The Nervous System - Department of English and Comparative ...

"he Nervous System / Notes to 83-111
Notes to 112-121
6. REIFICATION AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF
THE PATIENT
I wish to thank Drs Tom O'Brien and Steven Vincent for helping me begin this project,
and the members of the 1977 Marxist Anthropology seminar at the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, for their comments on an early draft of this paper.
1. Gcorg Lukacs, "Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat," in History
and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), pp. 83-222.
2. t. E. Hvans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1937).
.}. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Secaucus N.J.: Citadel Press, 1956), abridged
cd., pp. 279-80.
4. P. Radin, Primitive Man as a Philosopher (New York: Dover, 1957), p. 274.
5. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrcr, Strauss & Giroux, 1978).
6. R. Linder, "Diagnosis: Description or Prescription?" Perc. Mot. Skills 20(1965), 1081;
cited in M. Blaxter, "Diagnosis as Category and Process: The Case of Alcoholism," Social
Science and Medicine 12(1978), 12.
7. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Mentor Books, 1967).
8. Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis (London: Caldar & Boyars, 1975).
9. J. Horn, Away with All Pests (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).
10. L. Goodman and A. Gilman, eds., The Pharmacoloqical Basis of Therapeutics, 5th ed. (New
York: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 166-67.
11. Steckel, S. Boehm and M. Swain, "Contracting with Patients to Improve Compliance,"
Journal of the American Hospital Association 51(1977), 82.
12. Ibid., p. 81.
13. Steckel S. Boehm, "The Use of Positive Reinforcement in Order to Increase Patient
Compliance," Journal of the American Association of Nephrology Nursing Technique 1(1974), 40.
14. Ibid.
15. A. Kleinman, L. Eisenberp, and B, Good, "Culture, Illness and Care: Clinical Lessons
' t o
from Anthropologic and Cross-cultural Research," Annals of Internal Medicine 88(1978).
16. Kleinman et al., ibid., 256.
17. Ibid., 257.
18. Ibid.
19. V. Turner, "A Ndembu Doctor in Practice." The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1967), p. 392.
20. Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Sorcerer and His Magic." Structural Anthropology (New York:
Anchor Books, 1967), pp. 161-80.
7. MALEFICIUM: STATE FETISHISM
1. Mv own introduction to the cultural studv of the modern State and to see this as a
problem worth thinking about comes from The Great Arch; English State Formation As Cultural
Revolution by Philip Corrigan and Derek Saver (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), by w-ay of the
insights and encouragement of Professor Bernard Cohn of the University of Chicago.
2. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,
edited and with introduction bv Adam Phillips (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press,
1990), p. 59.
3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical!
and Cm! (New York: Collier MacMillan, 1962), p. 132.
4. Shlomo Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1972), p. ix. A.R. RadclilTe-Rrovvn, preface, in African Political S\stcms, ed. M. Fortes
and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Oxlord: Oxford Uni\ersity Press, 1970), pp. xi-xxiii.
5. Radcliffe-Brown, p. xxiii, emphasis added.
6. Philp Abrams, "Notes on The Difficulty of Studying the State," journal of Historical
Sociology, 1:1 (1988), 58.
7. Ibid., p. 77.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Quoted in The New York Times, Mav 3, 1990 (p. B 1), in the coverage ot the violent
dispute over gambling on the Mohawk reservation upstate New York.
1 1. Max Weber, "Politics As a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays m Sociology, trans, and
edited by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), p.
79.
12. I am indebted to Adam Ashforth for bringing this observation of Benjamin's to my
attention.
1 3. Quoted in Robert Ackcrman, J. G. Fra/.er: His Life and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), p. 63.
14. In his foreword to an exhaustive collection of essays and talks prepared by the College
of Sociology group around Bataillc, Caillois, and to some extent, Leiris (to name the bestknown),
Denis Hollier indicates the College's vexed dependence on Durkheim and his school,
especially in relation to the place of the "primitive" and "the sacred" in modern West
European society; see Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology, 1937-39 (Minneapolis:
Univcrsitv of Minnesota Press, 1988). While many of the key concepts of Durkheim, almost
bv default, would be theirs too, there were also profound differences, beginning with the
question that formed the basis to their project—namely, the place of the sacred in modernity.
Another outstanding difference is the College's notion of the sacred as not only a lorce for
Durkheimian social solidarity, but also the opposite, the sacred as an excess, as "the outburst,"
as Caillois put it in 1938, "of violations of the rules of life," which is, of course, thoroughly
consistent with Bataillc's fascination with taboo and transgression—a "post-Durkheimian"
rewriting of the Liberal problematic of reason and violence; Roger Cailloi.s, in I he College of
Sociology, 1937-39, p. 152.
15. William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish: I," RES, 9 (Spring 1985), 5-17, and
unpublished 227-page manuscript on the history of the fetish.
16. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976).
17. Quoted in a footnote in Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1973), p. 35.
18. Ibid., pp. 34-35.
19. George Catlin, "Introduction To The Translation," in Fmilc Durkheim, The Rules of
Sociological Method (New York: The Free Press, 1964), p. xiv.
20. Lukes, op. cit. pp. 11-12.
21. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory With Special Reference
to a Group of Recent European Writers (New York: The Free Press, 1937).
22. As far as I can determine, Durkheim uses the term "fetish" but once in The EJememarv
Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1965), p. 144, and does so in order to