Subjectivity
Ethnographic Imaginations
Editors | João Biehl & Byron J. Good & Arthur Kleinman
Contributors | Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Arthur Kleinman and Erin Fitz-Henry, Veena Das, Ranendra K. Das, Paul Rabinow, Stephen Greenblatt, Allan Young, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Byron J. Good, Subandi, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Ellen Corin, Anne M. Lovell, Evelyn Fox Keller, Eric L. Krakauer, João Biehl, Michael M. J. Fischer
About the Book | 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.
Reviews
“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
“This volume is destined to set the tone and agenda for discussion of subjectivity for a considerable time. It illuminates the threads that span the vast existential space between the edifice of technologized global institutions and the nuanced particularities of individual experience. This is a dynamic (definite, state-of-the art) contribution to anthropology and the human sciences by a stellar cast of authors.” —Thomas Csordas, author of Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement
“This is a timely and much needed volume. No other works address the cultural, political, and social dimensions of subjectivity in such a fresh and conceptual way.” —Robert Desjarlais, author of Sensory Biographies