Berghahn Books

Explorations in psychoanalytic ethnography.

For anthropologists and psychoanalysts, Mimica (anthropology, U. of Sydney, Australia) brings together nine essays on psychoanalysis and ethnography that focus on the human culture as explored through psychoanalytic practice and ethnographic projects. The authors, who are psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, ethnographers, and political scientists, present anthropological work based on psychoanalysis. They consider the realities of the human condition and specific subjects such as cultural differences and psychoanalysis, human intersubjective relations among the Iatmul people of Papua New Guinea, and the father-son relationship among the Yagwoia people there. Other topics are Parintin shamanism, the Yaka people of the southwestern Congo, twentieth century Western psychiatric and psychoanalytic outlooks on mental health, the negative and the unconscious, and the dynamics of the religious experience. Both subjects and names are indexed. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Medical identities; health, well-being and personhood.

The identity of healers has been little studied, with the exception of spirit possession and other practices exotic to Western eyes. Anthropologists here begin the exploration in seven papers from a 2003 seminar at the University of Oxford. Among their topics are general practitioners in Britain and South Africa, Kekjom traditional doctors and an ambivalent clientele in Cameroon, and auxiliary workers in a nursing-home hierarchy. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)