This article tells the story of an anthropologist and a research subject who encountered each other in the middle of the 20th century on an island in the southwestern Pacific. In the midst of an intensive spate of evidence gathering for his dissertation, anthropologist Melford Spiro noted that one of his would-be interlocutors, a man named Tarev – notable for failing all of his psychological tests – still managed to contribute a different form of evidence: if his views could not be amalgamated in numbers via test scores (and thus contribute directly to Spiro’s data set), they could still be rendered as a case. Tarev’s personality study, ‘A Psychotic in the South Seas’, counted as one of many cases contributing to a broad, worldwide effort to explore the meaning of suffering – specifically psychological illnesses – in non-Western cultures. This article examines Tarev’s rejected test-response ‘data’ and the ways in which his answers did not fit the epistemological and geopolitical frameworks that provoked them. The encounter between anthropologist and interlocutor, today, allows an investigation into how mid-20th-century scholars amassed ambitious data sets meant to revolutionize the sciences that dealt with human beings as psycho-social entities. What sorts of data made it into their archives and what sorts did not? How was the data of happiness, sadness and other fleeting emotional states collected from whole islands newly under US naval occupation?
...More
Book
Latour, Bruno;
Lépinay, Vincent Antonin;
(2009)
The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde's Economic Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB001023273/)
Article
Horvath, Agnes;
Szakolczai, Arpad;
(2013)
The Gravity of Eros in the Contemporary: Introduction to the Special Section
(/isis/citation/CBB001213729/)
Article
Buschmann, Rainer F.;
(2007)
Oceanic Carvings and Germanic Cravings: German Ethnographic Frontiers and Imperial Visions in the Pacific, 1870--1914
(/isis/citation/CBB001030679/)
Book
Young, Michael W.;
(2004)
Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884-1920
(/isis/citation/CBB000470706/)
Book
O'Hanlon, Michael;
Welsch, Robert Louis;
(2000)
Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s-1930s
(/isis/citation/CBB000101821/)
Article
Johnston, Ewan;
(2005)
Reinventing Fiji at 19th-Century and Early 20th-Century Exhibitions
(/isis/citation/CBB000660212/)
Article
Sophie Ledebur;
(2021)
Evidence of undercounting: Collecting data on mental illness in Germany (c. 1825-1925)
(/isis/citation/CBB254674350/)
Book
Deborah Blythe Doroshow;
(2019)
Emotionally Disturbed: A History of Caring for America's Troubled Children
(/isis/citation/CBB495157182/)
Article
Granek, Leeat;
(2010)
Grief as Pathology: The Evolution of Grief Theory in Psychology from Freud to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB000953644/)
Article
Bonner, Kieran;
(2013)
Eros and Ironic Intoxication: Profound Longing, Madness and Discipleship in Plato's Symposium and in Modern Life
(/isis/citation/CBB001213732/)
Book
Lund, Mary Ann;
(2010)
Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading “The Anatomy of Melancholy”
(/isis/citation/CBB001220196/)
Article
Arthur Arruda Leal Ferreira;
(2015)
Anthropophagy: A Singular Concept to Understand Brazilian Culture and Psychology as Specific Knowledge.
(/isis/citation/CBB833854844/)
Article
Jeffrey S. Adler;
(2021)
“I’m at My Rope’s End”: Suicide in New Orleans, 1920–1940
(/isis/citation/CBB997404519/)
Article
Lennart Jansson;
Josef Parnas;
(2020)
‘The schizophrenic basic mood (self-disorder)’, by Hans W Gruhle (1929)
(/isis/citation/CBB757425856/)
Book
Kandel, Eric R;
(2012)
The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB001201847/)
Article
Frank, Adam;
(2012)
Loose Coordinations: Theater and Thinking in Gertrude Stein
(/isis/citation/CBB001251570/)
Article
Sullivan, Gerald;
(2004)
A Four-fold Humanity: Margaret Mead and Psychological Types
(/isis/citation/CBB000671308/)
Article
Thomas McNally;
(2016)
More Than a Feeling: Wittgenstein and William James on Love and Other Emotions
(/isis/citation/CBB108623002/)
Article
Malin, Brenton J.;
(2011-12)
Electrifying Speeches: Emotional Control and the Technological Aesthetic of the Voice in the Early 20th-Century U.S.
(/isis/citation/CBB001231785/)
Article
McDougall, Russell;
Croft, Julian;
(2005)
Henry Ling Roth's and George Kingsley Roth's Pacific Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB000660211/)
Be the first to comment!