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Reviewed by:
  • Postcolonial Disorders
  • Don Seeman (bio)
Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron J. Good, eds., Postcolonial Disorders (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 480 pp.

This collection of fifteen original essays bespeaks a growing consensus among anthropologists who study human subjectivity that we must collapse the intellectual and disciplinary distinctions between studies of individual pathology in the postcolonial world and studies of the “disordering” effects on life there of social [End Page 510] and political turmoil. Contributions range from an analysis of the “mad” violence of Basque terrorism to a critique of the international humanitarian regime that filled the “sovereignty vacuum” left by the collapse of communist polities in the Balkans. Most of these essays explore connections between disorders of the individual—like refugee trauma, HIV infection, or various forms of mental illness—and the social (dis)orders through which they are inflicted. This approach is not new to anthropology, but this volume focuses on what are claimed to be distinctive new forms of subjectivity engendered by the pathologies of a new world order. Some essays attempt to break down the barriers among psychiatric, postcolonialist, and standard anthropological ways of thinking about illness and suffering, but most contribute primarily to theory rather than practice. Postcolonial Disorders stands in an ethnographic tradition that, by focusing on lived experience at the local level, remoralizes conversations about illness and socioeconomic collapse. There is a danger, therefore, of moralistic grandstanding, but overall these are powerful and well-crafted essays (by some of the most thoughtful people in the field).

Don Seeman

Don Seeman is associate professor of religion at Emory University, with a joint appointment in the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies. Trained as a medical anthropologist, his articles on Jewish ethnography and religion have appeared in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, the Journal of Religion in Africa, and the Harvard Theological Review.

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