Syllabus
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Anthropology 499/HON 450
Madness and Culture
College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Northern Arizona University
Monday 1:50-4:20
Spring 2001
Instructor: James M. Wilce, Ph.D.
Email address: jim.wilce@nau.edu
Pre-requisites: ANT 102 or permission of instructor
Course description:
Madness is a generic term that includes behaviors considered deviant. Deviance is always culturally defined, and varies markedly from society to society. Although much evidence points to the universality of conditions like schizophrenia, culture shapes how people experience, and respond to, even that serious disease. In that sense, culture shapes the illness. This course explores varied cultural descriptions and models of madness. It also explores madness as a key cultural symbol, representing various things, such as a profound threat to order. This dimension of the course will take us into literary and film treatments of madness. The course will require student participation in leading seminars, and students will write research papers analyzing case studies in madness and culture.
Questions raised by this course include the nature of sanity and insanity; various cultural representations of madness (some of which we find in literature and film); the social and medical institutions set up to care for those considered mad; and the possibilities and nature of healing. To what extent is psychiatry a cultural expression involving rituals of its own? We will try to understand the cultural, personal, and political underpinnings of mental illness and medical practices in societies throughout the world. What is it like to "hear voices" or to be diagnosed as schizophrenic, or suffer from depression or "soul loss"? How do experiences of madness vary from society to society? How do different cultures construct "normality" and "abnormality"? How do medical diagnoses, psychiatric labels, and the taking of medications influence a person's identity? What are the ritual, symbolic, experiential, and political dimensions of healing practices in the world today? We will develop comprehensive ways to think about these questions by reading a range of anthropological and ethnographic studies alongside perspectives from psychiatry, history, sociology, and literature.
Class format: Seminar–student-facilitated discussions of readings and films.
Evaluation Method: I will evaluate your performance based on your participation in and leading of weekly discussions, your critical/integration papers, and your final research paper.
I generally find that students get the most out of course readings, films, and discussions when they write a series of critical-integration papers. So, from January 29 through April 16, you will be asked to write 10 weekly paper on the readings, from 2-4 pages in length, that consider certain themes, ideas, or arguments that arise out of that week's readings. The essays will be collected at the beginning of class. These essays should be clearly written, grammatically correct, and free of spelling errors. Carefully follow the guidelines for writing these papers provided at the end of this syllabus.
Required Texts:
Castillo, Richard J., ed.
1998 The Meanings of Madness. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing. (Referred to as CM in the syllabus)
Desjarlais, Robert R.
1997 Shelter Blues: Homelessness and Sanity in a Boston Shelter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (Referred to in the syllabus as DSB)
Foucault, Michel
1973 Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. New York: Vintage. (Referred to in the syllabus as FMC)
McDaniel, June
1989The madness of the saints: Ecstatic religion in Bengal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Referred to in the syllabus as McMS)
Sass, Louis Arnorsson
1992 Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought. New York, NY: Basic Books. (Referred to in the syllabus as SMM)
Showalter, Elaine
1985 The female malady: Women, madness, and English culture 1830-1980. New York: Pantheon. (Referred to in the syllabus as SFM)
Plus readings on regular and electronic reserve c/o Cline Library (not my website)
Recommended Texts (some readings to be required; copies available at Cline)
1. Castillo, Richard J.
1997 Culture and Mental Illness. Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole Publishing.
2. Wilce, James M.
1998 Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh. New York: Oxford University Press. (ET)
Required Films:
A series of films will be shown outside of class hours and you will be required to see them so that we can discuss them in class along with assigned readings.
Titicut Follies
Devi
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Le Roi de Couers
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervos". English Title: Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown [videorecording] / written and directed by Pedro Almodovar ; produced by El Deseo, S.A. Publisher. New York, N.Y. : Orion Home Video [distributor], 1988.
Grading system
Grades will be assigned for participation and writing on a 100 point total:
| |
| |
| 1) Participation |
30 points | |
| 2) Critical integration papers |
30 points | |
3) Final research project
a) Presentation (10)
b) Paper (30) |
40 points | |
|
Grading Scale:
90+ = A
80+ =B
70+ =C |
|
Jan. 22–Week 1 Introduction: Culture, Madness, and Treatment
Film: The Titicut Follies (89 min.)
Rosenhan, D.L., 1973. On Being Sane in Insane Places. Science 179 (January):250-58.
