Theorizing The 'Subject' of Medical and Psychiatric Anthropology

Theorizing the 'subject' of medical and psychiatric anthropology
Author(s): Byron J. Good

Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 18, No. 3 (September
2012), pp. 515-535
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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Theorizing the 'subject' of
medical and psychiatric
anthropology*
Byron J. Good Harvard University
This essay explores recent developments in theorizing subjectivity, with a particular focus on medical
and psychiatric anthropology. It suggests that studies of violence and humanitarian interventions,
new medical technologies, and new modes of citizenship challenge older ways of writing about the
subject and lived experience. The essay outlines four claims about the study of subjectivity - that
'subjectivity' denotes a set of issues quite different than classic studies of 'self' or 'person'; that
viewing subjectivity through the lens of the 'postcolonial' provides a language and analytic strategies
valuable for addressing such issues; that attention to 'disorders', social as well as individual, is critical
to the ethnography of subjectivity; and that such ethnography requires theory and methods that
facilitate attending to that which is 'unspeakable and unspoken'. The essay then provides three
ethnographic vignettes from the author's work in Indonesia, using each to explore a domain central
to the ethnography of subjectivity. First, it discusses the importance of the study of the genealogy of
the modern subject and of distinctive patterns of modernity for anthropological research on
subjectivity. Second, it outlines a particular perspective on the psychological subject. And, third, it
addresses 'the eruption of the political', the ethnography of post-conflict settings, and participation
in intervention as critical sites for inquiry into subjectivity. The essay juxtaposes Cavell's philosophy of
'the Ordinary' with current psychoanalytic theories as approaches to bringing that which societies
and individuals keep 'hidden in plain view' into the purview of writing on subjectivity.
I have chosen for the Marett Lecture to speak about the theorization of the 'subject' in
anthropology - and of the place of medical anthropology as a critical site for thinking
through issues of the subject, subjectivity, and the emergence of complex forms of
experience in the worlds in which anthropologists work today. Issues of subjectivity -
of the lived experience of those suffering illness and in search of healing - have long
been central to medical anthropology. I will be arguing that the context of the work of
many medical and psychiatric anthropologists is much different today than it was not
so many years ago, and that theorization of subjectivity has changed dramatically in the
human sciences and anthropology over the past several decades. And I will be outlining
in broad strokes how my own thinking has changed about strategies for investigating
* 2010 R.R. Marett Memorial Lecture, delivered at Exeter College, Oxford University, 30 April 2010.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) i8,515-535

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2012
516 Byron ). Good
and theorizing subjectivity in the context of illness and globalizing medical technolo
gies, as well as in relation to a broader class of phenomena discussed under the rubric
'postcolonial disorders'.
I dedicated a portion of the initial Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture (B. Good 1990; cf.
B. Good 1994: chap. 1) some twenty years ago to a critical reading of the rationality
debates that preoccupied many in the late 1960s and 1970s, and to their clearly posi
tioned arguments about the nature of what Robin Horton (1967) called 'African tradi
tional thought' in contrast to 'Western science', a debate intended to reduce the
boundaries between Enlightenment rationality and scientific discourse and the ratio
nality of, for example, the Azande when speaking of'magic and witchcraft'. And I made
an argument for an alternative strategy, grounded in cultural phenomenology, herme
neutics, semiotics, and narrative studies, with a special effort to address questions of
epistemology. One early goal of the Morgan Lectures was to disrupt the divide between
'belief' and 'knowledge' - 'their beliefs, our knowledge' - a dichotomy that subtly
authorizes 'us' and discounts 'them' in ways that have become an increasing burden for
a postcolonial anthropology. And I was concerned to move the focus of attention of
medical anthropologists away from questions of 'rationality', which reproduces anxi
eties about how to overcome the legacy of what George Stocking called 'a general
intellectual orientation which may be called developmental, progressive, or (loosely)
evolutionary', in the direction of what he called 'the Germanic [or Romantic] roots of
cultural anthropology' (1989: 3, 4).
What was less the focus of attention of those lectures was the nature of the 'subject'
assumed by the alternative positions outlined there - the search for rational subjects
who, despite odd 'beliefs', are not so much different from us versus a focus on culturally
distinctive life-worlds and the culturally shaped persons or selves constituted in rela
tionship to what Irving Hallowell (1955a; 1955fr) called their 'behavioral environment'.
would like in this Lecture to discuss why I have come to feel that neither of these is an
adequate theory of the 'subject' for medical anthropology or anthropology in general,
to discuss how theorizing the subject has been refigured over the past two decades, why
medical anthropology has become one critical site for such refiguring, and why this
matters for how we think, write, and conduct our inquiry as anthropologists.
In a recent review, Joäo Biehl and Amy Moran-Thomas introduce the challenges
faced in writing about subjectivity - which they dub provisionally as 'inner life pro
cesses and affective states' - in the context of contemporary medical technologies.
[Subjectivity does not merely speak as resistance, nor is it simply spoken (or silenced) by power. It
continually forms and returns in the complex play of bodily, linguistic, political, and psychological
dimensions of human experience, within and against new infrastructures and the afflictions and
injustices of the present ... To grasp the wider impact of how medical technologies are becoming
interwoven in the very fabric of symptoms ..., we must account comparatively for the ways such life
forms are fundamentally altering interpersonal relations, domestic economies, and identity-making
processes in both affluent and resource-poor settings (Biehl & Moran-Thomas 2009: 270).
Michael Fischer, in the concluding essay of Subjectivity: ethnographic investigations

(Biehl, Good & Kleinman 2007), describes writing about subjectivity in the twenty-firs
century as mapping out 'dangerous anthropological terrain - raucous terrae incognitae
and landscapes of explosions, noise, alienating silences, disconnects and dissociation,
fears, terror machineries, pleasure principles, illusions, fantasies, displacements, and
secondary revisions, mixed with reason, rationalizations, and paralogies - all of which
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

Theorizing the 'subject' 517
have powerful sociopolitical dimensions and effects' (Fischer 2007: 442). This is where
we have arrived in writing about subjectivity in medical anthropology - a space and
time quite different from those associated with debates over the rationality of witch
craft or narratives of illness and the lived experience of human suffering, however
critical these continue to be. Medical anthropologists increasingly work in settings of
violence or post-conflict. Many engage issues of humanitarian interventions, mobile
and undocumented populations, new forms of biological citizenship, and medical
technologies that escape clinical settings. Complex bureaucracies and forms of govern
mentality, categories of ethnicity and citizenship, as well as profound economic
inequalities mediate access to medical care and biotechnologies. All of these create
enormous challenges for ethnographic research and writing.
In what follows, I make four claims about where we are and how we might proceed
in theorizing subjectivity, then unpack a few of these ideas in relation to our ethno
graphic studies of subjectivity in Indonesia, which is the larger project that frames this
Lecture.1 My argument here follows from a collaborative project with colleagues rep
resented by our volume Postcolonial disorders, of which Prof. Mary-Jo Good is the first
editor (M. Good, Hyde, Pinto & Good 2008).2
First, I argue that the analytic term 'subjectivity' denotes a set of critical issues for
anthropologists working in contemporary societies, issues that differ from those raised
by classic studies of'self' or 'person and emotion' characteristic of earlier generations of
psychological and cultural anthropologists, opening different domains for ethno
graphic investigation and suggesting alternative modes of inquiry.3 The term 'subjec
tivity' signals awareness of critical writings related to the genealogy of the subject, and
to the importance of colonialism and the figure of the colonized 'other' for writings
about the emergence of the modern subject. It denotes new attention to hierarchy and
exclusions, to violence and modes of governance, to new forms of'citizenship', and to
subtle modes of internalized anxieties that link subjection and subjectivity. It indicates
the importance of linking national and global economic and political processes to the
most intimate forms of everyday experience. It places the political at the heart of the
psychological, and the psychological at the heart of the political (B. Good et al. 2008:3).
For much of the literature on subjectivity, the term 'subject' references the sujet of
French psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, and feminist writing, locating discussions in
theoretical territories that evoke strong reactions among anthropologists. There are
good reasons for this. The post-structuralist suspicion of the 'humanist subject' and the
focus on 'subject position' over lived experience lead too often to thick theory and thin
ethnography. Despite this proclivity of some post-structuralist writers, the language of
subjectivity signals a complex, psychological understanding of the subject, one for
which current psychoanalytic conceptualizations and methods are relevant. The Laca
nian vocabulary provides a language for linking aspects of consciousness and psycho
logical experience with the linguistic and institutional, reflecting a long-standing
pattern in French social and psychological theories for conscience to provide a natural
bridge mediating individual and collective aspects of experience or consciousness. The
hypothesis here is that a project of ethnographic studies of 'subjectivity', drawing on
these theoretical frames, is both feasible and productive. One goal of this Lecture is to
illustrate what such studies might look like, indicating the range of data that may
contribute to such a project.
My second claim is that viewing subjectivity through the lens of the 'postcolonial'
provides a language and analytic strategies valuable for investigations of lives,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18, 515-535

