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Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience. Jams Hunter Jenkins and Robert John Barren, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, xvii + 357 pp.
In Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity, editors Janis Jenkins and Robert Barren offer what is destined to become a classic of the anthropological literature on mental illness, much in the same vein as Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good's 1985 Culture and Depression. Drawing on contributors from anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and history, this volume explores schizophrenia in its various expressions as a lived experience, a cross-cultural phenomenon, a biomedical and epidemiological category, and a site of social contestation over critical notions of selfhood, culture, and subjectivity.
Reacting against the claims made by modern psychiatry that schizophrenia is primarily a biological phenomenon, Jenkins and Barrett center their volume around the role of culture in shaping the disease, with explorations into the subjective experience of schizophrenia as the core task. This point of view produces a wide array of perspectives on the phenomenology of schizophrenia, roughly divided into sections focused on theory, methods, and the place of emotion in the disease. The first of these sections provides a theoretical framework for the ways a psychiatric disease can be examined across cultures. In the opening chapter, Jenkins argues against the notion that schizophrenia represents an acultural experience, a state without agency or subjectivity. Instead, she claims that understanding schizophrenia can provide privileged insight into the relationship between culture and individual processes of experience and meaning-making. She distinguishes between fundamental human processes, referring to a continual dialectic of culture and psyche à la Richard Shweder, and ordinary human processes, those everyday experiences that shape the lives of patients and nonpatients alike, such as taking a daily walk, mulling over one's value to loved ones, and so on. In elucidating the play between fundamental and ordinary processes-explored through attention to how individuals with schizophrenia think, feel, and act-Jenkins means to capture how culture and self collide and are mutually creative. She contends that the often abnormal paths taken by this dialectic in the mind of someone with schizophrenia can reveal much about these processes more generally.
Bringing this viewpoint to bear on an analysis of what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV (DSM-IV) refers to as negative...