BiblioVault - Books about Psychiatry, Transcultural

A Culture of Corruption?

Coping with Government in Post-communist Europe

William L. Miller

Central European University Press, 2001

Based upon surveys and interviews with government officials and citizens, this book focuses on issues such as bribery, corruption, inefficiency and freedom of information in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The authors go beyond an analysis of public perceptions and behaviour and look at public attitudes towards proposals for reform. They reveal how the problem of citizens' interactions with officials varies in kind as well as in degree across the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

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Hand Trembling, Frenzy Witchcraft, and Moth Madness

A Study of Navajo Seizure Disorders

Jerrold E. Levy

University of Arizona Press, 1987

According to traditional Navajo belief, seizures are the result of sibling incest, sexual witchcraft, or possession by a supernatural spirit—associations that have kept such disorders from being known outside Navajo families. This new study is concerned with discovering why the Navajos have accorded seizures such importance and determining their meaning in the larger context of Navajo culture. The book is based on a 14-year study of some 40 Navajo patients and on an epidemiological survey among the Navajos and among three Pueblo tribes.

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On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

Bruno Latour

Duke University Press, 2010

On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods continues the project that the influential anthropologist, philosopher, and science studies theorist Bruno Latour advanced in his book We Have Never Been Modern. There he redescribed the Enlightenment idea of universal scientific truth, arguing that there are no facts separable from their fabrication. In this concise work, Latour delves into the “belief in naive belief,” the suggestion that fetishes—objects invested with mythical powers—are fabricated and that facts are not. Mobilizing his work in the anthropology of science, he uses the notion of “factishes” to explore a way of respecting the objectivity of facts and the power of fetishes without forgetting that both are fabricated. While the fetish-worshipper knows perfectly well that fetishes are man-made, the Modern icon-breaker inevitably erects new icons. Yet Moderns sense no contradiction at the core of their work. Latour pursues his critique of critique, or the possibility of mediating between subject and object, or the fabricated and the real, through the notion of “iconoclash,” making productive comparisons between scientific practice and the worship of visual images and religious icons.

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Unconscious Dominions

Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties

Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, and Richard C. Keller, eds.

Duke University Press, 2011

By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European and North American ideas about the colonial world and the character and potential of native cultures. Psychoanalytic discourse, from Freud’s description of female sexuality as a “dark continent” to his conceptualization of primitive societies and the origins of civilization, became inextricable from the ideologies underlying European expansionism. But as it was adapted in the colonies and then the postcolonies, psychoanalysis proved surprisingly useful for theorizing anticolonialism and postcolonial trauma.

Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is colonial and psychoanalytic, but, until now, this intersection has scarcely been explored, much less examined in comparative perspective. Taking on that project, Unconscious Dominions assembles essays based on research in Australia, Brazil, France, Haiti, and Indonesia, as well as India, North Africa, and West Africa. Even as they reveal the modern psychoanalytic subject as constitutively colonial, they shed new light on how that subject went global: how people around the world came to recognize the hybrid configuration of unconscious, ego, and superego in themselves and others.

Contributors
Warwick Anderson
Alice Bullard
John Cash
Joy Damousi
Didier Fassin
Christiane Hartnack
Deborah Jenson
Richard C. Keller
Ranjana Khanna
Mariano Plotkin
Hans Pols

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With the Wind and the Waves

A Guide to Mental Health Practices in Alaska Native Communities

Ray M. Droby

University of Alaska Press, 2020

In With the Wind and the Waves, psychologist Ray M. Droby tells a story of treatment and learning, drawing on experiences ranging from an ocean journey he took on the Bering Sea while serving in a Alaska Native community to his clinical work as a psychologist in rural Alaska. Like negotiating an ocean, Droby moves “with the wind and the waves” while working with substance abuse disorders and mental health issues superimposed on intergenerational trauma and internalized oppression. He captures positive momentum in work aimed at facilitating self-determination with Alaska Natives and their communities while discouraging historical dependency and colonizing patterns of thinking and doing for mental health workers. Sensitive to the history of non-Native outsiders imposing their own culture on Native land, Droby presents here principles, combined with cultural and therapy considerations, that are designed to help people avoid replicating this history of harm. Recognizing the strengths of Alaska Natives and their communities, and the stages of change human individuals and communities undergo, Droby shows how to exercise a nonjudgmental presence as a mental health worker in rural Alaska.

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