Beyond the Pathological

"questions of pathology haunt the work. It is time to drop the problematic of pathology" (373)"psychoanalysis bequeaths a set of tools for analyzing the complete spectrum of human states... psychoanalysis may be generalized and used as part of a hermeneutic process of gaining critical insight into sociocultural phenomena without imputing either judgments of clinical pathology or questions of practical intervention" (373)I like Born's instrumentalization (or the more neutral toolificaiton) of psychoanalysis to understand sociocultural phenomena. I also think her move away from "the problematic of pathology" is necessary for anthropological work. However, I question whether "dropping" the problematic exorcises the ghosts that haunt the work of psychoanalysis. What is needed here is Felman's open or "how" reading since it would foreground the paradox of the normal/pathological rather than banish the binary too quickly (and unsuccessfully). I think its an oversimplification (and a possibly paranoid reading) to interpret Born as arguing that we should neatly package Kleinian psychoanalytic concepts and theories into a cohesive hermeneutic tool or apparatus for anthropology. Perhaps an alternative reading is to consider how psychoanlaysis can be used as a (splitting?) method that "holds things in tension" within specific sociocultural and historical contexts."Splitting, then, involves a reductive form of thinking: objects are either all good or all bad. The integrity of the object is fragmented, as is the perception of it and the ambivalence that it evokes. In this state simple difference becomes imbued with extreme evaluation" (374)"Classification plus splitting equals ideology" (376)"It is the tendency for binary oppositions and the classificatory systems that encompass them to be experienced antagonistically and evaluatively, the systematic idealization or advocacy of one pole and denigration of the other, that is captured powerfully by the concept of splitting. Thus splitting can provide a crucial link for theorizing the relation between classification and ideology in general, as well as giving insight into their subjective internalization, reproduction, and power" (376)This is the section where I think Born is advocating for psychoanalysis in anthropology as a splitting method for interrogating context-emergent ideologies. "I have proposed the term antidiscourse to sum up this phenomenon of a discourse that is produced in the process of simultaneously denying another, coexistent, and rival discourse. This term may be contrasted with Michael Halliday's (1978) concept of antilanguage. It refers not simply to purely linguistic forms but to discourse more broadly conceived, in the Foucauldian sense, to include characteristic practices, social relations, institutions, technologies, and forms of knowledge" (379)"I consider my own work and Turner's injunction as mandates for the ethnogaphic elucidation of various kinds of potential contradiction and difference: between words and actions, explicit and implicit, public and private, past and present, social or ritual microcosm and wider social order, one historical or mythic discourse and another. None of these are limited to the kind of Western high-cultural object that I have researched. All should be possible in any ethnographic setting and in relation to different orders of historical analysis" (382)"Far from indulging a poststructuralist fetishism of difference, the intention must be to generate empirical fuel for a more complex and adequate account of cultural historical process" (382)This passage reminds me of Avery Gordon's work (citing Patricia Williams) on "life is complicated." I appreciate setting the aim at "a more complex and adequate account of cultural historical process" rather than the invocation to "make the world safe for difference." Though the poststructuralists are definitely not the only difference-fetishists (and not all poststructuralists are necessarily difference-fetishists). Universalists are all alike; each poststructuralist fetishizes in their own way.