518 Byron j. Good
institutions, and regimes of knowledge and power in the settings in which many
anthropologists work today. Whether directly addressed or not, whether working in
societies that were formally part of European and North American colonialism or not
the figure of the colonial haunts ethnographic writing. Anthropologists are well aware
of the colonial history of the discipline; 'writing culture' has been subject to critiques o
Orientalism, and efforts to represent individual lives of others are often contested as
speaking for the other. Indeed, for new generations of anthropologists, the whole
enterprise of ethnography becomes suspect. In her book Decolonizing methodologies,
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Director of the International Research Institute for Maori and
Indigenous Education at the University of Auckland, writes:
From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the
term 'research' is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself,
'research', is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary. When mentioned
in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is
knowing and distrustful (1999:1).
No amount of theorizing will resolve the conflicts inherent in ethnographic research

and writing. The hypothesis here, however, is that the work of historians and literary
critics and students of the subaltern and the postcolonial (many of whom are them
selves scholars from postcolonial societies), along with inventive forms of ethnographic
writing and collaborative projects, provide tools for addressing the ghosts of colonial
ism present alike for anthropologists and members of the societies in which we work
My third claim is that attention to 'disorders' - as in our phrase 'postcolonial
disorders' - is critical to the ethnography of subjectivity, in particular for medical and
psychiatric anthropologists. The term 'disorders' is obviously a broader category than
illness, marking an enlarged scope of the work of many medical anthropologists today
On the one hand, it bridges the individual and the societal, linking the madness of the
state and of individuals, collective and individual memories, repressions, and remem
bering. On the other, it denotes that which is set off as threatening to 'order'. Historians
have shown that the strategic assemblage of ideas, institutions, and forms of domina
tion that constituted colonialism - in the name of God, Science, and Capital, or under
the rubric of Christianity, Civilization, and Commerce - all functioned to establish and
maintain distinctive, local 'orders', modes of social life, and an enactment of'the Real',
characteristic of a particular Enlightenment vision of reason, progress, and freedom.
Indeed, the very origins of the modernist equation of disorder with the mad, the
primitive, and the bestial - all characteristics of'the Other' - are found in the efforts t
enact and instantiate a bourgeois colonial order (e.g. Biehl 2008). Attention to disorders
thus forces attention to the establishment of very particular political, moral, and
epistemic orders, often through mechanisms of state violence.
Acknowledging the links between the political and the psychological, between states
of order and disorder, is, of course, only the statement of a problem, not its solution.
Many anthropologists draw on Foucauldian analyses of'subjugation' and 'subjection' in
the formation of the subject to explore these linkages - in ways sometimes useful, but
often producing over-determinist views of the role of governmentalities in producing
unitary subjects and modes of consciousness. Many have drawn on clinical terms -
trauma, anxiety, dissociation, paranoia, insecurity - in ways that are, again, sometimes
insightful, at other times more metaphorical than technically useful. Arthur Kleinman

and his colleagues have advocated 'suffering' or 'social suffering' as more experience
near frames for analysis, placing particular primacy on the existential, phenomenologi
cal, and moral, producing an important body of new ethnographic writing (Das,
Kleinman, Ramphele & Reynolds 2000; Kleinman, Das, Lock, Reynolds & Ramphele
1997). The use of moral and religious languages as sources for analytic categories, and
the suggestion that 'suffering' is a distinctive mode of experience, applicable across
cultures and religious traditions, are also, however, not without difficulties.
There is an obvious hazard to approaching subjectivity among postcolonial societ
ies through a focus on disorder or pathology. If 'research' is as suspect among indig
enous peoples as Linda Tuhiwai Smith indicates, research on social pathologies is
particularly problematic, laden with colonial history and power relations. In the colo
nial context, the pathologies of native cultures were routinely cited as evidence of the
inferiority of the colonized and as mandate for intervention. In liberal societies, focus
on the pathologies of indigenous peoples - or the poor - is often equally used as
mandate for intervention, including those by international agencies that produce what
Mariella Pandolfi calls 'mobile sovereignty' (2008: 163). Recognizing, labelling, study
ing, and responding to social pathologies are thus located in complex terrains of
postcolonial histories and relationships. Linking 'disorders' to 'subjectivity', however,
has the potential for increasing understanding of the lived experience of persons
caught up in complex, threatening, and uncertain conditions of the contemporary
world.4 It provides a focus on the historical genealogy of normative conceptions asso
ciated with order and disorder, rationality and pathology, and it brings analytic atten
tion to everyday lives and routine practices instantiated in complex institutions.
Addressing such issues lies at the heart of much contemporary work in medical
anthropology.5
Finally, my fourth claim, perhaps more controversial, is that studies of subjectivity
need to pay attention to that which is not said overtly, to that which is unspeakable and
unspoken, that which appears at the margins of formal speech and everyday presenta
tions of self, manifest in the Imaginary, in dissociated spaces and individual dream
time, and in traces of the apparently forgotten, coded in esoteric symbolic productions
aimed at hiding as well as revealing. This suggests close attention to memories and
subjugated knowledge claims that are suppressed politically but made powerful pre
cisely by their being left unsaid, attention to that which speakers strategically refuse to
talk about in settings of surveillance and danger, to painful secrets and 'poisonous
knowledge' (Das 2000), and to traumatic memories and hidden transcripts, which may
fade from everyday awareness but have explosive power when evoked (Scott 1990). It
suggests attention to forms of knowledge coded in highly symbolic art or in theatrical
performances, as well as to that which is embedded so fully in everyday practices and
assumptive worlds, shaped by contemporary assemblages of knowledge/power, that
they become invisible to subjects, depending on their positions of power. And it
suggests the special importance of the uncanny, of the ghosts and spectres that haunt
political and social life, as well as individuals, linking studies of subjectivity to what
Derrida calls 'hauntology'.6 Discussion of the secret, the hidden, the unspoken, and the
unspeakable as qualities of subjectivity, of the ir-rational and incomprehensible forms
of violence and aggression, of the motivating force of longing or desire, of loss, mourn
ing, or revenge, of remorse or guilt, of sensibility disrupted by displacement and socia
disintegration, all disguised more than revealed by rational discourse, obviously has
resonance with a wide range of psychoanalytic theories.

