July 2, 2008
Oh, Lord, what have I gotten myself into?
I started this post the day before yesterday, and I could have sworn I saved a draft. But it’s not anywhere to be found. So, I’m starting over. That may be a good thing, because there was some bitter snark in the post, and it wasn’t very attractive. And as I get on in my degree, I’ve been getting more and more nervous about what I say on this blog and how it might be interpreted by the absurdly politically correct academics who may be interested in hiring me. (You’re getting your wish, Mom. I’m self-censoring!) I wish I could just write books and work for myself and then be able to say whatever I wanted to. But somehow, I doubt that is going to be an option. Unless I win the lottery or it turns out I have a billionaire relative who I don’t know about and s/he dies, leaving me a chunk-o-change.
But in the meantime, I need to finish this doctorate degree. The hoop-of-the-month is a qualifying paper — 35 or so pages of coherent prose on “medicine and experience.” This means I have to read an absurd number of texts and string together my thoughts on these texts so that my committee will be able to grill me on the texts (and theories therein) during my oral exam in December. I’m a wee bit behind, per usual.
(Really, more than a sudden gift of a few hundred million dollars, I’d really like the discipline to do what I really want to do, like get my work done on time, get to the gym four times a week, and get 50 pages of my novel and/or memoir written every two weeks. How does one get discipline? Please, if you know, tell me.)
So, in a bit of masochism that all of you sadists might enjoy, I’m going to post my reading list for this paper and cross off each text when I’m doing reading (and writing its entry in my annotated bibliography). Visit this page and see what I’ve read. It’ll be fun if you play along! And let me know if you have any suggestions or comments on the list. And by “you,” I mean the five people who still read this blog.
Here’s the list. It even has subheadings!
I. GREATEST HITS, Vol. 1: Early Med/Pscyh Anth Theorizing
A. Illness and Society: How is illness interpreted, absorbed, and used?
1. Belief and Rationality
a. Evans-Pritchard, EE, Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande
b. Rivers, WHR, Medicine, Magic, and Religion
c. Good, Byron, Medicine, Rationality, and Experience
2. Symbolic Anthropology
a. Levi-Strauss, Claude, “The Effectiveness of Symbols” and “The Sorcerer and His Magic” in Structural Anthropology.
b. Mauss, Marcel, “Techniques of the Body”
3. Structure and Function
a. Parsons, Talcott, “The Sick Role” in The Social System
B. Ab/normal: How is ab/normality constructed and defined?
1. Boasian Anthropology
a. Sapir, Edward, Selected Writings in Language, Culture, and Personality
b. Benedict, Ruth, “Anthropology and the Abnormal”
c. Hallowell, A. Irving, “The Self and its Behavioral Environment”
II. GREATEST HITS, Vol. 2: Post-Structuralism, Post-Modernism, Med/Psych Anthropology
A. Political economy, Part 1: How is medicine historically constructed?
1. Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic and Madness and Civilization and Discipline & Punish and The History of Sexuality, Part 1
2. Young, Allan, “The Anthropologies of Illness and Sickness”
3. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol. 2, no. 4: “Gramsci, Marxism, and Phenomenology: Essays for the Development of Critical Medical Anthropology”
B. Political economy, Part 2: How is suffering historically constructed?
1. Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds., Social Suffering
2. Farmer, Paul, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues
C. Medicalization & Stigmatization: How are patients constructed?
1. Stigma
a. Goffman, Erving, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
b. Conrad and Schneider, Deviance and Medicalization
c. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Margaret Lock, “The Message in the Bottle: Illness and the Micropolitics of Resistance”
d. Gussow, Z. & G.S. Tracy, “Status, ideology and adaptation to stigmatized illness: A study of leprosy.”
