Suchergebnisse

Stefan Ecks (2014), Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India. New York, NY: New York University Press. 223 pp., $75 (Hardcover), ISBN: 978-0814724767.

AbstractThis issue aims to assess the state of claims over intangible forms of property, which have been expanding in recent decades enabled by Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property and other international conventions. The articles examine the nature and limitations of intellectual property law and related property-like claims over intangible products and expressions, and present cases from the expanding margins of intangible property provisions including analyses of how these trends are playing out in the Global South and in areas outside of intellectual property law. The contributors show how both expansions of intangible property provisions and resistances to these expansions increase the terrain of experience that is enclosed by proprietary claims and suggest alternative strategies for responding to the contemporary intangible property regime.

Chinese Medicine in Conte porary China: Plurality and Synthesis. Volker Scheid. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 407 pp.

This article examines reports of improvement and decline in short-term follow-up interviews and long-term recollections among patients in three forms of therapy for mental illness in south India: ayurvedic (indigenous) psychiatry, allopathic (western) psychiatry, and religious healing. Interviews indicate that patients of all three therapeutic systems showed improvement after follow-up assessments and that several patients had radically divergent experiences with each of the three therapies; each therapy was found by some to be helpful and by others to be ineffective. These findings suggest that a greater availability of distinct forms of therapy makes it more likely that an individual will find a therapy to which he or she responds well, an insight that helps interpret World Health Organization-sponsored studies which examined mental disorders in developed and developing country sites and found a better outcome for these disorders in developing country centers. Although several studies have attempted to account for this difference in outcome, none have done so by considering that the 'developing' country sites in the World Health Organization studies are all places that have a greater availability of diverse forms of therapy when compared with the 'developed' sites

Anthropological research that focuses on the body has been prolific in the last two decades. This trend has provided an important reorientation away from a tendency to focus on mental representations of experience and has allowed for a more holistic understanding of the human condition. However, this article argues that much research on the body has created a false dichotomy: Westerners are seen as living in a world of mentalistic bias and mind–body dualism while all others are understood as more grounded in their bodies. Ethnographic research conducted among people suffering psychopathology and possession in Kerala, India, challenges these assumptions about the embodied Other by showing that these patients experience a continuum of states of being that includes the body, mind, consciousness, and self/soul. This approach demonstrates how an examination of a local culturally and historically formed phenomenological orientation can provide a useful alternative to the tendency to discover embodied peoples. [Keywords: body, embodiment, India, Kerala]

Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- List of Tables -- 1 Global Mental Health -- Critical Histories -- 2 Mental Ills for All -- 3 Schizoid Balinese? -- 4 Misdiagnosis -- The Limits of Global Mental Health -- 5 Jinns and the Proletarian Mumin Subject -- 6 Psychedelic Therapy -- Alternatives -- 7 The House of Love and the Mental Hospital -- 8 Ayurvedic Psychiatry and the Moral Physiology of Depression in Kerala -- 9 Global Mental Therapy -- Afterwords -- 10 Global Mental Health -- 11 "Treatment" and Why We Need Alternatives -- Index