Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations
Joao Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman
Abstract
This book is an extended intellectual conversation about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. Examining the ethnography of the modern subject, this group of scholars probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. Contributors consider what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communities are transformed or displaced by free trade economics, terrorism, and war; how new information and medical technologies reshape the relation one has to oneself; and which ... More
This book is an extended intellectual conversation about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. Examining the ethnography of the modern subject, this group of scholars probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. Contributors consider what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communities are transformed or displaced by free trade economics, terrorism, and war; how new information and medical technologies reshape the relation one has to oneself; and which forms of subjectivity and life possibilities are produced against a world in pieces. The transdisciplinary conversation includes anthropologists, historians of science, psychologists, a literary critic, a philosopher, physicians, and an economist. The authors touch on how we think and write about contingency, human agency, and ethics today.
Keywords:
personal lives,
modern subject,
personhood,
Western societies,
non-Western societies,
individual subjectivity,
nations,
communities,
free trade economics,
terrorism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2007 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780520247925 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: May 2012 |
DOI:10.1525/california/9780520247925.001.0001 |
