Mary-Jo Delvechhio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron J. Good (eds.): Postcolonial Disorders

This book is composed of contributions by participants in the weekly seminar of Harvard’s long-standing program in clinically relevant medical anthropology, and will stand as a mark of the program’s stature as a prime intellectual locus in which anthropological reflection on illness and suffering has generated results of profound significance for contemporary social thought. The volume is a wide-ranging examination of subjectivity, a concept that has in recent years moved to the foreground in social theory after a long time away from the spotlight. Insofar as it is often the case that when a theoretical term becomes popular it comes to be seen everywhere and its meaning gradually becomes attenuated, the most compelling feature of this volume is its thematically consistent and sustained attention to defining and circumscribing the notion of subjectivity in a way that will preserve its discursive value. More specifically, the volume develops an analytic sensibility that repeatedly traces the connections between subjectivity as the experience of individual social actors and the global social conditions under which that subjectivity takes form. This is indeed its greatest service to contemporary social thought in general, beyond the significant contribution to the substantive themes it engages—politics and the state, madness and disorder, borders and marginality— and beyond the uniformly vivid arguments of the individual chapters. A thoughtful introduction by the editors nicely synthesizes the contributors’ approaches to subjectivity, carefully deconstructs the eponymous concepts of ‘‘postcolonial’’ and ‘‘disorders’’ and justifies the organization into discrete sections. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the first chapter’s author, Begoña Aretxaga, but there is good thematic reason for the chapter’s placement as well. It broaches the subject of madness, the ultimate form of problematic subjectivity, by creatively juxtaposing its individual and collective forms and its possible locus in