I think this is the first text we’ve read that directly addresses ethnography and anthropology as part of the text. Biehl asks questions and provides his own insights and discusses methods of both anthropology and ethnography. Here are a some of the examples I was struck by:
“What are the ways of these words? How to tell it all and what are we to do with it?” (73)
“Ethnography can help us to reinstate and rethink psychopathology within these various circuits and struggles over belonging, agency and care” (106).
“It is the fundamentally ambiguous being of the people in Vita that gives the anthropologist the opportunity to develop a real human critique of the machine of social death…” (317).
“As her interlocutor and anthropologist, I tried to sift through all this, finding meaningful connections and poetic associations to the fragmented stories she was telling me” (125).
“As Caterina’s anthropologist I focus on …put in these ideas and materials, lived experiences and perceptions, back into circulation with and against one another…to keep the story unfinished and opened” (178)
Questions: What does it mean to be somebody’s anthropologist? What kind of responsibility do we/does he have to his subject (I don’t like that word at all, but lack a better one…)
How might this work be seen as similar to Hayden’s – particularly in reference to the idea of networks? Hayden’s idea seems to look at networks through the way that they have different interests that pull actants together in certain ways. Biehl also seems to be concerned w/ what holds and pulls things t/g. There are these different actants that come t/g thru interests into a network that allow him to trace certain trajectories of objects…though is Caterina that object here? Also related to this is the idea that thru the relationships established in the making of a network that the object gets constituted. So in Biehl’s work maybe Caterina is the object that gets constituted as mad through the relationships of medicine, state, economy, and family…
How can this text be discussed in terms of “ruins” – I’m thinking here of Friday’s symposia. I have little exposure to this idea, so it would be valuable, at least for me, to maybe discuss Vita in these terms.
This book reminds me of the semi-autobiography of Susana Kaysen – Girl, Interrupted, which was adapted to a Hollywood film, though not without major alteration.
Both works, Girl, Interrupted and Vita, are about the so-called “insane women”. I deliberately use this almost sexist term to illustrate how this culture relates insanity with women, how insanity is formed in contrast to “sanity”, and how gender, and more explicitly, sexual experience, is connected with the idea of mental disturbance.
I’m interested in the idea insanity because I believe most of the time insanity is constructed by the society. Catarina wrote, “When my thoughts agreed with my ex-husband and his family, everything was fine. But when I disagreed with them, I was mad. It was like a side of me had to be forgotten. The side of wisdom. The wouldn’t dialogue, and the science of the illness was forgotten.” (8) If a person completely cannot conform to the norms and values of a society, there are only two “exits”: Suicide or insanity. Because social forces are absolutely pervasive and powerful, (See Durkhiem, Foucault, etc), the only shelter is either the tomb or the asylum. This partly explains the subtitle of this book – “Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment”. But ironically, there is no “life” in the such abandoned zone. To use a Lacanian term, it is in the zone of “the Real”. It is not only beyond, but before “symbolic order”. This may explain why Catarina could hardly communicate. She, her thinking, has be given in to the “the other side” her, “the side of wisdom”, as she put it. But Lacan told us that the Real is not only “real”, but also is traumatic. That’s why Vita is absolutely chaos and tragic. It represents not “the Real” of one single person, nor one “patient”, but “the Real” of society – those we want to hide, ignore, repress, forget…
2 Comments:
At 7:34 PM,
melinda said…
I think this is the first text we’ve read that directly addresses ethnography and anthropology as part of the text. Biehl asks questions and provides his own insights and discusses methods of both anthropology and ethnography. Here are a some of the examples I was struck by:
“What are the ways of these words? How to tell it all and what are we to do with it?” (73)
“Ethnography can help us to reinstate and rethink psychopathology within these various circuits and struggles over belonging, agency and care” (106).
“It is the fundamentally ambiguous being of the people in Vita that gives the anthropologist the opportunity to develop a real human critique of the machine of social death…” (317).
“As her interlocutor and anthropologist, I tried to sift through all this, finding meaningful connections and poetic associations to the fragmented stories she was telling me” (125).
“As Caterina’s anthropologist I focus on …put in these ideas and materials, lived experiences and perceptions, back into circulation with and against one another…to keep the story unfinished and opened” (178)
Questions:
What does it mean to be somebody’s anthropologist? What kind of responsibility do we/does he have to his subject (I don’t like that word at all, but lack a better one…)
How might this work be seen as similar to Hayden’s – particularly in reference to the idea of networks? Hayden’s idea seems to look at networks through the way that they have different interests that pull actants together in certain ways. Biehl also seems to be concerned w/ what holds and pulls things t/g. There are these different actants that come t/g thru interests into a network that allow him to trace certain trajectories of objects…though is Caterina that object here? Also related to this is the idea that thru the relationships established in the making of a network that the object gets constituted. So in Biehl’s work maybe Caterina is the object that gets constituted as mad through the relationships of medicine, state, economy, and family…
How can this text be discussed in terms of “ruins” – I’m thinking here of Friday’s symposia. I have little exposure to this idea, so it would be valuable, at least for me, to maybe discuss Vita in these terms.
At 10:51 PM,
Jason Lau said…
Response to Vita
This book reminds me of the semi-autobiography of Susana Kaysen – Girl, Interrupted, which was adapted to a Hollywood film, though not without major alteration.
Both works, Girl, Interrupted and Vita, are about the so-called “insane women”. I deliberately use this almost sexist term to illustrate how this culture relates insanity with women, how insanity is formed in contrast to “sanity”, and how gender, and more explicitly, sexual experience, is connected with the idea of mental disturbance.
I’m interested in the idea insanity because I believe most of the time insanity is constructed by the society. Catarina wrote, “When my thoughts agreed with my ex-husband and his family, everything was fine. But when I disagreed with them, I was mad. It was like a side of me had to be forgotten. The side of wisdom. The wouldn’t dialogue, and the science of the illness was forgotten.” (8) If a person completely cannot conform to the norms and values of a society, there are only two “exits”: Suicide or insanity. Because social forces are absolutely pervasive and powerful, (See Durkhiem, Foucault, etc), the only shelter is either the tomb or the asylum. This partly explains the subtitle of this book – “Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment”. But ironically, there is no “life” in the such abandoned zone. To use a Lacanian term, it is in the zone of “the Real”. It is not only beyond, but before “symbolic order”. This may explain why Catarina could hardly communicate. She, her thinking, has be given in to the “the other side” her, “the side of wisdom”, as she put it. But Lacan told us that the Real is not only “real”, but also is traumatic. That’s why Vita is absolutely chaos and tragic. It represents not “the Real” of one single person, nor one “patient”, but “the Real” of society – those we want to hide, ignore, repress, forget…
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