Empathy and Healing: Essays in Medical and Narrative Anthropology

For more than three decades the author has been concerned with issues to do with emotion, suffering and healing. This volume presents ethnographic studies of South Wales, Maharashtra and post-Soviet Latvia connected by a theoretical interest in healing, emotion and subjectivity. Exploring the uses of narrative in the shaping of memory, autobiography and illness and its connections with the master narratives of history and culture, it focuses on the post-Soviet clinic as an arena in which the contradictions of a liberal economy are translated into a medical language

Introduction -- Empathy and healing : aspects of spiritualist ritual -- Bodily madness and the spread of the blush -- The symbolic significance of menstruation and the menopause -- Women and affliction in Maharstra : a hydraulic model of health and illness -- Anthropology and psychiatry : the uneasy alliance -- Remembering and forgetting : anthropology and psychiatry : the changing relationship -- A historical disorder : neurasthenia and the testimony of lives in Latvia -- Narratives of the body and history : illness in judgement on the Soviet past -- From damaged nerves to masked depression : inevitability and hope in Latvian psychiatric narratives -- Looking for a subject : Latvian memory and narrative -- The expropriated harvest : narratives of deportation and collectivization in north-east Latvia -- Narratives of landscape in Latvian history and memory -- Arguing with the KGB archives : archival and narrative memory in post-Soviet Latvia -- Varieties of deception and distrust : moral dilemmas in the ethnography of psychiatry