e. Waxler, Nancy, “Learning to be a leper: A case study in the social construction of illness”
2. Medicalization
a. Jenkins, Janis, “The State Construction of Affect: Political Ethos and Mental Health among Salvadoran Refugees”
b. Kleinman, Arthur, The Social Origins of Distress and Disease
3. Biomedicalization
a. Clarke, Adele, et al, “Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine”
b. Rose, Nikolas, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century
c. Epstein, Steven, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research
D. Medical Discourse: How do people talk about illness and medicince?
1. Kleinman, Arthur, Illness Narratives
2. Sontag, Susan, Ilness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors
3. Good, Byron, “The Heart of What’s the Matter: the Semantics of Illness in Iran”
4. Kuipers, Joel, “‘Medical Discourse’ in Anthropological Context: Views of Language and Power”
5. Briggs, Charles, Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling During a Medical Nightmare
6. Briggs, Charles, “Communicability, Racial Discourse, and Disease”
E. The Body: How does the body experience sickness?
1. Bourdieu, Pierre, various and sundry…
2. Csordas, Thomas, Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self
3. Kleinman, Arthur, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture
4. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock, “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology”
5. Martin, Emily, Flexible Bodies
F. Subjectivity: How do doctors and patients construct and experience their selves?
1. Holland, Dorothy, William Lachicotte, Jr., Debra Skinner, and Carole Cain, eds.,Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds
2. Bourgois, Philippe, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio
3. Obeyesekere, Ganath, Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience
4. Jenkins, Janis, Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience
5. Luhrmann, Tanya, Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry
6. Biehl, João, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
7. Biehl, João, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman, eds., Subjectivity
8. Good, Mary-Jo, Sandra Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron Good, eds. Postcolonial Disorders
G. Emotion [I kinda need to fill this section in. Hmmm.]
6 Responses to 'Oh, Lord, what have I gotten myself into?'
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Oh my God reading this gave me a headache. Good luck Ted!
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I certainly feel your pain about self-censorship. While I haven’t landed the “lucrative”* tenure track job, I’ve held back on some of my own posts.
Good luck with the dissertation!
*this word can only be used with a great measure of irony.
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Looks like you’ve got a full docket! I don’t know whether to be jealous (a lot of it sounds really interesting) or to have pity. Perhaps I’ll do both.
A couple of thoughts…
What about something by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross? It seems to me that you can’t talk about illness without in some way touching on death as a subject. I’ve never read anything of hers, so it may be total bunk, but it was one of the first things that came to mind after, of course, thinking of Susan Sontag (which you’ve already read). And I do believe Kubler-Ross was one of the grandmothers of the modern hospice movement… so perhaps she can’t be all that crackpotty.
She’s not at all crackpotty! She’s often referenced in the self-help and therapeutic psychology stuff, and the abbreviated stuff I’ve read is pretty good. It hadn’t occurred to me to bring in death at this point, but it may come up. (Though one of the good things about studying HIV/AIDS in the US nowadays is that there is a lot less death to deal with. Sigh.) Thanks for reminding me of her.
Also (not sure if this is too far afield) there’s a text by David Matsumoto called “Culture and Psychology” which might be interesting in terms of filling out your “emotion” section. Basically the book goes through how culture changes what is considered aberrant/normal, but even more fascinating (to me, anyway) is that psychological perceptions of diseases may vary from culture to culture– so much so that something like depression may have a totally different set of symptoms in one culture or another. Somehow to me this seems to get at the idea of subjectivity not just being on the individual level, but on the cultural level as well.
That Matsumoto book has come up in some of my searches, but it looks a bit survey-ish. I think I’m going to end up reading all the stuff that he synthesizes. But maybe I’ll get the book to help me make sense of the more difficult stuff. Would be good to have around! Thanks! –Ed.
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Wow! That is a list!
I love Emily Martin. Her text Woman and the Body (?) is a favorite of mine. It almost made me become a midwife. Almost.
I also really like The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry.
Good luck! I feel your pain.
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This post does NOT make me want to go back to school!
See you in August i hope!
Lo aka MOH[Reply]
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You do know how to bring out the perky sadist in me. You certainly have the art of the outline down. Look at how nice your alignment is! It’s very pretty. Only 29 more to go, if we ignore the emotion section. 29. And you’ve only read 15 so far. Oh dear.
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Beth Kwon
2 Jul 08 at 12:09 pm