Goffman, Erving 1961. The Moral Career of the Mental Patient pp. 1-124.. and On the Characteristics of Total Institutions, pp. 125-170 [the latter section is recommended]. In Asylums. New York: Anchor.
Fabrega, Horacio 1989. On the Significance of an Anthropological Approach to Schizophrenia. Psychiatry 52:45-65.
8+123+55+20=201
Jan. 29–Week 2 Psychiatric Perspectives on Madness; Anthropological Perspectives on Psychiatry (First paper due)
American Psychiatric Association. 1994. Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV). p. 273-315. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association.
Cutting, John, and Francis Dunne. 1989. Subjective Experience of Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin 15(2):217-231.
Gaines, Atwood. 1992. From DSM-I to DSM-R; Voices of Self, Mastery and the Other: A Cultural Constructivist Reading of U.S. Psychiatric Classification. Social Science and Medicine 35:3-24.
SMM Ch. 7, pp. 213-241, Loss of Self.
Young, Alan. 1995. The Technology of Diagnosis. Ch. 5 (pp. 145-175) in The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
52+14+21+28+30=135
Recommended:
Emil Kraepelin. 1921. Dementia Praecox. Ch. 5 of Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry. New York: The Macmillan Company, pp. 219-275.
Feb. 5–Week 4 , Anthropological Perspectives on Madness
Nancy Waxler. 1974. Culture and Mental Illness: A Social Labeling Perspective. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 159:379-395.
Robert Edgerton. 1966. Conceptions of Psychosis in Four East African Societies. American Anthropologist 68:408-425.
Byron Good. 1992. Culture and Psychopathology: Directions for Psychiatric Anthropology. In New Directions in Psychological Anthropology, T. Schwartz, G. White, and C. Lutz, eds., pp. 181-205. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Robert Levy. 1992. A Prologue to a Psychiatric Anthropology. In New Directions in Psychological Anthropology, T. Schwartz, G. White, and C. Lutz, eds., pp. 206-230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kim Hopper. 1991. Some Old Questions for the New Cross-Cultural Psychiatry. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 5:299-330.
16+17+24+24+31=112
Feb. 12–Week 5, Living with "Mental Illness" (Second paper due)
DSB, pp. 1-58, 95-120
Ellen Corin. 1990. Facts and Meaning in Psychiatry. An Anthropological Approach to the Lifeworlds of Schizophrenics. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14:153-188.
Sue Estroff, Lachicotte, William, Illingworth, Linda, and Anna Johnston. 1991. Everybody’s Got a Little Mental Illness: Accounts of Illness and Self among People with Severe, Persistent Mental Illnesses. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 5:331-369.
35+38+58+25=156
Recommended:
Sue Estroff. 1993. Identity, Disability, and Schizophrenia: The Problem of Chronicity, pp. 247-286 of Knowledge, Power and Practice.
Feb. 19–Week 6, Relativizing/Historicizing/Exposing Psychiatric Institutions and Psychiatric Power (3rd paper due)
Read F–The class as a whole will read the whole book; division of labor to be decided in the previous week.
Rhodes, Lorna. 1992. The Subject of Power in Medical/Psychiatric Anthropology. In Ethnopsychiatry, edited by A. Gaines, pp. 51-66. Albany: SUNY Press.
Connor, Linda. 1982. Ships of Fools and Vessels of the Divine: Mental Hospitals and Madness, A Case Study. Social Science and Medicine 16:783-794.
Watch Le Roi de coeur [King of hearts]. Fildebroc S.A.R.L. MGM/UA c1990, 1966.
15+11+F
Feb. 26–Week 7, Madness as a Way of Construing Cultural "Others": Europe’s View (4th paper due)
Lucas, Rodney H. , and Robert J. Barrett. 1995. Interpreting Culture and Psychopathology: Primitivist Themes in Cross-Cultural Debate. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 19: 287-326.
Leslie Swartz. 1991. The Politics of Black Patients’ Identity: Ward-Rounds on the ‘Black Side’ of a South African Psychiatric Hospital. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 15:217-244.
Ruth Benedict. 1934. "Anthropology and the Abnormal," pp. 262-283 of An Anthropologist at Work; Writings of Ruth Benedict, edited by M. Mead. New York: Avon Books.