520 Byron j. Good
Do these, then, belong to the domain of the anthropological? Can these issues be
explored without committing the obvious fallacy, of such concern to classical British
anthropologists, of reducing the social to the individual? The claim here is that anthro
pologists cannot not attend to these issues if we are to address forms of lived experience
in the settings in which many of us, older as well as younger generations of anthro
pologists, work today. We cannot neatly dissociate the social or cultural from the
psychological, leaving the psychological to psychologists or clinicians, if we are not to
abdicate subjectivity as a domain of anthropology. But does this lead us to yet another
form of'knowing better' than members of the society in which we work, knowing the
motives unknown to them, a search for the Real behind the Ordinary? Or can a 'descent
into the ordinary', in Veena Das's lovely phrase, referencing philosopher Stanley Cavell
(Das 2007), reveal the hidden? Is a deep commitment to the Ordinary compatible with
the understanding of the subject and the programme of investigating and theorizing
subjectivity sketched out here? And can these be translated into modes of ethnographic
inquiry?
These are the questions that motivate the ethnographic reflections to which I now
turn. For more than fifteen years, Mary-Jo Good and I have been engaged in research,
teaching, and collaborative projects with colleagues in Gadjah Mada University in the
Indonesian city of Yogyakarta - a classic centre of Javanese culture, a hub of political
activism from the period of the independence struggle to the present, a local site of
complex global aesthetic productions. While Yogya remains the primary setting of our
work, since 2005 we have also been deeply involved in post-conflict mental health work
in Aceh, the province at the northern tip of Sumatra, the coast of which was devastated
by the great Indian Ocean Tsunami of 26 December 2004. In what follows, I provide
three brief narrative accounts from my fieldwork, which might be framed in terms of
multiple modernities, the transition from cultural phenomenology to the psychological
subject, and the eruption of the political. Although each could stand as a lecture on its
own, I hope that juxtaposition of these three analyses will suggest how I conceive the
larger, complex project of investigating subjectivity in Indonesia - and by extension in
the field at large.7
Multiple modernities?
Mary-Jo and I first began working in Yogyakarta in 1996, teaching and carrying out
research as Senior Fulbright Lecturers in Gadjah Mada University. I was a member of
the Faculty of Psychology, and with a junior colleague, my friend Subandi, who is now
the Vice Dean for Academic Affairs of that Faculty, was carrying out a study of psy
chotic illness in relation to Javanese culture. Early in my stay, a professor from a
nearby university called urgently to ask if I would meet to review a grant proposal he
was writing. The next day, a bright Sunday morning, he stopped by our house. It was
clear he had something important he wanted to discuss, in addition to the proposal.
He told me how he had gone to a European university to study experimental psy
chology for his Ph.D. He said that he still teaches learning theory, but that he now
doubts the neo-Skinnerian theory in which he was trained. I told him I wasn't sur
prised, that psychology students are active in society and have interests hardly cap
tured by such experimental models. But no, he interrupted, that wasn't the issue. He
then leaned forward and began, 'I am a Christian. I believe the Bible is true. I believe
that what Jesus said is true - that if you truly believe, you will be able to do all things
...'.8 What followed was a remarkable statement of fundamentalist Christianity mixed

with Javanese ontology. 'I believe the Bible tells what is true about the world. If people
truly believe and do what it says, God will answer prayer'. The professor talked about
how too many try to take the easy way out - to pray, expect God to answer their
prayers, but avoid doing those things the Bible says you have to do. 'The Bible says you
have to deny yourself. That must mean something. You have to fast, you have to ...' -
and at this point he began to elaborate classic practices of Javanese acquiring mystical
power by regular fasting, meditation, prayer, staying awake at night - by denying
oneself! He went on:
Another faculty member and I are interested in doing research on this. There are powerful people here
in Java - but God is the most powerful. I have a friend [a personal guide or guru, he intimated] who
can say a prayer, say some words, and a person will fall unconscious. Then he will say another thing,
and the person will wake up. There are powerful Muslims as well, people who can point to a candle,
say a word, and a fire will start. But if my friend is there, he can pray and the candle will not light. This
proves that Christianity is true, superior to other religions. That is what we want do research on.
Could you help us write an NIH [National Institutes of Health] grant to do a study like that?
My new acquaintance was speaking from a contemporary form of what historian

Merle Ricklefs (2006; 2007) describes as the 'mystic synthesis' that emerged in Java in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - a synthesis of Javanese Islam, particularly
Sufism, acceptance of a wide array of local spiritual forces, and acknowledgement of
diverse practices, including both the pillars of Islam and Hindu-Buddhist ascetic prac
tices aimed at enhancing one's ontological power. Although contested by Islamic mod
ernists of the colonial period and competing with a dense field of philosophical and
religious traditions - as Ricklefs writes, 'Javanese were putihan, abangan, priyayi, Mod
ernists, Traditionalists, Sufis, Christians, westernizers, Theosophists, Freemasons, anti
Islamic fans of pre-Islamic Javanese culture, perhaps even Existentialists' (2007: 258) -
this mystic synthesis shaped everyday experience and practices of the self. For many
Javanese, including scientists, physicians, and faculty members throughout Indonesian
universities, it continues to do so today.
'In Java', Ward Keeler wrote in his classic analysis Javanese shadow plays, Javanese
selves, 'the self is defined most crucially in two ways: as placed in the social hierarchy,
and as in possession of a particular concentration of power' (1987:19). Ben Anderson,
in his classic paper 'The idea of power in Javanese culture' (1972), describes Javanese
ideas concerning ontological power, which suffuses the universe, constitutes the self,
and organizes political understandings; and he contrasts these Javanese theories of
political power with those of Western political science. Javanese rulers, from the ancient
Hindu kings through President Suharto and on until today, have political power as a
result of being able to concentrate ontological forces or power in themselves - using
ascetic practices, ceremonial activities, powerful objects or pustaka (such as magical
krises), and making pilgrimages to powerful sites. Unity, or one-ness, is a central quality
of Power, Anderson argued, and multiplicity and diffusion are associated with weakness
and dispersion of Power. These are critical issues for understanding Javanese concepts
of the person and everyday subjectivity, as well as governance.9
I begin with this ethnographic sketch, however, not only to indicate that any inves
tigation of Javanese subjectivity requires a phenomenological exploration of such
culturally shaped experiences and practices of the self, and that these are critical in my
own research on serious mental illness and psychiatric practice in Java, but also to
suggest that such explorations must be placed in the context of questions about the

522 Byron J. Good
nature of modernity, the 'modern subject', and the historical genealogy of subjectivity
in Java and elsewhere in Indonesia. I want to suggest that such analyses must necessarily
be situated amidst recent discussions of'multiple modernities', of debates over unitary
conceptions of 'the modern subject' versus comparative, cross-cultural studies of
'modernities' (plural) and the modes of subjectivity they produce. I want to assert,
without taking time to demonstrate, that the real debates within Indonesia today have
to do less with contests between Western and Indonesian forms of modernity than with
those between what I would provisionally call priyayi modernity and reformist Islamic
modernity. And I suggest that the dynamic constituted by such distinctively Indonesian
contests has a very different historical trajectory10 and leads to very different social and
internalized divides than those represented by both South Asian and Middle Eastern
'modernities', as discussed, for example, in Timothy Mitchell's fine collection Questions
of modernity (2000a).
One brief example, to make clear what I am suggesting. Writing about psychiatric
practice in Morocco, Stefania Pandolfo describes the profound ruptures across social
groups labelled modern and traditional, across generations and educational groups,
and within self-identity that result from Moroccan experiences of French colonialism.
Moroccan psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, she found in her research, echoed the
attitudes and practices of earlier French ethnologists and colonial health administra
tors, who insisted that 'indigenous healing' is 'incommensurable with the modern' (cf.
Mitchell 2000k xxii), leading diverse healing practices to be classified as superstition
and made punishable by law (Pandolfo 2008: 331). Pandolfo provides case accounts of
the deep divide between the world of Arab and Berber culture, religion, and healing
practices, on the one hand, and the 'French modern' (Rabinow 1995) - including the
Lacanian analytic reasoning of the psychoanalysts, and the ambivalent rejection of their
Arab heritage by Moroccan youth who appear in their clinics - on the other.
Now my argument is simply that this analysis describes a remarkably different
trajectory of modernity and the modern subject in Morocco than is present in con
temporary Indonesia. The French modern of North Africa produced sharp divides
between the presumed rational, secular order of the modern and the devalued order of
the religiously superstitious or traditional, between a disenchanted order of Nature and
the social or symbolic (much as described by Bruno Latour in We have never been
modern [1993]), and between an educated intellectual elite trained in French institu
tions and the majority of members of the society. These sharp divides are largely absent
in Java - and elsewhere in Indonesia. What I have called 'priyayi modernity' - though
it is a mode of subjectivity common to many Indonesians who would never consider
themselves 'priyayi', including many non-Javanese11 - and illustrated in my initial story,
maintains an ontology that is open to diverse spiritual forces and practices, embracing
conceptions of the self, of Nature, the political, and practices of self-cultivation that
resist this set of dichotomies, while at the same time being comfortably modern. The
biggest challenge to priyayi modernity comes not from the natural sciences or Western
rationality, but from an increasingly powerful form of reformist Islamic modernity,
which challenges both the mystical synthesis described by Ricklefs and patterns of
Islamic syncretism embraced by competing Islamic groups.12
The psychiatrists with whom I work - and their patients - also share far less concern
for the divide between the modern and the traditional than the Moroccan psychiatrists
Pandolfo describes. Although those psychiatrists who openly embrace an identity as
traditional healers - whether Balinese, Javanese, or Islamic - are considered something

