A French-language version of this piece, written by Nicolas Henckes, first appeared on h-madness. It has been translated into English by Anne Lovell and is also being posted simultaneously on h-madness.
French sociologist and historian Robert Castel passed away on March 12, 2013, at the age of 79. An important figure in French intellectual life over the past …
I have been intending to return and continue the two lines of discussion I had started earlier concerning the broader theme of political subjectivity and the more specific issue of metonymic and metaphoric functions for a while now, but too many things stopped me from doing so. Thankfully a recent comment/question by Malte about my earlier posting on metaphor and …
The latest issue of Ethos, guest edited by Sarah Willen and Don Seeman, brings together the phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches in the anthropology of experience — making an argument for a closer engagement between these two modes of conceptualizing subjectivity. The idea that this represents a moment of conceptual reorientation is most clearly articulated by Byron Good’s reflection on …
A few days ago I mentioned that summaries of the panels from January’s Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR)-UCLA conference on Cultural and Biological Contexts of Psychiatric Disorder were being posted on the FPR blog. Now Constance Cummings, Project Director at the FPR, has begun uploading videos of some events to the FPR’s YouTube page.
The first of …
There are few subject areas in anthropology untouched by the seminal thought of the late Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss. Though he published only two or three essays concerned expressly with medical subject matter, his theorization in those places of the role of myth and shamanistic authority in symbolic/magical healing opened up questions with lasting significance. I would like to briefly review …