The idea that one can 'soak up' someone else's mood or sense the tension in a room is familiar - as in 'negative energy'. This ability to borrow or share states of mind is now pathologized, as the author shows in relation to affective transfer in psychiatric clinics.

Students of culture have been increasingly concerned with the ways in which cultural values are 'inscribed' on the body. These essays go beyond this passive construal of the body to a position in which embodiment is understood as the existential condition of cultural life. From this standpoint embodiment is reducible neither to representations of the body, to the body as an objectification of power, to the body as a physical entity or biological organism, nor to the body as an inalienable (...) centre of individual consciousness. This more sensate and dynamic view is applied by the contributors to a variety of topics, including the expression of emotion, the experience of pain, ritual healing, dietary customs, and political violence. Their purpose is to contribute to a phenomenological theory of culture and self - an anthropology that is not merely about the body, but from the body. (shrink)

Powers of Freedom, first published in 1999, offers a compelling approach to the analysis of political power which extends Foucault's hypotheses on governmentality in challenging ways. Nikolas Rose sets out the key characteristics of this approach to political power and analyses the government of conduct. He analyses the role of expertise, the politics of numbers, technologies of economic management and the political uses of space. He illuminates the relation of this approach to contemporary theories of 'risk society' and 'the sociology (...) of governance'. He argues that freedom is not the opposite of government but one of its key inventions and most significant resources. He also seeks some rapprochement between analyses of government and the concerns of critical sociology, cultural studies and Marxism, to establish a basis for the critique of power and its exercise. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in political theory, sociology, social policy and cultural studies. (shrink)

Clever Hans, the famous horse who was believed to be able to count, is generally cited as the paradigm of the influence of the observer. Psychologist Rosenthal has illustrated this phenomenon with his well-known experiment about ‘bright’ and ‘dull’ maze rats. Hans, however, achieved something much more interesting. Hecould not only read human minds through their bodies: he could also influence his questioners to produce gestures he could read as cues for finding the answer. Hans could make human bodies be (...) moved and be affected, and move and affect other beings and perform things without their owners’ knowledge. The question of ‘influence’ when we read this case becomes therefore far more complicated and interesting. It involves the question of the way bodies can attune, affect and transformeach other. We may follow carefully how scientists of ethological practices create access to the creatures they study, how they are moved by their subjects of interest, and how they give them a chance to be interesting andto articulate other responses. Doing so, we notice that the signs that define subject and object, what talks and what is talked about, subjectivity and objectivity, are redistributed in a new manner. These practices offer a new and pragmatic definition of the body, close to James’s theory of emotions: to have a body is to learn how to feel. (shrink)

Investigates the role of violence in social change, as reflected in its use by colonized peoples to achieve the liberation of the Third World.

This article addresses the relations between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (and those characteristics associated with ‘the natural’ and ‘the cultural’) in the context of the debates about Prozac. Following Marilyn Strathern, I focus specifically on the contested issue of enablement - that is, on what Prozac does or does not enable, and on the relation between enablement and enhancement, normality and pathology. I argue that the implications of the model of the brain that accompanies explanations of Prozac are such that commentators (...) are obliged to address not only the nature of normality but also the nature of nature itself. Through a close analysis of these debates, I suggest that critiques of Prozac should be understood not as objections to reductionism - to a biology that closes things down - but rather to one that opens things up: that opens up the relations between nature, culture, biology and the individual, relations that are now cross-cut and thrown about by artificiality. Objections to Prozac, then, might be characterized as an attempt to put these concepts back into their ‘proper’ positions, to re-establish the relationality between them. In conclusion, I argue that the biology put forward by proponents of psychopharmacology, regardless of the desirability of the latter, challenges not only the frequent assumptions that are made about the claims of materialist science, but also some of the terms and concepts that are commonly deployed in the social sciences. (shrink)

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances, and politics in twentieth- century technoscience. The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, OncoMouse. (...) Haraway sees the world of contemporary technoscience as a drama. Information sciences and life sciences are at the center of the dramatic action. Scenes are set in landscapes where maps of human genetic differences are stored in databases, racialized bodies are reconfigured by morphing for photographs in popular magazines, and transgenic mice important to breast cancer research are patented intellectual property. The actors are many, and not all are human. Beginning with the Modest Witness, the key figure in the Science Revolution, Haraway shows us the trouble lurking in race and gender- marked practices for attesting to matters of fact. In later scenes, Haraway explores the kinship relations among the many cyborg creatures produced in the late twentieth-century--in nuclear research, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, computer-mediated representational practices, and mutations in biological approaches to "race.". (shrink)

Prominent consumer depression manuals issued in recent years circulate a standard depression script as scientific knowledge. The script, asserting that a broad spectrum of depressions are brain illnesses that require antidepressant treatment, is in fact highly contested among researchers. This paper reviews the logical problematics of these manuals, and how such discourse promotes the diagnosis and pharmaceutical treatment of behaviors ranging from mild symptoms to severe depression. In keeping with the trends of pharmaceutical advertising and State health policy, these manuals (...) encourage consumers to self-scrutinize risky behavior, and to treat common behavioral and mood distresses with antidepressants. Ultimately, these activities of self-management function to produce a more productive citizen population. (shrink)

Science studies has often been against the normative dimension of epistemology, which made a naturalistic study of science impossible. But this is not to say that a new type of normativity cannot be detected at work inscience studies. This is especially true in the second wave of studies dealing with the body, which has aimed at criticizing the physicalization of the body without falling into the various traps of a phenomenology simply added to a physical substrate. This article explores the (...) work of Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret in that respect, and shows how it can be used to rethink the articulation between the various levels that make up a body. (shrink)

New reproductive technologies, such as in vitrio fertilization, have been the subject of intense public discussion and debate worldwide. In addition to difficult ethical, moral, personal and political questions, new technologies of assisted conception also raise novel socio-cultural dilemmas. How are parenthood, kinship and procreation being redefined in the context of new reproductive technologies? Has reproductive choice become part of consumer culture? Embodied Progress offers a unique perspective on these and other cultural dimensions of assisted conception techniques. Based on ethnographic (...) research in Britain, this study foregrounds the experiences of women and couples who undergo IVF, whilst also asking how such experiences may be variously understood. (shrink)

`This is a wonderful volume, powerfully written, timely, insightful, and filled with major pieces; the passion, intellectual rigor and sense of history found here promises to shape this field in the decades to come. This volume sets the agenda for the future′ - Norman K Denzin, University of Illinois Pathology and the Postmodernexplores the relationship between mental distress and social constructionism using new work from eminent scholars in the fields of sociology, psychology and philosophy. The authors address: how specific cultural, (...) economic and historical forces converge in contemporary psychiatry and psychology; how new syndromes, subjectivities and identities are being constructed and. (shrink)