of an embarrassment to the profession, some with whom I work openly describe

themselves as able to evaluate their patients both in neuro-psychiatric terms and from
the perspective of kejawen or Javanese spiritual knowledge or science (ilmu kejawen),
and many argue for the importance of the spiritual (including Islamic) for psychiatric
practice.
My initial argument is thus that ethnographic investigations of subjectivity require
combining studies of the cultural phenomenology of the subject and practices of
self-cultivation with historical and ethnographic investigations of the genealogy and
meaning of the modern subject in the diverse and competing traditions of modernity
- including diverse Indonesian traditions.
From cultural phenomenology to the psychological subject

It was May 2007, and a psychiatrist friend from Jakarta, Dr Rusdi Maslim, joined my
research team members and me to go to visit a young man with whom we have met
regularly since February 2001, when he suffered a sudden and acute psychosis. We drove
about a half an hour outside of Yogyakarta to a small village, where we were to meet the
young man I will call Mas Anto, who lives in a small, quite poor house, still made partly
of bamboo, along with his mother, his stepfather, who is a construction worker, and two
sisters.
Mas Anto was part of a study we have been conducting of early psychosis in Java,
exploring the nature of the onset of psychotic illness and factors influencing course and
outcome.13 He had been a good student, but dropped out of school after eight years
because his parents could not afford to send him to high school. He went to work for
a year as a servant in the house of a rich Chinese-Javanese merchant in Yogya, but
returned home complaining of how he was treated. He was 19 years old, and had just
begun working in a small satay restaurant not far from his village when he fell sick. One
night, he failed to return home from work at his usual time. When he did arrive, his
mother told us, he was obviously troubled. When asked what was wrong, he became
angry and would only say that when he rode his bicycle past a graveyard, something
came after him. The spirits had tried to lure him.
Mas Anto went to work the next day but did not come home at all that night. When
he returned after two days, his condition had deteriorated severely. He would weep,
laugh, and shout without reason, mumbling while counting on his fingers. He had
difficulties sleeping because, he said, ghosts were bothering him, and he refused to eat.
He became silent, walked around stiffly - like a 'zombie', his family said - with a blank
look in his eyes, acting frightened. He felt that a black pig had entered his body, making
him root about on the ground. He had the powerful sensation of centipedes crawling
on his body and a large number of red ants attacking him. He was upset by anything
with the colours red and black and tried to burn or bury items with these colours. He
reported being visited by Nyi Loro Kidul, the great Queen of the South Sea, who
hypnotized him. He was also visited by Hamengku Bowono, the Sultan of Yogyakarta,
who paid him respect. He began feeling that people wanted to poison him. He heard
voices, thought a character on the television was mocking him, and felt that someone
was trying to control him. He became angry with his mother, claiming she had made a
deal with a spirit (a Thuyul) to take his soul in exchange for her being given wealth.
After one week, Mas Anto's family took him to the private clinic of a Yogya psychia
trist, who started him on anti-psychotic medications and told him to return to the
clinic weekly to refill his drugs. However, after three weeks, Anto's family felt he was not

524 Byron ). Good
improving and simply stopped purchasing the medication for him. Instead, they took
him to several healers to be given special water - air putih - blessed by the healers, bu
he did not recover. During one of the initial research visits, the psychiatrist on our team
Dr Carla Marchira, provided Anto with standard anti-psychotic medications, urging
him to start taking the drugs again.14
While Mas Anto's illness was quite dramatic, it gradually declined, and after two
months, in April, the psychologist from our team reported that he seemed much better.
I visited Anto for the first time in May of that year, along with Dr Carla. Anto was not
at home, but a neighbour reported that he was working up the street helping build a
house. Carla walked up the street and approached a young man, asking if he knew
where she could meet Mas Anto. The young man replied, 'I am Mas Anto!' Carla was
amazed, since only two months earlier she had seen him acutely psychotic. He joined u
for an interview, appeared almost totally recovered, but clearly did not want to talk
about his illness. When asked, he gazed off for a moment, and said he could no
remember what had happened.
We have followed Anto at least annually since that time. His illness is completely
gone. He has taken no further medication, has had no new episodes of illness, and
shows no residual impairment. When we visit him, Anto always seems happy to tal
with us. He is only modestly embarrassed about what happened in what is now the
distant past, has largely 'sealed over' his memories of the psychosis, and talks primaril
about his concerns with finding work and moving on with his life.
This, then, was the context of our visiting Mas Anto again in 2007. The interview
went as usual, with Anto chatting informally with Dr Rusdi, Dr Carla, a psychologist
from our team, and me about his current life. As he sat, he held his guitar and talke
about how he still occasionally sings and plays guitar with his friends, with whom h
used to have a small rock group. Pak Rusdi, my psychiatrist friend, encouraged him t
play for us. He seemed embarrassed, asking what he would sing. His older sister, passin
through, said, 'Sing the "Ayah" song', the song about the 'father'. With encouragement
he began singing, with increasing emotion, 'Kita Kembali', a song recorded by an
Indonesian pop group, Koes Plus. The song includes highly intimate and idealize
lyrics of someone who is missing a father. In Anto's adaptation of the lyrics, he sang 'too
sad to remember, having to go on without..., how sad my heart is to remember your
love and affection', and the refrain, datang kembali, 'come back again'. 'What answer will
you give me?' the song goes, 'Is there a path you will follow that will allow us to come
back together again (kita kembali lagi) ... ?' Our group sang along with the refrain, an
applauded his singing.
As we left, Pak Rusdi held Anto's hand quietly and said, 'I know what you are feeling,
that you miss your father and no one understands you ...'. As we later sat to have lunc
and discuss the case, Pak Rusdi reminded us that Mas Anto had lost his father and aske
what had happened. I remember realizing, with a kind of shock akin to those remark
able moments in psychotherapy when an interpretation produces a moment of embar
rassed insight, that although I knew that Anto's father had divorced his mother and left
the family when Anto was 4 years old, I had largely forgotten this, and that we had not
discussed it in depth with him.
Pak Rusdi and I returned to visit Anto again in July, this time alone, to take up th
issues the song had raised. Anto talked with us about his lack of self-confidence, h
feelings of indecisiveness, which impedes his finding work. He told us he thinks often
about his father, though he cannot really remember him. His mother refuses to talk

