3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent review on this book - with update 20 years later, May 23, 2011
This review is from: Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Updated and Expanded (Paperback)
Here's an excellent review of the book:
Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland
by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
University of California Press, 2001
Review by Gina Zavota on Mar 18th 2002
[...]
---
When Nancy Scheper-Hughes's Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland first appeared in 1977, it attracted immediate attention on both sides of the Atlantic. But despite being widely celebrated in North American anthropological circles, it shocked and outraged many of those who were its subjects: the residents of the tiny village of An Clochán on western Ireland's Dingle Peninsula. They took offense at what they perceived as a breach of trust, an illicit airing of secrets about their sexuality, mental and emotional health, and family life which they had confided in strictest confidence. Now, more than 25 years after the conclusion of her fieldwork, Scheper-Hughes is still attempting to resolve the conflict between her professional duties as a psychological anthropologist and her personal responsibility toward her friends in An Clochán. In her new prologue and epilogue, written especially for this 20th anniversary edition, she confronts this conflict in an eloquent discussion which touches on issues of philosophical importance to the field of anthropology while highlighting the development of her own relationship to her work and the subjects of that work in the intervening years. The quality and substance of these added sections make this justifiably classic work even more valuable to scholars and interested laypersons alike.
The subject of Scheper-Hughes's book alone would be enough to raise eyebrows in some circles: it is an attempt at "a broad cultural diagnosis of those pathogenic stresses that surround the coming of age in rural Ireland" (60) and that, in her opinion, contribute to an extremely high incidence of schizophrenia in the country's western counties. This tendency is especially pronounced among the area's young and middle-aged "bachelor farmers," the men who have been subtly coerced by their families into remaining in the village of their birth and taking over their fathers' farms in an age where farming has lost its once high status as a profession and has become economically unprofitable in all but a very few cases. The breakdown of the traditional extended family structure, along with the emigration of many of the eligible young women from rural Irish villages, has resulted in these men living lives of social isolation, loneliness, and mostly unwanted celibacy. More than even this unfulfilling lifestyle, however, the brutal socialization process, in which the perceived "runt" of a family is demoralized, scapegoated, and made to feel overwhelming guilt if he refuses to remain at home to tend to his aging parents and inherit the family farm, is singled out by Scheper-Hughes as leading to the emergence of schizoaffective symptoms.
In her analysis, Scheper-Hughes draws on several different methodologies, ultimately developing a new and fruitful paradigm for fieldwork in psychological anthropology. She attempts to strike a balance between a thoroughly medical view of schizophrenia, in which it is regarded as a personal, inner disorder - whether organic or psychical in nature - and an interactionist perspective that situates it in the relationship of the individual to her community and surroundings. In addition, she emphasizes the significance of cultural and historical analysis to the interpretation of mental illness. In her introduction, "Mental Illness and Irish Culture," she situates her work within the "culture and personality" school, whose most celebrated adherent, Margaret Mead, revolutionized anthropology with her focus on the role of an individual's culture in the development of her character. By trading statistical analysis and cross-cultural hypotheses for intensive, immanent study of a single community, Mead ignited a profound and still unsettled methodological debate within cultural anthropology. However, despite her debt to this school, Scheper-Hughes balances her subjective observations of life in An Clochán with analysis of the responses of several dozen youth to the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) - a sample which included both "normal" village youth and young patients at the district mental hospital and a local psychiatric clinic. The two approaches combine to give an extremely revealing view not only of the etiology of schizophrenia in rural western Ireland, but of the often pathogenic social and cultural dimensions of life in An Clochán and, presumably, other villages like it.
Cloaking the true name of the village under the moniker "Ballybran," and referring to the villagers, or "parishioners," with pseudonyms, Scheper-Hughes attempts to afford them a modicum of privacy while describing their intimate relations in great detail. The complete failure of this strategy - not only were the villagers able to identify each other instantly upon reading the book, but the identity of the village itself was also eventually discovered by persistent researchers and curiosity-seekers - illustrates what is at once the greatest failing and one of the most intriguing aspects of this masterful and eloquent study. Despite her extremely keen understanding of the social dynamics of the community in which she was immersed, Scheper-Hughes was ultimately unable to negotiate the Irish need for privacy, to reconcile it with her commitment to the demands of anthropological fieldwork and analysis. For that need could not be met by the marginal anonymity afforded by pseudonyms; the very fact that their innermost fears and desires were committed to print at all, however, anonymously, is what so shocked and angered the villagers. Thus a standard of privacy that would perhaps suffice for a resident of a large North American city was considered a betrayal of trust in tiny An Clochán.
The intimacy of the study was necessitated by Scheper-Hughes's concentration on family relations, which she sees as profoundly implicated in the emergence of schizophrenia among the community's most vulnerable members. Before her analysis of family structure and socialization, however, she first gives an "ethnohistory" of An Clochán, a reconstruction of its mythic past from stories told about its founding by seafaring Celts and subsequent conversion to Catholicism by Saint Brendan. She goes on to consider the changing demographic and economic patterns within An Clochán, most predominantly the emigration of many of its young women and firstborn sons and the devaluing of the traditional family farming lifestyle in the light of insurmountable competition from large international collectives. These two developments have resulted in a widespread demoralization or anomie within the segment of the population that has been "left behind" in the village, especially its bachelor farmers, who are most directly affected by both. Finally, Scheper-Hughes turns to conventional epidemiological data to elaborate on the distribution of mental illness in rural western Ireland. Through consideration of variables such as gender, marital status, and birth order among hospitalized patients, she bolsters her argument that it is precisely those "discarded" late-born sons and potential farm heirs who are at greatest risk of developing schizophrenia and other forms of serious mental illness. Weaving a discussion of the attitudes of the villagers toward various forms of unconventional behavior into the analysis, she simultaneously illustrates their predilection toward labeling this group "abnormal" and institutionalizing its members when they rebel against their prescribed societal role.
In the final three chapters of the book, Scheper-Hughes focuses on family relations, in particular those between mothers and children. Here she presents the material that aroused the most ire among the parishioners of An Clochán, particularly in Chapter 4, "Brothers, Sisters, and Other Lovers," where she describes what she characterizes as a climate of fear and mistrust between the sexes, an antipathy toward marriage, and a seeming rejection of adult conjugal relationships in favor of brother-sister and mother-son relations with repressed incestuous undertones. After this analysis, she shift her focus to the socialization process which she believes produces schizophrenic potential farm heirs and anomic bachelor farmers - a process which she characterizes as being "weighted in favor of the mental health of daughters and earlier-born sons, and against the chances of healthy ego integration of later-born sons" (267). She details a pattern which includes minimal contact as an infant, corporal punishment, and most tellingly, the chronic discouragement and humiliation of those sons considered to be, by their very nature, unsuitable for anything other than remaining at home to tend their aging parents in and inherit the family farm. This labeling process, by means of which the most psychologically vulnerable member of the family is forced into the role of underachieving "black sheep," encompasses not only the immediate family, but also schoolteachers, peers, and the community in general, and is for Scheper-Hughes profoundly psychogenic.
It is clear throughout Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics that Scheper-Hughes reflected profoundly on the social and sexual dynamics of the people among whom she lived, and with whom she developed a bond of friendship. Despite her almost complete immersion into village life, however, it appears that this reflection did not extend to a consideration of the effects of her work on her neighbors and friends. At the end of her original introduction, she states that "I trust [the villagers] realize that...
Read more ›
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
