What would an anthropological investigation of 'trauma studies' look like? I have used this section in my teaching in order to urge students to think critically about the given-ness of concepts such as 'trauma'. Here is a sample of the readings I have used:
Ethnographic Writing and Cultural Critique: Globalisation, the Postmodern, and Knowledge Production in the Global South
The aim of this session is to get a general sense of the ways in which anthropologists have understood globalisation and how they have situated ethnographic practice and cultural critique with regard to it. What do micro-studies of the so-called Global South teach us about our disciplinary and cultural assumptions? Whose ‘knowledge’ is legitimate? What is knowledge? Is knowledge a cultural construction?
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester, Manchester University Press: Read Introduction + Section 6-8 (p18-31):https://monoskop.org/images/e/e0/Lyotard_Jean-Francois_The_Postmodern_Condition_A_Report_on_Knowledge.pdf
Fischer, M., J. 1999. Emergent Forms of Life: Anthropologies of Late or Postmodernities. Annual Review of Anthropology,28:455-478.
Fischer, Michael M J. 2004. Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry. Duke University Press: Selected Chapters
Latour, Bruno. 1993. Crisis”, and “Constitution, in Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern. New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Knowledge Production in the Global South
El Shakry, O. The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017: Introduction, chapter1 and chapter 3
[If you don’t have access to the book, then read:
El Shakry, O. (2014). The Arabic Freud: The Unconscious And The Modern Subject. Modern Intellectual History, 11(1), 89-118.
El Shakry, O. (2011). Youth As Peril And Promise: The Emergence Of Adolescent Psychology In Postwar Egypt. International Journal Of Middle East Studies, 43(4), 591-610.]
Behrouzan, Orkideh. 2016. Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran.Stanford: Chapters 2 and 7
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 2013. Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran. Duke: Introduction
Kitanaka Junko. 2003. 'Jungians and the Rise of Psychotherapy in Japan: A Brief Historical Note'. Transcultural Psychiatry. 40(2): 239–247:
Retchman, Richard. The rebirth of PTSD: the rise of a new paradigm in psychiatrySocial Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. 2004, Volume 39, Issue 11,p 913-915
Lurhmann, T. 2011. Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry: Introduction.
Patai, R. 2002. The Arab Mind. Hatherleigh Press.
Pandolfo, S. 2008. The Knot of the Soul: Postcolonial Conundrums, Madness, and the Imagination. In Postcolonial Disorders. University of California Press, pp:329-358.
DelVecchio, M-J., Hyde, S., Pinto, S. and Good, B. 2008. (eds). Postcolonial Disorders. University of California Press.
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