about the divorce, and he is not close to his stepfather. He has no one with whom he
shares his feelings. He sang again a portion of the song 'Kita Kembali', then went on to
talk even more explicitly about how difficult it is to feel that his father may live in Yogya
but has never contacted him. He can't really be angry at his father, he said, because he
doesn't know what happened. But he often thinks, 'Why, why do I have such bad fate
(nasib), why does no one love me like my father loved me?' 'What would you tell you
father if you could meet him?' we asked. 'I would tell him to love me, to come back an
take care of me', he told us movingly. He concluded by singing another song, 'Tiga
Puluh Menit', 'Thirty Minutes', about a person sitting for thirty minutes with a lover
too shy to speak, unable to say what he felt, until one day he could force himself to say
'aku sayang padamu, 'I love you ...'
In retrospect, it is obvious that the real heart of this case is not the cultural phe
nomenology, the fascinating array of ghosts and mighty spirits that visited Anto, or
even simply the clinical course of the illness - its rapid onset, acute symptoms, and
complete resolution and recovery. The rage at his mother during the psychosis now i
interpretable; his story that his mother was selling his soul to a spirit, and her counter
claim that it was the Chinese businessman for whom he had worked who was the one
selling his soul, become meaningful. For all of my fascination with this world of spirits
and magical forces and hauntings made visible through his psychosis, this young man
was haunted by something far less exotic but more primal: the loss of his father. And it
took an Indonesian psychiatrist, a man psychologically attuned, to really hear and
acknowledge this haunting.
Why had we not attended to this sense of loss? Was it because our team was made up
of women, who were drawn into collusion in some fashion with the mother, who would
not speak about his father with him? In my case, how much had to do with the simple
fact that much of the conversation with Anto goes on in Javanese, and is only translated
back to me in Indonesian, filtering my relationship with him? But the question remains:
what was the source of my own 'not knowing' about something that at another level I
knew, the source of my forgetting about the loss of his father? Understanding the
phenomenology of Javanese culture is essential as we work with Mas Anto and others
in our longitudinal sample of persons with psychotic illness. It is not, however, enough.
Understanding Mas Anto - and the others - requires another kind of listening, a
different sort of intuition. In this case, it required an exploration of what Anto hinted
at in the coded language of Indonesian popular songs. It also suggests the importance
of attending to our own resistances to knowing as much as to the complex forms of
resistance to knowing of those with whom we work.
My point of telling this story in this Lecture is to indicate my growing conviction
that while cultural phenomenology and narrative studies of the kind I described in the
Morgan Lectures remain critical for medical and psychiatric anthropology, they are not
enough. I am increasingly convinced of the importance of more complex psychological
and psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject, and of the importance of developing
modes of inquiry that give access to domains of experience that initially remain hidden
from view. These are not easy matters, theoretically or methodologically, but if we are
to make subjectivity central to our work in this field, they cannot be avoided. Two brief
comments about starting-points.
In his Tanner Lecture of 1986, a remarkable essay published as 'The uncanniness of
the ordinary', Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell (1988), a former student and leading
American interpreter of John Austin, provides a reading of Lacan's interpretation of

526 Byron J. Good
Edgar Allan Poe's tale 'The purloined letter'. I have been reading Cavell, stimulated by
Veena Das's powerful use of his work in her ethnographic reflections on violence in
India. Das (2007) follows Cavell in exploring the constant desire of philosophers to
escape the Ordinary into the realm of metaphysics or other forms of scepticism, a
tendency both Cavell and Das show to be more fundamentally human, and in Cavell's
larger project of recovery of the 'human voice', a voice he sees as having been banished
by philosophers. Das draws inspiration from Cavell in her ethnographic focus on the
everyday worlds of those who have experienced violence. 'My engagement with the
survivors of riots', she writes, 'showed me that life was recovered not through some
grand gestures in the realm of the transcendent but through a descent into the ordinary
(Das 2007: 7, emphasis added).
Cavell regularly quotes Wittgenstein's statement, 'Since everything lies open to view
there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us', as
a beginning-point of ordinary-language philosophy (e.g. Cavell 1994: 5). So what does
this imply for my initial argument that a theory and method for investigating subjec
tivity must necessarily address that which is hidden, the 'unspeakable and the unspo
ken'? Of note, Cavell describes having prepared for the Tanner Lectures by teaching a
seminar on psychoanalytic literary criticism - and he describes Lacan's interpretation
as an example of material 'apparently antagonistic to ordinary language and its phi
losophy' (Cavell 1988:160, emphasis added). Cavell discusses 'The purloined letter', then
notes the following: 'The narrative comes to turn on the fact that a purloined letter was
hidden by being kept in plain view, as if a little too self-evident, a little too plain to
notice, as it were beneath notice, say under the nose, and then moves to an examination
of competing theories of the way to find the truth of hidden things'. And here again he
invokes Wittgenstein: 'The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden
because of their simplicity and [ordinariness, everydayness]. (One is unable to notice
something - because it is always before one's eyes.)' (Cavell 1988:164).
So, one starting-point. We anthropologists have our own forms of scepticism. How
can we possibly know the other? How can we ever approach the subjectivity of those
with whom we work? In particular, since, unlike psychoanalysts, who meet with clients
for years before coming to see that nearly everything that went before needs to be
reinterpreted, we anthropologists have neither licence nor opportunity for such
engagement. One response begins precisely with Cavell's claim that we must return
over and over again to the Ordinary, to acknowledge that, along with philosophers, we,
too, have enormous resistance to listening in the present, to truly being present for what
is said to us rather than escaping into interpretation. This suggests that we make use of
the psychological or psychoanalysis not as a formula for interpreting what lies behind
the Ordinary but as a way of listening in the present, of being present to what is in plain
view. This was certainly what I failed to do in the case of Mas Anto, and it is the reason
why I experienced my 'return to the Ordinary', with Pak Rusdi's interpretation, as
having an uncanny quality.
A second and related point follows from this. The claim that we need to attend to the
hidden in anthropological analyses of subjectivity comes up against the hazards that we
will reproduce again a colonial anthropology of'knowing better' than those with whom
we work — the same impulse represented by juxtaposing 'their beliefs' to 'our knowl
edge'. My initial answer is that I am advocating not simply a form of theorizing, but a
form of listening, one that involves mutual discovery. The old view of the psychoanalyst
as one who reads your mind, who knows what you do not know about yourself, of

course reflects a popular anxiety rather than actual practice. Psychoanalysis in its
clinical mode, in contrast to an older positivist mode, is a process of discovery, the
cultivation of a way of remembering and reflecting on the significance attached to
memories, of addressing resistances and repressions in ways more subtle than the
Foucauldian claims of finding hidden resistance to power.15 The real point is that, just
like psychoanalysts, anthropologists cannot know ahead of time. We do not and cannot
'know better than ...' We can only discover what others already know, or discover along
with those in a particular society that which is not easily knowable, that which is bound
up in the complicities and the 'after the facts', that which is embedded in the Ordinary
and lies at the complex intersection of the social, the psychological, and the political.16
The eruption of the political: intervention as a mode of inquiry

