Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms
by Tobias Rees
University of California Press, 2016, 352 pages
Plastic Reason is an excellent occasion to reflect on the relationship between poetry and science.
One might feel the proverbial contrastive tension in naming together poetry and science, a tension one finds in certain intellectual habits that foreground a …
…“Are cultural anthropologists ready to shed their habit of using society and culture? (…) No, I don’t feel so. (…) It seems to me that many anthropologists wish to keep the human (…). There is a tricky problem here: concentrating around the human could mean either maintaining this character apart from other entities — the former beings of ‘nature’ defining
Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria
Duke University Press, 2014, 256 pages.
Chemical Arbitrage
We tend to think of pharmaceuticals as chemical matter caught up in complicated legal and economic relationships, but it is probably more useful to think of them as legal artifacts oriented towards a potential (but by no means guaranteed) biochemical …
A Commentary on Angela Garcia’s The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande
University of California Press, 2010
264 pp., US$ 28.95 (paperback)
In his sprawling and widely lauded novel Infinite Jest, the late David Foster Wallace offers a riveting portrait of modern addiction. Scenes of the banality of Twelve-Step programs drew on Wallace’s own experiences in …
The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy
by Todd Meyers
University of Washington Press, 2013
172 pp, US$25.00 (paperback)
The Clinic and Elsewhere is an extremely well-crafted account of the methodological, conceptual and narrative problems of knowledge and life of the afterlife of drug therapy. Todd Meyers gives expressive form to the attempt to cure, to …
Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community
Princeton University Press, 2013. 280 pp, US$ 29.95 (Cloth)
“They didn’t get into the details of real life, the little things,” a troubled U.S. war veteran criticizes a PTSD primer for returning soldiers in Kenneth MacLeish’s ethnography Making War at Fort Hood. …