Empathy and Healing: Essays in Medical and Narrative Anthropology

Vieda Skultans

Published by Berghahn Books 2008

Empathy and Healing

Essays in Medical and Narrative Anthropology

Vieda Skultans

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780857450364

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Vieda Skultans is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bristol. Her previous publications include The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in post-Soviet Latvia (Routledge, 1998).

Reviews

“Arguably, Vieda Skultans is the most prominent contemporary Latvian social anthropologist…One of the best assets of this book is its introduction. In its 15 lucid and condensed pages, Skultans summarizes her intellectual journey and contextualizes the articles presented in the collection, thus providing readers with a highly efficient guide to the themes that hold the book together.” · Journal of Baltic Studies

“If anthropologists want to attend to wider audiences and adjoining disciplinary perspectives, this book is an inspiring example of how anthropology can be both challenged and enriched by such dialogue. Few have managed this with Skultans’s dexterity or determination.” · JRAI

“This volume brings together for the first time many of Skultans's important, even ground-breaking essays on psychiatry, religion and culture. It is a gift for those of us working in the field.” · Tanya Luhrmann, University of Chicago

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Figures Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Tables Publicly Available Download PDF	viii
Note on Site of Original Publication Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1. Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Empathy and Healing: Aspects of Spiritualist Ritual Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	16
3. Bodily Madness and the Spread of the Blush Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	30
4. The Symbolic Significance of Menstruation and the Menopause Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
5. Women and Affliction in Maharstra: A Hydraulic Model of Health and Illness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	58
6. Anthropology and Psychiatry: The Uneasy Alliance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	96
7. Remembering and Forgetting: Anthropology and Psychiatry – The Changing Relationship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	112
8. A Historical Disorder: Neurasthenia and the Testimony of Lives in Latvia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	122
9. Narratives of the Body and History: Illness in Judgement on the Soviet Past Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
10. From Damaged Nerves to Masked Depression: Inevitability and Hope in Latvian Psychiatric Narratives Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	156
11. Looking for a Subject: Latvian Memory and Narrative Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
12. The Expropriated Harvest: Narratives of Deportation and Collectivization in North-East Latvia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	190
13. Narratives of Landscape in Latvian History and Memory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205
14. Arguing with the KGB Archives: Archival and Narrative Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	224
15. Varieties of Deception and Distrust: Moral Dilemmas in the Ethnography of Psychiatry Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	244
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	264
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279

Language: English
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 294
Keywords: Medical Anthropology

eBook

Published: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 9780857450364