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As anthropologists rush to salvage culture in the wake of an increasingly biologized and globally homogenized psychiatry, they are focusing anew on phenomenology and the subjective experience of people afflicted with the anomalous states, feelings, and cognition of madness. But recent studies suggest that, in the Western settings in which psychiatry evolved, the cultural, macrosocial, and microsocial underpinnings of severe psychiatric conditions cannot so easily be separated from psychiatric knowledge. The comparative method of cross-cultural research, useful in uncovering the cultural dimension of psychiatric conditions outside the realm of biomedicine and Western psychiatry, is less helpful for recognizing the work of 315 10 Hoarders and Scrappers Madness and the Social Person in the Interstices of the City anne m. lovell La rue est un chemin, ce n’est pas un asile; la rue appartient à ceux qui passent, et non à ceux qui l’habitent. [The street is a walkway, not an asylum; the streets belong to passersby, not to those who live in them.] —From a French news document, mid-1800s (Girardin and Vissière 1986) My work is very simple. I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap. It suits my purposes admirably. I find the streets an endless source of material, an inexhaustible storehouse of shattered things. Each day I go out with my bag and collect objects that seem worthy of investigation. —Stillman, the philosopher-bagman, in City of Glass, by Paul Auster Rubbish collectors are the unsung heroes of modernity. Day in and day out, they refresh and make salient again the borderline between normality and pathology, health and illness, the desirable and the rejected, the comme il faut and comme il ne faut pas, the inside and the outside of the human universe. —Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives, Modernity and Its Outcasts 316 / Hoarders and Scrappers culture in psychiatric disorders in North America and Europe. This difficulty arises because disorders and their subjective and social representations are entangled in the interactive process of psychiatric knowledge production . Robert Barrett, for example, has shown how the disease category of schizophrenia and its manifestation in people defined as“schizophrenic”are shaped by institutional and disciplinary discourses and frameworks hewn in the nineteenth-century asylum and still present in contemporary psychiatric institutions (Barrett 1996).Psychiatric ideologies and practices,and the web of institutions in which they are embedded (pharmaceutical companies, research centers, consumer and family groups, and so on) generate “the schizophrenic” as an anomalous and liminal category of the person (Barrett 1998). More recently, the philosopher Ian Hacking has used the notion of “classificatory looping” to describe how persons experiencing schizophrenia inevitably react to the way they are defined and treated.Their behavior feeds new psychiatric classifications and knowledge in a recursive process. Hence, anomalous experiences such as the category we call schizophrenia are socially constructed as the afflicted individuals interact with their diagnosis as well as with the practices, institutions, and so forth in which these psychiatric classifications thrive and evolve (Hacking 1999). Darin Weinberg ’s analysis of the occurrences at a substance-abuse program when diagnosis is ambiguous or when personal experience is incongruent with psychiatric explanations can be applied to psychiatric conditions in general. Behavior is often reinterpreted as a sign of another type of psychiatric disorder , another mental disorder, a biological or brain disorder, or “the effects of some human agent adept at reproducing the local appearance of mental disorder for his or her own private,but eminently discoverable,human purpose .”Some staff and clients even suggest that medication,biological mechanisms , and other phenomena found in psychiatric explanations cause experiences , as if these phenomena were endowed with agency (Weinberg 1997). The psychiatric frame of reference dominates the semantic network of meanings to which both sufferers and observers of psychiatric conditions turn as they seek to make sense of their experiences. Does this perspective hold true outside the clinic’s reach? Can we envision a situation, in complex societies immersed in scientific and biomedical discourse, that gives precedence to the macrosocial and cultural shaping of experience while the clinical influences of diagnosis, medication, therapy, and even popular knowledge of psychiatric categories,causes,and treatment modalities recede? Can the typical rapid socialization into the patient role be...

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