This article is part of the following series: Reworking the Cognitive Bias
How do mental illnesses sound? What are the stakes of using machines to render the signs of psychiatric suffering audible? These questions drive the teams of psychiatric and engineering professionals I study. They also animate my own ethnographic inquiries into listening as a gendered, racialized form of labor and care, and the politics of framing mental health care in the …
Domesticating Organ Transplant: Familial Sacrifice and National Aspiration in Mexico
Duke University Press, 2016, 336 pages
In Domesticating Organ Transplant: Familial Sacrifice and National Aspiration in Mexico, Megan Crowley-Matoka carefully grapples with the symbols and everyday practices of organ transplantation in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her research focuses on transplantations that take place in two resource poor yet key …
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter
W. W. Norton, 2013, paperback, 627 pages.
Incomplete Nature is a big book, literally and conceptually. The subtitle “How Mind Emerged From Matter” hints of a grand synthesis and Terrence Deacon, chair of University of California–Berkeley’s anthropology department, presents a dense argument which defies usual labels. The result is part …
This article is part of the following series: Second opinion
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 …