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Personhood and emotion -- Performing the "rationality" of "irrationality" -- Managing mania and depression -- I now pronounce you manic depressive -- Inside the diagnosis -- Pharmaceutical personalities -- Taking the measure of moods and motivations -- Revaluing mania -- Manic markets

As a result of the strength and dominance of the centralized state, ritual action in China often takes its logic from political action. In this book Emily Ahern explores the implications of this. She argues that forms of control attempted ritually on non-human persons (gods and other spirits) in China parallel those forms of control which people regard as effective in ordinary life, namely political control, and draws important conclusions from this. She shows that in China it is possible to discard terms such as 'magic', which imply that acts directed to spirits operate on a different basis from acts in ordinary life. She also challenges claims in anthropology that, since they seem arbitrary and the actions of participants in them highly predictable, rituals support established authority. Her book will be of interest not only to specialists in Chinese studies, but to social anthropologists and others interested in the link between ritual and political processes

Returning to Marcel Mauss's classic work on the person, this essay explores Mauss's distinction between personne and personnage and the distinction used in contemporary anthropology between dividual and individual. Using these terms of analysis, I use the insights gained from recent ethnographic research in laboratories of experimental psychology to show how some parts of the practices used in these settings have become the foundation of social media. I consider whether social media has created a world focused almost entirely on the autonomous and socially isolated individual or whether the socially embedded "dividual" can be equally present/recognized in these settings.

AbstractReflecting on the early days of her career, and her experiences of being mentored by Leith Mullings, Emily Martin shares the ways in which Leith Mullings pioneered intersectionality as a mode of analysis, and advocacy. Martin works through many of Mullings's major scholarly contribution to anthropology and feminist thought, and calls upon her readers to continue Mullings's legacy into the future.

In everyday Euro‐American understandings, blood is both vital and dangerous to the brain. Why, then, are there virtually no illustrations of the brain in contemporary neuroscience that include the blood vessels needed to supply the brain with its vital energy? Photographs, drawings, scans, images, and other kinds of visual material illustrate the location, function, and shape of nervous tissue in the brain in endless variety and detail. But to see where the blood vessels that supply the brain lie, one has to turn to texts on the anatomy of cerebral vasculature or medical literature specifically devoted to the diagnosis and treatment of brain injury. Blood is simultaneously essential to contemporary understandings of brain physiology and segregated into distinct domains. Using visual depictions in medical illustrations and web‐based discussions among patients with brain injury, this paper explores what kind of special object blood is in contemporary neuroscience.

This essay explores how the distinctively anthropological concept of culture provides uniquely valuable insights into the workings of science in its cultural context. Recent efforts by anthropologists to dislodge the traditional notion of culture as a homogenous, stable whole have opened up a variety of ways of imagining culture that place power differentials, flux, and contradiction at its center. Including attention to a wide variety of social domains outside the laboratory, attending to the ways nonscientists actively engage with scientific knowledge, and focusing on the complex interactions that flow both into and out of research laboratories are ways the activities of both scientists and nonscientists can be situated in the heterogeneous matrtx of culture. Three images—the citadel, the rhizome, and the string figure—allow us to picture the discontinuous ways science both permeates and is permeated by cultural life.

Discusses the potential contributions of the field of anthropology to the study of science & culture. It is argued that both science & the humanities have always been fundamental constituents of anthropology. However, the isolation & supposed objective stance of the scientific community have led to a dangerous lack of critical analysis from academics within & outside the scientific realm. Further, the existence of a purely objective perspective has recently been questioned, & it is suggested that science functions not isolated from, but as a central component of, the institutions that reinforce inequality & submission in the modern world. Recent anthropologic research evidences the fact that even the isolated citadels of science are affected by culture; scientific knowledge is created by & through nonscientific influences. Anthropology provides a necessary framework in which the relations between science & culture are not fixed, but discontinuous, fractured, & constantly changing. 20 References. T. Sevier