Jane Murphy. 1976. Psychiatric Labeling in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Science 191:1019-1028.
39+27+21+9=96
Mar. 5–SPRING BREAK
Mar. 12–Week 8, Culture-bound disorders: anorexia, latah, nervios & Irish (Part I) (5th paper due)
Film: Latah, A Culture-Bound Syndrome from Indonesia (39 min.)
Hildred Geertz. 1968. Latah in Java. Indonesia 5:93-104. (April).
Simons, Ronald C. 1985. The Resolution of the Latah Paradox. In The Culture-Bound Syndromes. R. C. Simons and C. Hughes, eds. pp. 43-62. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Low, Setha 1994. Embodied Metaphors: Nerves as Lived Experience. In Embodiment and Experience. T. Csordas, ed. pp. 139-162. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peters, Nonja. 1995. The Ascetic Anorexic. Social Analysis 37:44-66.
Rebhun, L.A. 1993. Nerves and emotional play in northeastern Brazil. CM, 193-204.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1979. Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 3-15
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. "Mental" in "Southie"(CM chapter 14), 245-260. (Read the editor’s introduction, too).
11+19+23+11+15+13=92
Mar. 19–Week 9, Madness at the Margins of Euro-American Mainstreams: The Irish and the poor (6th paper due)
Cohen, Carl I.. 1993Poverty and the Course of Schizophrenia: Implications for Research and Policy. Hospital and Community Psychiatry 44(10):951-8.
Theresa O’Nell. 1996. Introduction, Ch.s. 4-6, and Afterward, pps. 1-14 and 110-215 of Disciplined Hearts: History, Identity, and Depression in an American Indian Community. Berkeley: UC Press.
Saris, A Jamie. 1996. Mad Kings, Proper Houses, and an Asylum in Rural Ireland. American Anthropologist 98(3):539-554.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2000. Ire in Ireland. Ethnography 1(1):117-??
7+14+105=126+?
Mar. 26–Week 10, Madness & the Culture of Capitalism (7th paper due)
Watch One flew over the cuckoo’s nest. Fantasy Films. Warner Home Video 1997, c1975.
Barrett, Robert J. 1988 Interpretations of Schizophrenia. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 12:357-388.
______________1997. Cultural Formulation of Psychiatric Diagnosis. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 21:365-379.
_____________. 1998. Towards a Human Understanding of Schizophrenia [Review of Barhan, Hayward and Doubt]. Transcultural Psychiatry 35(1 (March):99-109.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1977 Anti-Oedipus : capitalism and schizophrenia. New York: Viking Press. Selections to be announced
DSB, pp. 120-159
31+14+10+49+D&G=104+X
Apr. 2–Week 11, Madness, Modernity, and Modernism in Culture and the "Fine Arts" (8th paper due)
SMM, chs 1, 2, 10, 11–pp. 13-74, 300-373 (Division of labor to be decided in the previous week).
Sass, Louis A. In press. Negative Symptoms…in the Modern Age". In Schizophrenia, Subjectivity, and Culture. J. H. Jenkins and R. Barrett, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Barrett, Robert. 1997The "Schizophrenic" and the Liminal Persona in Modern Society. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry?(?):1-30?
Sass+134+30=164+X
Apr. 9–Week 12, Madness, Gender, Bodies, and Rhythms (9th paper due)
SFM, chs. 5-7 (121-194)
Gratier, Maya. 1999. Expressions of belonging: the effect of acculturation on the rhythm and harmony of mother-infant vocal interaction. Musicae Scientiae 1999 (Special issue on " Rhythm, Musical Narrative, and Origins of Human Communication").
Wilce, James M. In press. Madness in Bangladesh: Schizophrenia as Pa\gala\mi. In Schizophrenias, Subjectivities, and Cultures. J. Jenkins and R. Barrett, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press/Russell Sage Foundation. (1-33)
73+32+x=105+20??
Apr. 16–Week 13 Subjectivity, Dissociation, & Medication (10th paper due)
DSB, 117-120
Estroff, Sue. 1981. Medications, Ch.. 5 of Making it Crazy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Strauss, John S. 1994 The Person with Schizophrenia as a Person II: Approaches to the Subjective and Complex. British Journal of Psychiatry 164(Supplement 23):103-7.