In this final section, I reflect on another set of phenomena, in this case political, which
was also only partially spoken but hidden 'in plain view'. Mary-Jo and I have watched
remarkable changes in what seems like a very short span of sixteen years, during which
we have returned regularly to Indonesia, often several times each year. The last years o
Suharto's New Order witnessed growing protests and sporadic political violence, par
ticularly in years of national elections. As we were leaving Indonesia after our first
six-month stay in 1996, the most significant violence in recent history exploded, a
Suharto's government attempted to sabotage Megawati Sukarnoputri's leadership of
the PDI, the Democratic Party of Indonesia, leading to clashes and open riots in Jakart
that had to be quelled by the military. But this was only one of a number of outburst
of violence. The government, and many journalists, responded by asking, mengapa
massa gampang mengamuk?, 'why do the masses so easily run amok?', using the old
Malay term mengamuk, to run amok, to pathologize virtually all forms of political
resistance.
We have written about this elsewhere, noting the complex history of the term 'amok'
in colonial psychiatry.17 But what became manifest through the almost obsessive focus
on 'disorder' during this period was a grammar of political discourse that juxtaposed
'order' and its associated vocabulary - as in Ordre Baru, the New Order of the Suharto
regime - with a set of terms linked with 'disorder'. Order {ordre), stability (stabilitas),
discipline (disiplin), were juxtaposed to anarchy (anarkis), disturbances or riots
(kerusuhan), brutality (kebrutalan), struggles or fights (rebutan), and the chaotic
(kacau). In this juxtaposition, amuk massa lay clearly on the side of the pathologized
disorder.
Three characteristics of this grammar should be noted. First, these distinctions also
resonated with the classic Javanese cultural dichotomies of halus versus kasar, of the
refined versus the coarse or crude, the spiritual versus the earthly, and the set of
practices of the self and self-cultivation, as well as the social class assumptions, that
went with them. Second, for Indonesian intellectuals, and many in the public at large,
this appropriation by the New Order of classical Javanese language and values was
transparent. For intellectuals, this represented a form of hegemony - labelled explicitly
as hegemoni - the naturalization of New Order political power within the Indonesian/
Javanese value structure. Many in the general public responded with caustic humour.
The 'discipline' in a 'national discipline movement' (gerakan disiplin nasional) was
turned into 'di-silipin - the money that has to be 'slipped in' to your identity card when
you give it to any official. The third characteristic of this grammar was that the stroke
dividing the two sides of these dual categories was precisely the historical fact of the

528 Byron ). Good
killings of 1965 that brought Suharto to power - represented symbolically and narra
tively as G30S, the 30th of September Movement, the term for the abortive coup in
which six Indonesian Army generals were murdered. The military blamed the PKI, th
Communist Party of Indonesia, for the coup, and launched a campaign of mass killing
that saw between 600,000 and one million persons summarily executed and many
more imprisoned. In New Order ideology, this event and the heroic actions of the arm
mark the gap between the chaos of that period, ironically blamed on the communist
and the 'order' established by the regime. But except when students were forced t
watch the classic propaganda film enacting the Suharto regime's version of the story
every Independence Day, the events of 1965 were largely unspeakable. At the heart o
this political grammar was thus an occulting of traumatic memory.
In a fascinating essay entitled 'The seven veils of fantasy', Slavoj 2izek writes that
'fantasy is the primordial form of narrative, which serves to occult some original
deadlock' (1997:10, original emphasis). He describes Lacan as radically anti-narrativis
- that is, as opposed to the idea that the ultimate aim of psychoanalytic treatment is t
'organize a confused life-experience into a coherent narrative, with all of the trauma
properly integrated', and goes on: 'Lacan's thesis is much stronger: the answer to the
question "Why do we tell stories?" is that narrative as such emerges in order to resolv
some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its terms into a temporal succession
(1997: 10-11, original emphasis). In this most basic originary event of contemporar
Indonesian political consciousness, the chaotic killings and murderous rage of 1965 ar
narrativized as the heroic actions of the military, which saved the nation and estab
lished the New Order, and are represented as the gap between order and disorder. The
historical memories remain 'repressed' in a 'literal/symbolic sense: violent political
censorship, involuntary forgetting, psychic obliteration', as Pandolfo (2008: 331) writ
of Morocco. Though unspeakable, this originating event remains in plain view, con
stituted as a dimension of the Ordinary.
The fall of Suharto in 1998 saw an eruption of the political. What had been unspeak
able became largely speakable, though President Abdurahman Wahid's efforts t
reopen the events of 1965 and bring closure threatened to reignite the great divid
inflaming the passion of Islamic modernist groups, suggesting that the 'fundamenta
antagonism' was far from resolved and the fantasized 'other,' the 'Communist', remain
a powerful element of the Symbolic. There was an eruption of Reformasi speech and
artistic productions - paintings, long suppressed political drama, satire, endless politi
cal talk shows on suddenly freed television channels - aimed at producing new forms
of political consciousness or critical citizenship (M. Good & Good 2008). Despite this
sudden openness, many forms of hidden violence continued to threaten the emergin
efforts at democratic politics - the 'dark forces' spoken of by President Gus Dur.
Among the darkest of secrets was the terrible war that the Indonesian military
continued to wage on the people of Aceh, the northernmost province of Sumatra. Her
again, 'secret' violence was carried out only partially disguised. Although access to Ace
was almost completely cut off by the military, enforced by martial law, reports we
circulating that made clear the nature of the violence. It took a great act of Nature, th
terrible earthquake of 26 December 2004 and the Indian Ocean Tsunami that killed
between 130,000 and 200,000 people, to bring these events fully into the open. By ear
January 2005, hundreds of humanitarian organizations, international agencies, and
emergency response groups were spread along the coasts of Aceh. There was an em
tional outpouring of grief and support for Aceh throughout Indonesia. And on 15

August 2005, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed in Helsink

between representatives of the government of Indonesia and GAM, Gerakan Aceh
Merdeka, the Free Aceh Movement, bringing the violence to an end and initiating a
broad set of post-conflict interventions.
In November 2005, barely three months after the signing of the Helsinki accords,
Mary-Jo and I began consulting for the International Organization for Migration
(IOM) concerning mental health strategies in previously high-conflict areas of Aceh. By
February 2006, we were accompanying IOM research teams into villages of thre
districts of Aceh to conduct a major 'psychosocial needs assessment', a survey designed
to guide IOM in launching post-conflict psychosocial or mental health programmes, t
which we were deeply committed between 2005 and 2010. And this brings me to my
final ethnographic vignette (cf. M. Good, Good & Grayman 2010: 248-50).
The quantitative and qualitative survey we helped lead produced an outpouring of
stories of violence and torture enacted by the Indonesian military. In one village, our
interviewers left in such shock that our graduate student and collaborator, Jesse
Grayman, then working for IOM, arranged for the organization to send a mobile
mental health team for a visit to this village. On 15 February 2006, we joined a group o
Acehnese doctors and nurses, including a brave and committed psychiatrist, and a
guide who was a former leader of GAM, in a caravan of four-wheel-drive vehicles,
marked with the blue and white symbols of IOM, up into the hills of North Aceh. W
passed untended rice fields and overgrown pinang gardens and burned-out hulks of
houses along the side of the deeply rutted, muddy road, finally stopping in a shabby
village centre, with a few nearly empty shops, where people had begun to gather,
expecting our visit. We were greeted with coffee, cigarettes, and small talk, which
gradually turned more sombre as people began to refer to the events of the conflict.
After a short time, we walked to the meunasah, the village centre, where we were met by
a tall, thin man, in his forties, wailing loudly as his friends tried to support him. The
doctor preceded him up the stairs to a large, open room, where the two sat, facing each
other, surrounded by a growing crowd of villagers, and opened his 'trauma clinic'. My
scribbled handwritten notes report the following.
In April 2004, men in black shirts came at 4 a.m. and accused this man of being a spy
for GAM. They beat him, bound his hands and legs, tied a plastic bag over his head
suffocated him, hung him on a pole like a goat, beat him many times, smashed his head,
and left him for dead. The villagers found him and released him. But since then, he
can't sleep, he can't work, he can't take care of his family, and he cries constantly. The
doctor took control, grabbed his hands, said a prayer with him, calmed him, took his
blood pressure, gave him an injection of a sedative, and soon he was sleeping quietly.
Thunder and lightning crashed, accompanying a tropical downpour, as, one by one,
villagers came forward to tell their stories to the doctor. I sat at the edge, began a
conversation with a man sitting quietly, smiling. How are you? I asked. His eyes began
to water. They came and took everything from his house. The villagers were forced to
leave, and when he came back, his house was empty, everything was gone. The chicken
were gone, everything was gone. He feels sad, he cries easily, he often sleeps at 9 then
wakes at 12, he has little appetite. He was hit, for a long time he couldn't work. He is now
a bit better, but still has pain in his body. He looks seriously depressed.
A woman tells her story to the doctor. Her husband was taken in 1990, he was cut
open, his heart was taken out, he was killed in front of her and her children. Her
child had a gun put to his throat. She has a pain in her heart, she feels sad, easily

