Publication Date
10-23-2023
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Annual Review of Anthropology
Volume
52
DOI
10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-041315
First Page
365
Last Page
380
Abstract
Dominant anthropological theories of mind, cognition, and consciousness reify particular ways of being in the world as "normal," which marginalizes the experiences of people who do not meet normative expectations of personhood or exhibit nonnormative subjectivities. By focusing on atypical forms of communication and self-representation in the ethnographic record, which draws from work in the anthropology of disability and psychological anthropology, we argue for the need to attend to interactions and behavior as the necessary basis for anthropological studies of personhood and subjectivity. These foci, which build on a foundation provided by affect theory and disability studies, stand to open up anthropological conceptions of personhood and subjectivity and resituate the process of attribution in making persons and subjects. We articulate a psychotic anthropology that centers atypical forms of consciousness and seeks to unsettle anthropological assumptions about mind, cognition, and consciousness.
Keywords
affect theory, behavior, consciousness, disability studies, self-expression
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Department
Anthropology
Recommended Citation
John Marlovits and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer. "Is a Psychotic Anthropology Possible? or How to Have Inclusive Anthropologies of Subjectivity and Personhood" Annual Review of Anthropology (2023): 365-380. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-041315
