“I went instead for the particular, and tried to come to terms with Ind and IndL, and did so not by cramming but by becoming a flaneur of the stacks.”[i] There are many wonderful and evocative turns of phrase in No Aging in India, but few others offer quite the same invitation into a way of being amid …
Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran
Stanford University Press, 2016, 328 pages
Orkideh Behrouzan’s first ethnographic endeavor, Prozak Diaries (2016), explores a question that has provoked much interest in the Middle East in recent years: what’s with all the talk about depression nowadays? The influence of Western clinical psychiatry seems to traverse language: the …
How does one use a book? We are well trained in how to read a book. We know how to interpret, decipher or clarify the content of the pages we read. But what about a different kind of engagement with a book? One less immediately oriented toward the satisfactions of comprehension and discernment and more oriented to use.
I …
Commentary and speculation after this election have focused on voters’ motives and emotional states, and, especially in the day or two after the result, why experts didn’t know in advance how this would turn out. Why did public opinion polling skew the way it did? What does this teach us about voting and its psychological and social dimensions? These questions …
Last September, a group of scholars gathered at the State University of Rio de Janeiro for “Autism Spectrum Disorders in Global, Local and Personal Perspective: A Cross-Cultural Workshop”. The event was organized by Clarice Rios, a postdoctoral fellow at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, and Elizabeth Fein, a professor of psychology at Duquesne University, and funded by the …
The The Americanization of Narcissism
Harvard University Press, 2014, 384 pages.
Historians have not handled psychoanalysis very well. The clumsy reductionism of much of the psychohistory movement is usually Exhibit A, though historians such as Dominick LaCapra and Joan Scott have been developing more nuanced ways of using psychoanalytic ideas for History. But the historiography of psychoanalysis has also had …