530 Byron j. Good
frightened. She was dragged by the TNI, the Indonesian army, for two metres, then
fell unconscious. She still feels pain in her back. They killed her husband in front of
her daughter and her children. Her daughter was covered by a cloth, so she didn't
have to see. They cut off his ear and put it in the meunasah. She doesn't know where
his head was put. She suddenly makes a joke, and the mood lightens.
A woman approaches the doctor, crying, telling how she was tortured, her toenails
torn out, beaten. TNI members kept asking her, where is GAM. She didn't know. Her
husband was taken, her house was burned, and until now, she doesn't know where her
husband is, though this happened in 2004. He wasn't a GAM member, but he was
accused and tortured, as they asked where is GAM, where are the weapons. She was
suspected of cooking food for GAM. A second group of soldiers came and asked her,
where is the flag of Indonesia? Why don't you report to us? She finally escaped to the
forest, where she hid for seven days and nights, afraid she would be beaten again. They
came back and burned her motorcycle, saying it belonged to GAM, accused her of
cooking rice for the combatants, because she had leftover rice in the house. They
commanded her to lie down, then shot a gun near her ear, terrifying her. And so the
stories went on, for nearly five hours - until the doctor had had all he could take and
asked a man from the local soccer team to massage him. We all relaxed for a bit, then
took our leave.
For us, this was the start of a long and deep involvement, in which we took this
spontaneous 'trauma clinic' as a model for the development of mental health outreach
teams, organized by IOM, staffed by young Acehnese doctors and nurses, and funded
by diverse donors, particularly the World Bank.18 These teams treated over 2,000
persons in 75 villages. We fought to have IOM and the donors support these teams; we
worked closely with them, carried out formal evaluations and wrote reports, met with
patients to hear stories of recovery, and have continued to advocate for this model of
care, even as donor funds for Aceh have largely disappeared.
I recall in particular returning to that same village in North Aceh as part of our
evaluation research, in November 2008, for the first time since that initial visit in 2006.
This time, a large red banner wafted over the entrance to the meunasah, proclaiming
'Partai Aceh', the local political party formed by GAM, the former combatants, as part
of the peace process. I recall vividly the stories people told this time, with the same
traumatic events narrated as though in the past, rather than in the present. And I still
carry the text messages I wrote to Mary-Jo that day, while heading back from the
villages. 'Long, fascinating day. Still on way home. So interesting to see what peace
brings - more chickens and ducks, houses rebuilt, children in school, people have a
chance to recover from having husbands, children, friends killed. Quite moving'. And
then later: 'Another amazing day! Aceh betul bisa bangkitV (Aceh truly can recover!')
This is obviously the beginning of a very long story at the end of an already long
lecture. Although there are many critical issues concerning how we represent the lives
and lived experience of those tough Acehnese men, women, and children, for now I
want to use this bit of ethnography to make one simple point. The nature of what we
learn about other's subjectivity depends on the positions that we ourselves occupy. In
this case, we have been involved on the side of intervention. We chose to work closely
with IOM - or, perhaps more accurately, we felt compelled by the stories we heard to
become as deeply involved as we could in advocating for mental health care for terribly
traumatized communities in a region with great need and only five psychiatrists for 4
million people. Although we know all of the arguments about the potential that the

category post-traumatic stress disorder serves to medicalize suffering and the critiques
of the humanitarian industry, we reject using these as an excuse not to try to help those
affected by the violence. We have been privileged to see individuals and communities
recover, with the help of the committed young Acehnese doctors and nurses with whom
we worked. Persons in these communities who continue to suffer the terrible remain
ders of violence remain as stark reminders to the community of the past violence, icons
of memory. Providing care thus has the potential to contribute to the peace process. As
a part of teams of doctors and nurses, we have been able to go into villages and ask
questions, even when these issues were terribly sensitive politically; we have listened in
on persons telling doctors their stories; and we have been in a position to ask people to
talk about their recovery precisely because we are involved in the intervention and its
evaluation.
This is obviously only one mode of inquiry for the study of subjectivity in medical
and psychiatric anthropology - or in studies of conflict, violence, suffering, resilience,
and recovery. I would argue that we should not privilege intervention as the only ethical
position from which to investigate and write about these issues, but that we should
recognize involvement in intervention as one critical site for anthropological inquiry.
Many things have become evident to us precisely because we have been trying to build
systems of care - not only about the inner lives of those treated in the project, but also
about the structure of health services and the difficulty of initiating change. It is for this
reason I subtitled this section 'Intervention as a mode of inquiry'.
Conclusion
I apologize for trying to do too much in this Lecture, to take on too many pieces of data,
while telling stories without endings. My point in doing so has been to suggest that the
complex task of studying subjectivity requires inquiry and writing from multiple
vantages. For example, I have learned critical things about Java and Javanese subjec
tivity precisely by going outside of Java, viewing the Javanese from the perspective of
the Acehnese. I no longer aspire to a single, unified theory of the subject or subjectivity,
which was suggested by Medicine, rationality and experience (B. Good 1990). And I do
not believe there is a single mode of inquiry that is adequate to the task at hand. The
kinds of settings in which many of us, old and young, work these days, and the world
in which we live, provoke a fundamental challenge to understanding. In a world of
murderous rage and apparent death instincts, what Freud called thanatos, rationality
seems an almost ludicrous presumption, an escape from the Ordinary. Cavell argues
that this desire to escape must be recognized as fundamentally human, that we must
'allow skepticism its permanent role in the human mind'. 'What this requires', he says,
is learning to bear up under, and to take back home, the inevitable cracks or leaps of madness that
haunt the act of philosophizing and haunt the construction of the world - to take the madness back
to our shared home of language, and take it back not once for all [for there is no once for all within
life] but each day, in each specific, everyday site of its eruption (Cavell 1988: t86, original square
brackets).
That, too, is the task of anthropology.
NOTES
I express my great appreciation to Elisabeth Hsu and David Gellner for the invitation to present the Marett
Lecture and for hosting my visit to Oxford. Among the many friends and colleagues who supported this

