Vieda Skultans is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bristol. Her previous publications include The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in post-Soviet Latvia (Routledge, 1998).

“Arguably, Vieda Skultans is the most prominent contemporary Latvian social anthropologist…One of the best assets of this book is its introduction. In its 15 lucid and condensed pages, Skultans summarizes her intellectual journey and contextualizes the articles presented in the collection, thus providing readers with a highly efficient guide to the themes that hold the book together.”  ·  Journal of Baltic Studies“If anthropologists want to attend to wider audiences and adjoining disciplinary perspectives, this book is an inspiring example of how anthropology can be both challenged and enriched by such dialogue. Few have managed this with Skultans’s dexterity or determination.”  ·  JRAI“This volume brings together for the first time many of Skultans's important, even ground-breaking essays on psychiatry, religion and culture. It is a gift for those of us working in the field.”  · Tanya Luhrmann, University of Chicago

• List of FiguresList of TablesNote on Site of Original PublicationChapter 1. IntroductionChapter 2. Empathy and Healing: Aspects of Spiritualist RitualChapter 3. Bodily Madness and the Spread of the BlushChapter 4. The Symbolic Significance of Menstruation and the MenopauseChapter 5. Women and Affliction in Maharstra: A Hydraulic Model of Health and IllnessChapter 6. Anthropology and Psychiatry: The Uneasy AllianceChapter 7. Remembering and Forgetting: Anthropology and Psychiatry – The Changing RelationshipChapter 8. A Historical Disorder: Neurasthenia and the Testimony of Lives in LatviaChapter 9. Narratives of the Body and History: Illness in Judgement on the Soviet PastChapter 10. From Damaged Nerves to Masked Depression: Inevitability and Hope in Latvian Psychiatric NarrativesChapter 11. Looking for a Subject: Latvian Memory and NarrativeChapter 12. The Expropriated Harvest: Narratives of Deportation and Collectivization in North-East LatviaChapter 13. Narratives of Landscape in Latvian History and MemoryChapter 14. Arguing with the KGB Archives: Archival and Narrative Memory in Post-Soviet LatviaChapter 15. Varieties of Deception and Distrust: Moral Dilemmas in the Ethnography of PsychiatryBibliographyIndex