Afflictions

Robert Lemelson is Associate Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA, Founder and Director at Elemental Productions, and Founder and President of The Foundation for Psychocultural Research.Annie Tucker is Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and Senior Researcher at Elemental Productions.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. Precedents and Possibilities: Towards an Integration of Visual and Psychological Anthropology.- 3. Culture, Mental Illness, and Outcome in Java and Bali.- 4. The Bird Dancer: Social Suffering and the Question of Therapeutic Visual Ethnography.- 5. Shadows and Illuminations: The Complexities of Interpreting and Framing Extraordinary Experience.- 6. Family Victim: Encountering Deviance and Representing Intersubjectivity.- 7. Memory of My Face: Globalization, Madness, and Identity Onscreen.- 8. Ritual Burdens: Culturally Defined Stressors and Developmental Progressions.- 9. Kites and Monsters: Continuity in Cultural Practices and Visual Representation.- 10. Basic Concepts in Filming for Visual Psychological Anthropology.- 11. Visual Person-Centered Ethnography: Adapting Core Methodologies and Articulating Principles for Visual Psychological Anthropology.

“This book is intended to complement the stories and themes explored in the films, and to shed light on the contribution of ethnographic film to psychological anthropology. … The book is not only relevant and informative on the subject of visual anthropology, but it is also very concrete: Lemelson provides many examples of his own experience and that of other researchers, which helps to make the book practical.” (Véronique Senécal-Lirette, Anthropology Bookforum, Vol. 5 (1), 2019)