As members of Somatosphere’s Editorial Collaborative, we have been following the unfolding crisis surrounding Hau with profound concern (Agro 2018, Flaherty 2018). As others have noted, this crisis has revealed multiple structural issues that deserve intense engagement beyond the specifics of the individual case: open-access (OA), digital scholarship and publication, yes, but also academic power, precarity, and vulnerability; …
Author Archives: Neely Myers
The collaborative turn: interdisciplinarity across the human sciences
This article is part of the series: The collaborative turn: interdisciplinarity across the human sciences
Questions of health, medicine and science have long animated sub-disciplinary attentions in the social sciences and humanities. Recently, however, research around these topics has taken a marked collaborative turn. If topics in the medical and health sciences were once straightforward objects of study for anthropological, sociological or philosophical analysis, increasingly, to work ‘on’ such topics often means also to work …
The Afflictions Series: an Interview with Ethnographic Filmmaker Robert Lemelson
When Robert Lemelson, an anthropologist, filmmaker, and research professor at UCLA, recently visited the George Washington University to speak at a conference on how ethnographic films can help us understand torture, I had to request an interview. I confess—I have long been a fan of Lemelson’s films, which I have seen screened at meetings as large as those …
The Neuroanthropology of Embodiment, Absorption, and Dissociation
Got Absorption? Towards a Neuroanthropology of Play and Ritual
Cross-posted with Neuroanthropology.
On Thursday, Nov. 17th at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Montreal, Canada, I attended a double panel of neuroanthropologists hosted by the Society for Psychological Anthropology. Organized by Christopher Dana Lynn (University of Alabama) and Jeffrey G. Snodgrass (Colorado State University), the panel was entitled …
Book Review: Jonathan Metzl’s The Protest Psychosis
Jonathan Metzl’s The Protest Psychosis: How schizophrenia became a black disease (Beacon Press, 2010) is an ideal introductory text for introducing students to ethical issues surrounding politics, prejudice, and psychiatric diagnosis. The reader will experience the indignity and paranoia that African American men being treated for schizophrenia in the 1960s and 1970s had to face. They will come to Call for Research: Ethnography, Psychosis and At-Risk Groups
An article this week in Nature highlights new issues surrounding the intersections of psychosis, clinical risk, and adolescence. Psychosis is now thought to lie along a “continuum” in the population from “at-risk” groups who have “psychotic-like experiences” (PLEs) (e.g., hallucinations and delusions that are transient or do not disrupt social functioning) (Meehl 1962; Polanczyk, Moffitt et al. 2010) to people …