Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics
Mental Illness in Rural Ireland, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Updated and Expanded
$24.95, £16.95 paperback
9780520224803
Available Now
417 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 23 b/w illustrations, 29 tables
January 2001, Available worldwide
Also in: European Cultural Anthropology; Psychology
January 2001, Available worldwide
Also in: European Cultural Anthropology; Psychology
TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, UPDATED AND EXPANDED
When Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics was published twenty years ago, it became an instant classic—a beautifully written study tracing the social disintegration of "Ballybran," a small village on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. In this richly detailed and sympathetic book, Nancy Scheper-Hughes explores the symptoms of the community's decline: emigration, malaise, unwanted celibacy, damaging patterns of childrearing, fear of intimacy, suicide, and schizophrenia. Following a recent return to "Ballybran," Scheper-Hughes reflects in a new preface and epilogue on the well-being of the community and on her attempts to reconcile her responsibility to honest ethnography with respect for the people who shared their homes and their secrets with her.
When Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics was published twenty years ago, it became an instant classic—a beautifully written study tracing the social disintegration of "Ballybran," a small village on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. In this richly detailed and sympathetic book, Nancy Scheper-Hughes explores the symptoms of the community's decline: emigration, malaise, unwanted celibacy, damaging patterns of childrearing, fear of intimacy, suicide, and schizophrenia. Following a recent return to "Ballybran," Scheper-Hughes reflects in a new preface and epilogue on the well-being of the community and on her attempts to reconcile her responsibility to honest ethnography with respect for the people who shared their homes and their secrets with her.
"This firsthand study of social conditions in the rural west, the most Irish part of Ireland, shows us a melancholy people, almost beyond desperation, isolated by vast social and economic changes. And if Scheper-Hughes started as an observer she ended up as a keener; lamenting a land which had lost its soul. . . . An important book."—Ray Murphy, The Boston Globe
"[Scheper-Hughes] draws you after her, nodding in recognition, as she dissects and holds up to the light. She is a skillful pathologist of human nature and a strikingly good writer."—Micheal Viney, The Irish Times
"[Scheper-Hughes] draws you after her, nodding in recognition, as she dissects and holds up to the light. She is a skillful pathologist of human nature and a strikingly good writer."—Micheal Viney, The Irish Times
"Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, in its original form--now integrally reproduced in the new edition--is a most important seminal study of an Irish community."—Conor Cruise O'Brien
Visit www.globetrotter.com for "Habits of a Militant Anthropologist": an interview with the author including video clips.
Winner of the Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology in conjunction with the American Anthropological Association.
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