Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations

Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity

1 Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity joão biehl, byron good, and arthur kleinman This book is an extended conversation about contemporary forms of human experience and subjectivity. It examines the genealogy of what we consider to be the modern subject, and it inquires into the continuity and diversity of personhood across greatly diverse societies, including the ways in which inner processes are reshaped amid economic and political reforms, violence, and social suffering. It is an ethnographic conversation, with authors confronting specific forms of social life in particular settings, and it is a theoretical conversation, exploring the debates and disciplinary disagreements about how we think and write about human agency today. The writings in this book suggest that contemporary social formations, with their particular ways of being and the theoretical frames available for analyzing them, have destabilized our observation, thinking, and writing about subjectivity. In editing this collection, we have sought to show the multiple ways in which scholars address the diverse phenomena we call subject and subjectivity. Striving for a single analytic strategy would have been limiting and premature at best. This volume is thus exploratory, aiming to provide new directions for studies of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in today’s distinctive conditions. In the many settings in which anthropologists now work, the vagaries of modern life are undoing and remaking people’s lives in new and ominous ways. The subjects of our study struggle with the possibilities and dangers of economic globalization, the threat of endless violence and insecurity, and the new infrastructures and forms of political domination and resistance that lie in the shadows of grand claims of democratization and reform.Once the door to the study of subjectivity is open, anthropology and its practitioners must find new ways to engage particularities of affect, cognition, moral responsibility, and action. 2 / Introduction regarding others Examples of remaking subjectivity are everywhere. “Amid China’s Boom, No Helping Hand for Young Qingming,” reads the front page of the New York Times of August 1, 2004. Fearful of being left behind in China’s fastpaced but deeply uneven economic boom, Zheng Qingming threw himself under an approaching train in his rural village on June 4. That day, Qingming had learned from a school administrator that he would not be allowed to take the annual college-entrance examination.“I don’t have the money,” he had said. “I don’t care if you sell a life,” the supervisor had replied. One of Qingming’s friends reportedly offered to sell blood to help him out. Without the needed eighty dollars and with his hopes of a college education and mobility cut short, Qingming fled the school and spent the day wandering through the village. Strangers who saw him that day said that Qingming had talked about working for Interpol—a fact the authorities used to justify their claim that the young man had “lost his mind.”A mental condition (possibly traceable to the “mentally retarded” relatives who adopted and helped raise him) thus became the official explanation for this young man’s profoundly willful act of ending his life. To the grandfather who is now suing the school, the boy he had raised to be a healthy and hard-working man was “upset, not insane.” A scrapbook the grandfather now keeps as a memorial gives some insight into this young man’s subjectivity and his response to the vanishing of familiar values. Qingming had pasted in a magazine article about a farm girl who had been raped and then abandoned by her relatives for the shame she inflicted on them. In the margins of the text,Qingming had scribbled,“We must extend our helping hand to any innocent underdog. Only by so doing can that person find a footing in society.” Chinese society is undergoing immense change.From a poor agricultural society beset with political chaos, China has, over a twenty-year period, become the world’s third-largest economy with an established, if undemocratic , social order. But China’s turn to capitalism has delegitimated the stilldominant Communist ideology just as radical Maoism undermined Chinese cultural traditions.The upshot is a culture of self-interest,rank materialism, and growing cynicism that has prompted widespread comment and criticism among the Chinese themselves. In the economy, health-care sector, socialwelfare programs, and everyday lived experience of peasants and urbanites, the public emphasis on social solidarity and the righting of historical social inequalities to help the poor and the marginalized have given way to gated communities, deepening...