I have never lost my childhood habit of beachcombing for special rocks and shells, and I think of ethnography as involving a similar process of collecting bits of evidence. Mostly what I collect are words (interviews, quotations, or notes) that I then use to make various kinds of word compositions (descriptions, analyses, arguments, and articles). But words do also have …
I am a cultural anthropologist who conducts research with deaf children and their families in Mexico City. Echarle ganas is a Mexican colloquial expression that roughly translates to “you have to give it your all.” “Échale ganas!” or “work at it!” is often heard as a rallying cry when things are not going as desired. This saying is …
In this response we address how the recent language controversy surrounding the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) must be considered as part of a broader politicisation of public health services used by women and minority groups in the US context, which has international implications given the influential position of the CDC in global health governance. Our individual areas …
Editor’s note: As part of our new series, Second Opinion (not to be confused with the SMA’s similarly titled newsletter) we ask two contributors to review the same book, respond to the same question, or comment on the same set of issues. For our first pair of Second Opinion posts, we invited two reviews of Eduardo Kohn’s new book, How …
Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety
Princeton University Press, 2010.
323 pp., US$29.95 (paperback).
E. Summerson Carr’s Scripting Addiction is an ethnography of American talk therapy for drug users. It explores the myriad ways in which symptoms of addiction are constructed, identified, and managed in this setting. Carr’s rich and …
Last month a small, international gathering of twenty-seven anthropologists and psychologists took place at the Stanford Humanities Center, organized by Stanford anthropology professor Tanya Luhrmann and Culture and Mind postdoctoral fellows Julia Cassaniti, and Jocelyn Marrow, with financial support from the Robert Lemelson Foundation. (See end of post for full list of participants.
The session on “selves” in …