Over the last 30 years, anthropologists have increasingly drawn on contemporary psychoanalytic thought to examine states of consciousness at the margins of awareness—such as dreams, fantasies, and imaginal thought—and how these states both shape and are shaped by social entanglements. This review covers work on loss and melancholia, emotional suffering and alienation, the influence of transference and countertransference in fieldwork, the experience of being haunted by personal and social injustices, and how self-awareness informs the development of ethics and morality. The article argues that such phenomena should be closely examined and included in anthropological theorizing rather than ignored.
The study of shamanism has been persistently partial, uneven, and skeptical, yet it holds a central place in anthropology. This article argues that shamans have been cast as translators of the unseen and as sites of anxiety shaped by encounters across gender, class, and colonial incursions often defined by race. Anthropologists, in building a vast library of shamanic practice, have found in diverse spirit practitioners translators across social worlds who resemble themselves, suggesting that the figure of the shaman reveals a remarkable history of anthropology itself.
Dominant anthropological theories of mind and consciousness treat certain ways of being as normal, marginalizing those with nonnormative subjectivities. Drawing on the anthropology of disability and psychological anthropology, the authors argue that attending to atypical communication and behavior should be the basis for studying personhood and subjectivity. Building on affect theory and disability studies, this approach opens up conceptions of personhood and refocuses on the process of attribution. The article articulates a 'psychotic anthropology' that centers atypical forms of consciousness to unsettle assumptions about mind and cognition.