This is a collection of works that have held some significance in my intellectual debut. They span back to my freshman year and reflect well my journey from the humanities to the social sciences and back again twice. In college, I declared an English Language & Literature major proudly, as the department is competitive at the UW. I took a few quarters of some literature but mostly theory and some linguistics courses and realized pure literature did not occupy enough bits of my brain and it had a curious sense of death about it so I distanced myself from it somewhat. Through my reading of Foucualt, Said and myriad other of the french sociologists,I found myself upon some cultural studies literature and this led me to enrolling in anthropology courses. I was reminded of my love of critical theory in my Culture Concept class and was subsequently drawn back to English. I had to explain all this as well in my second admissions essay! Needless to say, I again felt morose and stale and headed back over to Denny, the anthro building at the UW. I took a seminar style class and was hooked. Now I freely "borrow" from the humanities and have the best of both worlds.
I was embarrassed at the time to have put my transcript through a such a workout but upon reflection, it was really indicative of my destiny for interdisciplinary work. My interests now straddle the humanities and the social sciences with some strategy, now with nearly a decade of trying to figure out where I belonged academically behind me.
And in no value-laden order:
Bourgois, Philippe, and Jeff Schonberg
2009 Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press.
Leakey, Richard E., and Roger Lewin
1977 Origins. New York: Dutton.
Ed. Joao Biehl, Byron Good, Arthur Kleinman, Ed.
2007 Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press.
Geertz, Clifford
1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Polhemus, Ted, Ed.
1978 The Body Reader: Social Aspects of the Human Body. New York: Pantheon.
Hurford, C.
1996 The anthology of popular verse. North Dighton: JG Press.
(the only text spanning back into childhood; I got this for Christmas when I was in 6th grade because I had won a poetry contest at Halloween)
Sacks, Oliver
1997 The Island of the Colorblind. New York: Knopf.
Dickens, Charles
1854 Times-Charles Dickens. New York: Penguin Books.
Broks, Paul
2003 Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Shenk, David
2001 Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic. New York: Doubleday.
Estroff, Sue
1985 Making it Crazy: An Ethnography of Psychiatric Clients in an American Community. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press.
Metzl, Jonathan and Suzanne Poirier, Eds.
2005 Difference & Identity: A Special Issue of Literature and Medicine. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jenkins, Janice, Ed.
2010 Pharmaceutical Self: The Global Shaping of Experience in an Age of Psychpharmacology. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research.
Fabian, Johannes
2000 Out of our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press
(above center)
Lemelson, Robert
2010 Afflictions culture & mental illness in Indonesia. Watertown: Documentary Educational Resources.
I saw a partial screening of these at the 2011 Society for Psychological Anthropology conference. This was my first academic conference :)
