Content area
Full text
Editorial
This editorial and special issue grew out of a workshop, 'Soul Catchers - A Material History of the Mind Sciences', held at Princeton University on 7-8 February 2014. The workshop was generously funded by the Humboldt/Princeton Strategic Partnership Collaboration Grant, the History of Science Program, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Research at Princeton University. The guest editors would like to thank Edward Baring and Michael Gordin, as well as the editorial team of Medical History and the three anonymous reviewers, for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this editorial.
A soul catcher is a piece of incised bear femur decorated with animal heads. Used by the Tsimshian people of the Pacific Northwest, it is plugged with cedar bark on both ends in order to catch and contain that ephemeral thing that Western Europeans have called 'the soul' - a lost soul or an evil spirit. While the soul catcher might strike us today as the cultural artefact of an animistic religious system, or perhaps as a superstitious relic, it resembles in both its form and its function a number of objects central to the modern mind and brain sciences. Many of these technologies could also in their way be labelled 'soul catchers' because they attempt to capture, render visible for study, and manipulate what otherwise eludes our physical grasp. With what justification might one consider voodoo and shamanism the products of naivety or deception, but not the devices and instruments, practices and routines used in Western science, which equally try to catch 'souls': the unconscious, the mind of the child, or the activity of a brain in a scanner?
This is not to downplay differences between these technologies of 'soul catching', which are indeed impossible to miss. Even a short glance reveals differences of scale, of cultural authority and plausibility, differences which reflect many of the oppositions that structure the modern world: science versus superstition, mainstream versus marginal, and the finer differentiations between psychoanalysis, psychology, neurology, brain science, and criminology, amongst others. Nevertheless, in this special issue, we use the anthropological comparison to the soul catcher in order to open up new perspectives on the history of the contemporary mind sciences and their material cultures. Casting the machines and apparatuses...