Jenkins, Janis Hunter. 1997. Subjective Experience of Persistent Schizophrenia and Depression Among US Latinos and Euro-Americans. British Journal of Psychiatry 171:20-25.
Good, Byron. 1977. The heart of what's the matter: The semantics of illness in Iran. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, =CM. 60-78
ET: pp. 46, 108, 123
Luhrmann, Tanya. 2000. Ecstasy and Despair: Dissociation in Religious and Psychiatric Settings. Paper presented at the 99th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, 2000.
Pandolfo, Stefania 2000. Reflections on Speech in the Margin of a Psychiatric Encounter. 99th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, 2000.
Martin, Emily. 2000. Optimizing the Mental. 99th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, 2000.
30?+4+5+18+10+10+10=87
Apr. 23–Week 14, Language, expressive forms, culture, and madness
Anderson, Neil. 1980. Singing Man. Tiburon, CA: HJ Kramer. Pp 7-17, 213-4
DSB pp. 159-222
ET, pp. 72-76, 224-232
SMM ch 6, pp. 174-209
Wilce, James. 2000. The Poetics of "Madness": Shifting Codes and Styles in the Linguistic Construction of Identity in Matlab, Bangladesh. Cultural Anthropology 15(1):3-34.
11+12+31+35+63=142
Apr. 30–Week 15, Madness and cultural meanings: Why is madness so bound up with religion and love?
Corin, Ellen E.
1990Facts and Meaning in Psychiatry: An Anthropological Approach to the Lifeworld of Schizophrenics. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14:153-188.
McMS–We will read the whole book; division of labor to be arranged.
Mehta, Gita. 1993. A River Sutra. Pp. 99-148, "The Executive’s Story" [of love, possession, and madness]. New York: Doubleday.
ET, chapter 11.
35+49+McMS
May 7–Week 16, Student presentations
Leading discussions
1. Each class session will consist of a group discussion based on a collection of readings. You are required to attend each class having read the assigned readings and being ready to discuss them. Take separate notes on the readings and bring notes and readings with you to class.
2. You will be responsible for co-facilitating some of the class discussions. Each required reading will be assigned to at least one student who will be expected to lead the discussion on it. In preparing for the discussions you will facilitate, write a one-sentence precis of the argument, cutting out everything but what the author is trying to persuade us to see, believe, do, etc. Keep in mind that we are discussing several readings relating to a theme; so look for common or contrasting threads that run through each week’s readings, common questions that those readings address as a unit. Formulate 2-3 questions on "your" reading that help us see the contrasting approaches of the authors to a similar phenomenon. Never ask questions whose answers must be looked up on a particular page. Instead, let your questions point us to the major points or memorable arguments the author makes.
Remember, the quality of any seminar depends mostly on how well participants prepare prior to coming to class. This involves not only reading the assigned materials but also thinking critically about the issues that they raise. You are expected to attend–and be on time–every week; the seminar format requires it. If you anticipate being away, please notify me in advance for the sake of the smooth functioning of the seminar.
Writing Critical/Integration Papers
These 2-4 page critiques will be your way of integrating and responding to the readings assigned for the week on which the papers are due (the papers are prospective, not retrospective). Again, the aim of these papers is to help you integrate and think critically about the readings as a whole. Never!!! write "one paragraph per reading" as an method of organizing the paper. Rather, integrate–form paragraphs according to topics you perceive cutting across the readings. Sometimes it will be appropriate in your papers to cumulatively draw on the various perspectives of authors you read over the course of the semester. You should prepare for this paper (and for the seminar) by writing a one-sentence précis of each author’s argument (so, e.g., four précis sentences for four authors) and then finding themes that crosscut. Your papers should touch on the main contribution of each reading to our understanding of the week’s (or semester’s) theme, not on supporting points (subarguments or data). Find differences between authors and take sides, arguing that one perspective is more logical and/or better supported (with evidence) than another. Again, organize each paragraph of every paper by a theme, not by an author. I am looking for evidence that you have gone beyond parroting to be able to compare and contrast perspectives. Write concisely. Do not quote at all. Obviously you need to accurately represent the gist of each author, and to do so you might need to cite a page # for a specific idea. In fact, whenever you get a particular idea from a particular author, try to nail down the page where that idea is best represented and cite it in anthropological citation style (author’s last name date: page) e.g. (Einstein 1941: 243).
Copyright © 2001 James M. Wilce