532 Byron j. Good
project, I owe particular gratitude to Michael Fischer, Alastair Donald, and Mary-Jo Good. Special thanks to
Matthew Engelke and an anonymous reviewer for insightful comments on the manuscript.
1 'Our ethnographic studies' here refers to my long collaboration with Prof. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good.
2 The argument in this section closely follows that in B. Good, Good, Hyde & Pinto (2008: 2-11), where
these issues are addressed in more detail and with fuller references.
3 Although I will go on to argue that some forms of psychoanalytic theory and practice are central to
contemporary studies of subjectivity, it is particularly interesting that this field has been largely devoid of
debates about cultural relativism that were long central to psychological anthropology. While I cannot
explore this observation in this Lecture, it is obviously not the case that questions of universality of particular
psychological theories have been resolved. It is rather that current theorizing about subjectivity brings
attention to a wide range of questions other than those which were central to much previous psychological
anthropology.
4 See Kleinman (2006) for an argument about the centrality of such conditions for any study of moral
experience.
5 B. Good, Fischer, Willen & Good (2010) provide a collection of critical essays that illustrate this claim. It
should be clear that while I am arguing here for a broad agenda for medical and psychological anthropology,
one that should contribute centrally to anthropological studies of subjectivity, I do not privilege suffering or
'disorders' as unique or more important sites for studying subjectivity than many other domains in which
anthropologists work.
6 In two recent essays (B. Good 2012; in press), I spell out in detail the need for what Derrida calls a
'hauntology' for anthropological studies of subjectivity. There I draw on elaborations of Freud's theory of the
uncanny (e.g. Royle 2003), Derrida's writings on spectres and haunting (Derrida 1994; 1998), Avery Gordon's
feminist sociology of'ghostly matters' (Gordon 1997), and anthropologists who have addressed these issues
(e.g. Aretxaga 2008; Das 2007; Garcia 2010; Taussig 1992; Weismantel 2001).
7 All of the research described here was carried out with continuing review of the Committee on Human
Studies of the Harvard Medical School. Specific characteristics of individuals referred to have been altered to
hide their identity.
8 The quotations in this paragraph are taken from my field notes, not from transcribed recordings, and are
therefore approximate.
9 As the quote from Ricklefs makes clear, I am making no claim for a single Javanese religious or political
ideology that shapes Javanese personhood. Diversity is historically important and is present, until today,
down to the level of single villages, as is made clear by Andrew Beatty's ethnography of villages of East Java
(Beatty 1999). However, assumptions about an ontology of power are widespread in Java and indeed much
of the Indonesian archipelago, and are important for understanding specific Indonesian forms of modernity
as well as tradition.
Ferzacca (2000) provides an important discussion of'healing the modern' in Yogyakarta, linking Javanese
notions of the body, illness, and healing to modernity and nostalgia for receding forms of Javanese ideal
culture.
10 The making of Javanese high culture has been read variously as a romantic elaboration of Javanese and
Dutch elites (e.g. Gouda 1995); as the confinement of Javanese ritual and arts to the kratons or palaces of
Yogyakarta and Surakarta after the conclusion of the Java War in 1830, which marked abdication of the
Javanese elite to Dutch authority (Pemberton 1994); or as the elaboration of 'the cult of the adiluhung, 'the
beautiful sublime', in which the Javanese Hindu priyayi elite and Dutch Javanologists collaborated in a
spiritualized codification of elite culture, focused in particular on the 'true inner meaning' of the wayang
shadow puppet theatres (Florida 1995: 32). These complex histories are highly relevant to interpretations of
the genealogy of the modern subject in Java.
11 Some who have read this Lecture object to the use of the term 'priyayi modernity', arguing that the forms
of modernity described here have relevance well beyond the aliran or cultural stream that Geertz (i960)
identified as 'priyayi', indeed well beyond Java. 'Priyayi' (in Javanese) denotes the upper classes of traditional
Javanese society - in contrast with the wong cilik or 'little people' - who cultivate cultural and religious
practices derived from the Hindu-Javanese court. I acknowledge that the pattern I have outlined here has
relevance well beyond Java or a particular group of Javanese. However, I use the term to suggest that
distinctive forms of Indonesian modernity were worked out among that class of Javanese intellectuals in
conversation with the Dutch colonial authorities and intellectuals.
12 Beatty's semi-fictional account (Beatty 2009) of the same villages in East Java described in his ethno
graphic writing provides a vivid portrayal of the inroads of puritanical Islam into such settings of high
religious and cultural diversity and contemporary forms of the 'mystical synthesis'.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) i8, 515-535

13 An analysis of this case also appears in B. Good (2012). Mas Anto (a pseudonym) was part of a set of eight
longitudinal case studies of persons whom we began interviewing, along with their family members, during
a first episode of psychosis. In this study, after individuals and family care-providers agreed to participate in
our research, members of a small research team from Gadjah Mada University would visit the individual an
family members in their homes. Over the first six months, team members visited these individuals four to six
times. We have continued to visit these families annually for nearly a decade. Interviews are tape-recorded
and transcribed. See B. Good, Marchira, Hasanat, Utami & Subandi (2010) for a description of the study and
initial analyses drawn from that research.
"Although the visits associated with our research projects are not intended as interventions, team
members often respond to questions and offer advice and access to medical clinics. In a very few cases, if an
individual was acutely psychotic and not taking medication, the psychiatrist on the team would recommend
the family seek treatment or even, as in this case, provide basic anti-psychotic medications.
15 For an older reading of Freud's psychoanalytic writings as a hermeneutic theory, see Ricoeur (1970).
Again, while such an approach does not eliminate questions concerning the universality of any particular
psychological theory, it helps make clear why debates about relativism versus universal claims about human
nature or psychological constructs have been peripheral to recent writings about subjectivity.
16 See B. Good (2012) for a fuller discussion of this issue.
17 B. Good & Good (2001; 2010); B Good, Subandi & Good (2007).
18 See M. Good & Good (in press) and M. Good etal. (2010) for descriptions of this work and our
reflections on becoming actively involved in this programme of medical interventions.
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Théoriser « le sujet » en anthropologie médicale et psychiatrique
Résumé
Le présent essai explore l'évolution récente de la théorisation de la subjectivité et se concentre en

particulier sur l'anthropologie médicale et psychiatrique. Il suggère que les anciens modes de description
du sujet et de l'expérience vécue ne sont plus adaptés aux études de la violence et des interventions
humanitaires, des nouvelles technologies médicales et des nouvelles formes de citoyenneté. L'auteur met
en lumière quatre propositions concernant l'étude de la subjectivité : « la subjectivité » désigne un
ensemble de questions différentes de celles des études classiques du « soi » ou de « la personne » ; l'examen
de la subjectivité à travers une lorgnette « postcoloniale » crée un langage et des stratégies analytiques utiles
pour aborder ces questions ; il est indispensable pour l'ethnographie de la subjectivité de s'intéresser aux
« troubles », sociaux aussi bien qu'individuels; l'ethnographie a besoin d'une théorie et d'une
méthodologie facilitant l'examen de ce qui est « indicible et non dit ». L'essai livre ensuite trois instantanés
ethnographiques tirés du travail de terrain de l'auteur en Indonésie, en explorant par le biais de chacun des
trois un domaine central de l'ethnographie de la subjectivité. Il aborde pour commencer l'importance de
l'étude de la généalogie du sujet moderne et des schémas distinctifs de modernité dans la recherche
anthropologique sur la subjectivité. Il met ensuite en lumière une approche particulière du sujet
psychologique. Enfin, il s'intéresse à « l'éruption du politique », à l'ethnographie des contextes
post-conflictuels et à la participation à l'intervention comme autant de points cruciaux dans l'étude de la
subjectivité. Cet essai superpose la philosophie de « l'Ordinaire » de Cavell aux théories psychanalytiques
actuelles pour amener dans le champ de vision de l'écriture sur la subjectivité ce que les sociétés et les
individus tiennent « caché au grand jour ».
Byron J. Good is Professor of Medical Anthropology, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine,
Harvard Medical School, and Department of Anthropology, Harvard University. His recent books include
Postcolonial Disorders (co-edited with Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, and Sarah Pinto; University
of California Press, 2007).
Harvard Medical School, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, 641 Huntington Avenue, Boston,
MA 02115, USA. byron_good@hms.harvard.edu


Theorizing The 'Subject' of Medical and Psychiatric Anthropology - ByronGood

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Theorizing The 'Subject' of Medical and Psychiatric Anthropology - ByronGood

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Author(s): Byron J. Good

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) i8,515-535

Michael Fischer, in the concluding essay of Subjectivity: ethnographic investigations

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18, 515-535

No amount of theorizing will resolve the conflicts inherent in ethnographic research

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18, 515-535

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18, 515-535

My new acquaintance was speaking from a contemporary form of what historian

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

of an embarrassment to the profession, some with whom I work openly describe

From cultural phenomenology to the psychological subject

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18, 515-535

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

The eruption of the political: intervention as a mode of inquiry

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

August 2005, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed in Helsink

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

That, too, is the task of anthropology.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) i8, 515-535

Geertz, C. i960. The religion of Java. Glencoe. 111.: Free Press.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) i8,515-535

2012. Phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and subjectivity in Java. Ethos 40, 24-36.

Mitchell, T. (ed.) 2000a. Questions of modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

Théoriser « le sujet » en anthropologie médicale et psychiatrique

Le présent essai explore l'évolution récente de la théorisation de la subjectivité et se concentre en

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18,515-535

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