Contemporary Sociology 7(5) (September 1978):566—68. When the intellectual history of our times comes to be written, that peculiarly Left Bank mixture of Marxism and structuralism now in fashion will be among the most puzzlingofourideastoevaluate.Aliteral “archeology of knowledge” (the title of one of Foucault’s earlier books) will be required to sort out the valuable from the obvious rubbish. I suspect that in this exercise the iconographers of the present (like Barthes) will fare less well than those who have read the past. Of such “historians” (a description which does not really cover his method) Foucault is the most dazzlingly creative. Discipline and Punish (which, shamefully, has taken over two years to be translated into English) follows Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (1971) as the next stage in Foucault’s massive project of tracing the genealogy of control institutions (asylums, teaching hospitals, prisons) and the human sciences symbiotically linked with them (psychiatry, clinical medicine, criminology, penology). His concern throughout is the relationship between power and knowledge, the articulation of each on the other. Here (as he makes explicit in an interview recently published in the English journal, Radical Philosophy) he opposes the humanist position that, once we gain power, we cease to know——it makes us blind—— and that only those who keep their distance from power, who are no way implicated in tyranny, can attain the truth. For Foucault, such forms of knowledge as psychiatry and criminology (with its “garrulous discourses” and “intermidable [sic] repetitions”) are directly related to the exercise of power. Power itself creates new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. Thus to “liberate scientific research from the demands of monopoly capitalism” can only be a slogan. Placing such programmatic Big Issues on one side, though, a superficial first reading of the book mightstartatthelevelofitssubtitle, “The Birth of the Prison.” The key historical transition——at the end of the eighteenth century——is from punishment as torture, a public spectacle, to the more economically and politically discreet prison sentence. The body as the major target of penal repression disappears: within a few decades, the grisly spectacles of torture, dismemberment, exposure, amputation, and branding are over. Interest is transferred from the body to the mind; a coercive, solitary, and secret mode of punishment replaces one that was representative, scenic, and collective. Gone is the liturgy of torture and execution, where the triumph of the sovereign was symbolized in the processions, halts at crossroads, public readings of the sentence even after death, where the criminal’s corpse was exhibited or burnt. In its place comes a whole technology of subtle power. When punishment leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters into abstract consciousness, it does not become less effective. But its effectiveness arises from its inevitability not its horrific theatrical intensity. The new power is not to punish less but to In Retrospect: 1978 29

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0094306118815499a

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison:

Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care

/pdf/unbending-gender-why-family-and-work-conflict-and-what-to-do-3quvxb3q7q.pdf

Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It

Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human

effective prevention campaigns. This is the \"lesson of history\" used to argue for a liberal policy approach. The book is not a work of original scholarship. Clark is bringing together a body of historical and current writing about AIDS and epidemic disease, much of which is familiar. Despite his historical analysis of widely different cultures, his focus in the present is almost entirely on the United States and the impact of AIDS in that particular culture. Even within the U.S., he takes no account of more recent disease formulations, such as the \"chronic disease\" model, which has been widely discussed. AIDS, whether rightly or wrongly, is no longer seen within the epidemic model; it would have been helpful to have some consideration of those more recent changes. Outside the U.S., too, AIDS has been a much less powerful force for the reform of health care systems. In the U.K., for example, AIDS funding has been the victim of recent health service changes rather than a driving force for change. The book is therefore of limited relevance to a non-American audience, although it is well produced and illustrated by thirteen full colour plates, ranging from a 1350 representation of Saint Sebastian to the AIDS quilt in the 1990s.

/pdf/constructing-the-subject-historical-origins-of-psychological-4zisn9j29f.pdf

Constructing the subject: historical origins of psychological research.

Tese de doutoramento, Antropologia (Antropologia da Saude), Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Ciencias Sociais, 2018

A call for a broader citizenship : parent-led autism advocacy movement in Portugal

Despite the recent theoretical debate over the importance of addressing emotions in fieldwork, most European undergraduate programmes in anthropology still lack methodology courses that specifically focus on the emotional impact of doing research. In this article, I draw from my research with activist parents of autistic children in Portugal to explore the affective dimensions of fieldwork experience. In particular, I give an account of how I have dwelled on the emotional challenges that I faced, how these have resulted in vehicles of understanding and affected the analysis of my work as an anthropologist. While fieldwork experience always entails unexpected and surprising emotional challenges, I argue that as anthropologists we can surely benefit from more tailored support networks, safer spaces for discussion, and better pastoral care.

/pdf/feelings-in-the-field-the-emotional-labour-of-the-3d3pkcixns.pdf

Feelings in the Field: The Emotional Labour of the Ethnographer

From the refrigerator mother theory to more recent comparisons to ‘warrior-heroes’, mothers of children with autism spectrum disorders have been historically categorised as emotionally remarkable. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in Portugal, I explore in this article how mothers politically mobilise emotions, characteristics, and acts usually associated with good mothering, such as maternal love, dedication, and sacrifice. While these socially expected phenomena have been addressed as instruments of the relegation of women to motherhood and care labour, I propose a novel look at the value of affectivity in discourses and practices of care and advocacy. I argue that mothers strategically embody and employ their affectivity as political capital to validate their role as expert caregivers and advocates, creating new opportunities to access leading positions within the autism advocacy movement.

/pdf/autism-super-mums-affectivity-as-a-political-capital-in-50ozr8r762.pdf

Lo Bosco

Papers

A call for a broader citizenship : parent-led autism advocacy movement in Portugal

Feelings in the Field: The Emotional Labour of the Ethnographer

Autism ‘Super Mums’: Affectivity as a Political Capital in Special Mothering and Autism Advocacy