Explorations in Psychoanalytic Ethnography

Abstract

This collection of essays is about psychoanalytic ethnography. Its concern is the psychic depths of human cultural life-worlds as explored through psychoanalytic practice and/or the psychoanalytically framed ethnographic project. The authors engage various aspects of the human condition within a wide range of conceptual frameworks that are representative of contemporary psychoanalytic understanding and practice. The anthropological contributions come from scholars whose ethnographic research is grounded in psychoanalysis and whose overall approach to human existence is articulated in terms of or gravitates toward psychoanalysis as a foundational framework for anthropological understanding. A strong version of this position (not shared by all contributors) maintains that anthropological interpretation of human existence is not sustainable without psychoanalysis. Critical here is the primary level of concrete ethnographic research whose horizons are delimited by the psychoanalytic perspectives on the unconscious matrix of the human psyche and, correlatively, on the unconscious depths and dynamics of the intersubjective (social) reality of any given cultural life-world.