural process of aging in transitional societies and utilizes rich opportunities for cross-fertilization of ideas, disciplines and methods to advance the gerontological promise of critical inquiry, training and practice.

Feeling in Others: Essays on Empathy and Suffering in Modern American Culture addresses different kinds of suffering as presented in texts, visual and verbal, and proposes empathy as an ethical exigency of the act of reading and critical tool. The volume brings together contributions from Americanists in France, Norway, Austria, Hungary, and Spain. It examines paintings, comic strips, autobiographies, fictional narratives, and poems on pain from a variety of critical perspectives, bringing together the fields of cognitive psychology, phenomenology, literary criticism, and architecture to account for the complexity of the contagious difference of pain.

Critical intersectional scholarship enhances researchers’ and scholar-activists’ ability to open novel research frontiers. This forward-thinking Research Handbook demonstrates how to pursue fluid and innovative research approaches, identify differences from traditional methodologies, and overcome the common challenges faced when carrying out intersectional research.

This book reflects on the implications of neurobiology and the scientific worldview on aspects of religious experience, belief, and practice, focusing especially on the body and the construction of religious meaning.

"With fine-tuned ethnographic sensibility, Jenkins explores the lived experience of psychosis, trauma, and depression among people of diverse cultural orientations, eloquently showing how mental illness engages fundamental human processes of self, desire, gender, identity, attachment, and meaning. Her studies illustrate the shaping of human reality and subjectivity in light of extreme psychological suffering, and shed light on psycho-political processes of alterity, precarity, and repression in the social rendering of the mentally ill as non-human or less than fully human. Extraordinary Conditions addresses the critical need to empathically engage the experience of persons living with conditions that are culturally defined as mental illness. Jenkins compellingly shows that mental illness is better characterized in terms of struggle than symptoms and that culture matters vitally in all aspects of mental illness from onset to recovery. Analysis at this edge of experience refashions the boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary, routine and extreme, healthy and pathological. The book argues that the study of mental illness is indispensable to anthropological understanding of culture and experience, and reciprocally that understanding culture and experience is critical to the study of mental illness. While anthropology neglects the extraordinary to its theoretical and empirical peril, psychiatry neglects culture to its theoretical and clinical peril"--Provided by publisher.