The latest issue of Transcultural Psychiatry is devoted to “Cultures of the Internet” – also the title of the 2011 McGill Advanced Study Institute (ASI) in Cultural Psychiatry at which many of the papers were originally presented. In our introductory essay to the issue, Laurence Kirmayer, Sadeq Rahimi and I examine some of the issues which the Internet and other …
Tag Archives: Identity
Agency, biogenetic discourse and psychiatric disorder
In recent years, a growing (and pleasingly interdisciplinary) literature has developed around the intersecting themes of neurogenetic ‘explanatory’ narratives, largely pharmaceutically-driven processes of medicalization, stigma and socioclinical identity in the context of psychiatric disorder. In this post I aim to briefly review two of the most immediate and provocative of these publications, and then launch a more free-ranging reflection on …
Ian Hacking – “The New Me: What Biotechnology may do to Personal Identity”
I recently came across a video of a relatively recent lecture which Ian Hacking gave at Huron University College, entitled, “The New Me: What Biotechnology may do to Personal Identity.” The short (15 min) talk — embedded below — reprises many of the issues Hacking has been dealing with for the past several years (e.g.”Ian Hacking on commercial genome-reading…
"Keywords" in Current Anthropology
The latest issue of Current Anthropology includes an interesting new section called “Keywords.” Like the book by Raymond Williams after which it is named, the new section contains essays discussing terms which are both “significant, binding words in certain activities and their interpretation” and “indicative words in certain forms of thought,” (Willams 1976 cited in …
Ian Hacking on commercial genome-reading
Chris Kelty at Savage Minds directs our attention to an excellent discussion on commercial genome-reading hosted by the National Humanities Center’s On the Human project. An excellent post by Ian Hacking on genome reading services offered by companies like 23andMe, receives commentary from Paul Rabinow, Gisli Palsson, Norton Wise and others. There is also a follow-up post…