Innovations in Psychological Anthropology

This volume offers a bold and long-overdue intervention into the field of psychological anthropology. It asks how scholars might both constructively destabilize old frameworks borne from the field's complex past and seed innovative new engagements in order to chart ethical, responsible, and constructive ways forward. The contributions cover such topics as white supremacy and the production of knowledge, new perspectives on the "disabled" mind, the importance of ethnographic refusal, silence in narrative, and the racialization of therapeutic methods. This timely book seeks to reinvigorate the field and lay groundwork for a new bridge between the subdiscipline and the wider anthropological community. It is an ideal text for courses in anthropology, psychology, and the wider social sciences and humanities.

Rebecca J. Lester, Ph.D., LCSW is Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. Her research interests include mental health, gender, sexuality, and religion, with a particular interest in how people experience and navigate existential challenges. She is also a practicing psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders, trauma, personality disorders, mood disorders, and gender/sexuality issues. Her most recent book, Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America (2019) was awarded a Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing.

Introduction; 1. Recovering Innovations: Louis Eugene King and the Study of Race in the United States; 2. Re-Cognizing Anthropological Methods: Toward a Decolonizing Cognitive Anthropology; 3. Beyond "Psychotics" and the "Feeble-Minded": Psychological Anthropology and the Disabled Mind; 4. On Love and Abolition: Building a Speculative Practice of Transformative Justice in Psychological Anthropology; 5. Listening to Refusal: Exploring the Political in Psychological Anthropology; 6. Revisiting and Revisioning Silence and Narrative in Psychological Anthropology; 7. Dangerous Intimacies: Resentment, Risk, and PTSD Recovery in "Post-Racial" America; Afterword