Main description:

For more than three decades the author has been concerned with issues to do with emotion, suffering and healing. This volume presents ethnographic studies of South Wales, Maharashtra and post-Soviet Latvia connected by a theoretical interest in healing, emotion and subjectivity. Exploring the uses of narrative in the shaping of memory, autobiography and illness and its connections with the master narratives of history and culture, it focuses on the post-Soviet clinic as an arena in which the contradictions of a liberal economy are translated into a medical language.

Contents:

List of Figures List of Tables Note on Site of Original Publication Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. Empathy and Healing: Aspects of Spiritualist Ritual Chapter 3. Bodily Madness and the Spread of the Blush Chapter 4. The Symbolic Significance of Menstruation and the Menopause Chapter 5. Women and Affliction in Maharstra: A Hydraulic Model of Health and Illness Chapter 6. Anthropology and Psychiatry: The Uneasy Alliance Chapter 7. Remembering and Forgetting: Anthropology and Psychiatry - The Changing Relationship Chapter 8. A Historical Disorder: Neurasthenia and the Testimony of Lives in Latvia Chapter 9. Narratives of the Body and History: Illness in Judgement on the Soviet Past Chapter 10. From Damaged Nerves to Masked Depression: Inevitability and Hope in Latvian Psychiatric Narratives Chapter 11. Looking for a Subject: Latvian Memory and Narrative Chapter 12. The Expropriated Harvest: Narratives of Deportation and Collectivization in North-East Latvia Chapter 13. Narratives of Landscape in Latvian History and Memory Chapter 14. Arguing with the KGB Archives: Archival and Narrative Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia Chapter 15. Varieties of Deception and Distrust: Moral Dilemmas in the Ethnography of Psychiatry Bibliography Index