Postcolonial Disorders

Postcolonial Disorders: Reflections on Subjectivity in the Contemporary World

POSTCOLONIAL DISORDERS: REFLECTIONS ON SUBJECTIVITY IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD Byron J. Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, and Sarah Pinto This book is a collection of essays reflecting on the nature of subjectivity—on everyday modes of experience, the social and psychological dimensions of individual lives, the psychological qualities of social life, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection found in the diverse places where anthropologists work at the beginning of the twenty-first century.The essays are a conscious effort to find new ways to link the social and the psychological, to examine how lives of individuals, families and communities are affected by large-scale political and economic forces associated with globalization, and to theorize subjectivity within this larger context.And the essays explore the role of colonialism in shaping postcolonial states and distinctive forms of subjectivity increasingly characteristic of contemporary societies. Although these essays address the “nature” of subjectivity, they are ethnographic rather than primarily theoretical or philosophical; they are efforts to understand persons and lives lived under extraordinary conditions all too common in much of the world today. But it is precisely by attempting to make sense of lives that challenge comprehension—lives of Basque youth engaged in acts of revolutionary violence viewed as utterly mad by most of their Basque compatriots;visionary artists and a provincial politician gone psychotic,responding to social breakdown at the end of the Suharto regime in Indonesia; local officials and international specialists engaged in often fantastic humanitarian ventures in the Balkans or attempting to control AIDS in China and the Republic of Congo; women responding to the deaths of their infants in India; and 1 persons with mental illness caught up with psychiatrists and old colonial hospitals in Ireland and Morocco—that the authors in this volume address the most difficult problems of history, methodology, and theory. Despite great diversity in the ways the essays in this book explore lives such as these, taken together they provide the basis for three broad, interconnected claims. First, these essays suggest that ethnographic studies of subjectivity are both feasible and productive, and that the analytic term “subjectivity” denotes a set of critical issues for anthropologists working in contemporary societies, issues different than those raised by classic studies of “self” or “person and emotion ,” opening new domains for ethnographic investigation. Second, taken as a whole, these essays support the claim that viewing subjectivity through the lens of the “postcolonial” provides a language and analytic strategies, often derived from the work of historians and literary critics, valuable for investigations of lives, institutions, and regimes of knowledge and power in the societies in which anthropologists work today. Indeed, the book suggests that whether directly addressed or not, the figure of the colonial haunts ethnographic writing today, and that thematizing the postcolonial has the potential to transform ethnographic writing about subjectivity. Third, this volume suggests that contemporary studies of subjectivity must necessarily address “disorders”—the intertwined personal and social disorders associated with rampant globalization , neoliberal economic policies, and postcolonial politics; and whether read as pathologies, modes of suffering, the domain of the imaginary, or as forms of repression, disordered subjectivity provides entrée to exploring dimensions of contemporary social life as lived experience. We briefly examine these three key terms—subjectivity, postcolonial, and disorders—in turn. SUBJECTIVITY The increasing use of the terms “subject” and “subjectivity” in anthropology points to widespread dissatisfaction with previous efforts to understand psychological experience and inner lives in particular cultures, characteristic of an earlier generation of psychological and cultural anthropologists—however important and incomplete that work was. “Subjectivity” immediately signals awareness of a set of historical problems and critical writings related to the genealogy of the subject and to the importance of colonialism and the figure of the colonized “other” for writing about the emergence of the modern (rational) subject. Subjectivity denotes a new attention to hierarchy, violence, and subtle modes of internalized anxieties that link subjection and subjectivity, and an urgent sense of the importance of linking national and global economic Postcolonial Disorders 2 and political processes to the most intimate forms of everyday experience. It places the political at the heart of the psychological and the psychological at the heart of the political. Use of the term “subject” by definition makes analysis of the state and forms of citizenship immediately relevant in ways that analysis of the “self” or “person...