Sarah Pinto - Böcker

The essays in this volume reflect on the nature of subjectivity in the diverse places where anthropologists work at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contributors explore everyday modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of Basque youth, Indonesian artists, members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programs in China and the Republic of Congo, psychiatrists and the mentally ill in Morocco and Ireland, and persons who have suffered trauma or been displaced by violence in the Middle East and in South and Southeast Asia. Painting on book jacket by Entang Wiharso

The centre of Melbourne is filled with stories about the city's pasts. Like all of Australia's cities, it is a place that is dominated by markers of the settler-colonial past. Yet when it comes to its Indigenous pasts, the city is mostly a place of silence. Since the 1990s, however, Indigenous histories have been brought into central Melbourne's commemorative landscapes. Monuments, memorials, namings and artworks have all been used to mark the city's Indigenous pasts. These historical markers can be found in the everyday places of parks, roads, bridges and thoroughfares. Taken together, they are an incursion into the city's commemorative landscapes. Places of Reconciliation tells the story of the introduction of official commemorations of Indigenous peoples and histories into the heart of Melbourne since 2000. It explains how they came to be part of the city, and the ways in which they have challenged the erasure of its Indigenous histories. In telling this story, the book also examines the kind of places that have been made and unmade by these commemorations, and how we might understand them as public historical projects in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

The centre of Melbourne is filled with stories about the city's pasts. Like all of Australia's cities, it is a place that is dominated by markers of the settler-colonial past. Yet when it comes to its Indigenous pasts, the city is mostly a place of silence. Since the 1990s, however, Indigenous histories have been brought into central Melbourne's commemorative landscapes. Monuments, memorials, namings and artworks have all been used to mark the city's Indigenous pasts. These historical markers can be found in the everyday places of parks, roads, bridges and thoroughfares. Taken together, they are an incursion into the city's commemorative landscapes. Places of Reconciliation tells the story of the introduction of official commemorations of Indigenous peoples and histories into the heart of Melbourne since 2000. It explains how they came to be part of the city, and the ways in which they have challenged the erasure of its Indigenous histories. In telling this story, the book also examines the kind of places that have been made and unmade by these commemorations, and how we might understand them as public historical projects in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

In her role as devoted wife, the Hindu goddess Parvati is the divine embodiment of viraha, the agony of separation from one's beloved, a form of love that is also intense suffering. These contradictory emotions reflect the overlapping dissolutions of love, family, and mental health explored by Sarah Pinto in this visceral ethnography.Daughters of Parvati centers on the lives of women in different settings of psychiatric care in northern India, particularly the contrasting environments of a private mental health clinic and a wing of a government hospital. Through an anthropological consideration of modern medicine in a nonwestern setting, Pinto challenges the dominant framework for addressing crises such as long-term involuntary commitment, poor treatment in homes, scarcity of licensed practitioners, heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and the ways psychiatry may reproduce constraining social conditions. Inflected by the author's own experience of separation and single motherhood during her fieldwork, Daughters of Parvati urges us to think about the ways women bear the consequences of the vulnerabilities of love and family in their minds, bodies, and social worlds.

In the years leading up to India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new method of dream analysis. “Mrs A.’s” analysis included a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. She turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. This book is an exploration of their conversation, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways Mrs. A. put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.’s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a concept of “counter-ethics”. Following Mrs. A. in pursuing mythic narratives, and turning in its conclusion to art as a guide for theorizing ethics, this book asks what perspectives on gender, power, meaning, and imagination are possible from the position of the counter-ethic and its orientation toward movement and change.

In the years leading up to India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new method of dream analysis. “Mrs A.’s” analysis included a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. She turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. This book is an exploration of their conversation, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways Mrs. A. put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.’s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a concept of “counter-ethics”. Following Mrs. A. in pursuing mythic narratives, and turning in its conclusion to art as a guide for theorizing ethics, this book asks what perspectives on gender, power, meaning, and imagination are possible from the position of the counter-ethic and its orientation toward movement and change.

In the Sitapurdistrict of Uttar Pradesh, an agricultural region with high rates of infant mortality, maternal health services are poor while family planning efforts are intensive. By following the daily lives of women in this setting, the author considers the women’s own experiences of birth and infant death, their ways of making-do, and the hierarchies they create and contend with. This book develops an approach to the care that focuses on emotion, domestic spaces, illicit and extra-institutional biomedicine, and household and neighborly relations that these women are able to access. It shows that, as part of the concatenation of affect and access, globalized moralities about reproduction are dependent on ambiguous ideas about caste. Through the unfolding of birth and death, a new vision of "untouchability" emerges that is integral to visions of progress.

In her role as devoted wife, the Hindu goddess Parvati is the divine embodiment of viraha, the agony of separation from one's beloved, a form of love that is also intense suffering. These contradictory emotions reflect the overlapping dissolutions of love, family, and mental health explored by Sarah Pinto in this visceral ethnography.Daughters of Parvati centers on the lives of women in different settings of psychiatric care in northern India, particularly the contrasting environments of a private mental health clinic and a wing of a government hospital. Through an anthropological consideration of modern medicine in a nonwestern setting, Pinto challenges the dominant framework for addressing crises such as long-term involuntary commitment, poor treatment in homes, scarcity of licensed practitioners, heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and the ways psychiatry may reproduce constraining social conditions. Inflected by the author's own experience of separation and single motherhood during her fieldwork, Daughters of Parvati urges us to think about the ways women bear the consequences of the vulnerabilities of love and family in their minds, bodies, and social worlds.

In the Sitapurdistrict of Uttar Pradesh, an agricultural region with high rates of infant mortality, maternal health services are poor while family planning efforts are intensive. By following the daily lives of women in this setting, the author considers the women’s own experiences of birth and infant death, their ways of making-do, and the hierarchies they create and contend with. This book develops an approach to the care that focuses on emotion, domestic spaces, illicit and extra-institutional biomedicine, and household and neighborly relations that these women are able to access. It shows that, as part of the concatenation of affect and access, globalized moralities about reproduction are dependent on ambiguous ideas about caste. Through the unfolding of birth and death, a new vision of "untouchability" emerges that is integral to visions of progress.