Kleinman, Arthur - The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

382 <strong>The</strong> <strong>Tanner</strong> <strong>Lectures</strong> on Human ValuesThis was no more and no less than a transformation in subjectivity.<strong>The</strong> new subjective self took institutional form aroundthe organized collection of funds, administration of hospitals andpoorhouses, and experiences of religious transformation. <strong>The</strong> entirecluster of representation, self, and institutions became a vehicleof political power.Historical studies of witch burning in the medieval period tella story of a transformation in subjectivity as well. <strong>The</strong> circle ofreligious obsession with sin and with the role of the devil, moralfears about the threat of sexuality, the social marginality of certaingroups of women, church politics, and the development of newreligious institutions reveal a reorganization of cultural representations,collective processes, and personal memory and affect thatcreated a terrifying form of interpersonal experience in Europeantowns and villages that had dire consequences for many. 41 By theturn of the Enlightenment not only was witch burning proscribed,but the experiential reality that featured and realized fear ofwitches, inquisitional practices, and the institutional support ofcivil authority had disappeared. Consider the possibility that theNazi era in Germany, Stalin’s era of terror in the Soviet Union,and Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China as well, perhaps, as theCambodian genocide and more recently Bosnia’s ethnic cleansingmight support similar analysis of the transformation of the political,moral, and subjective structure of experience. 42 Are the dif-41 Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1996), pp. 566-67.42This kind of argument is made, albeit in distinctive ways and with varyingdegrees of success, in such works as those of Browning, Ordinary Men; and DanielGoldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust(New York: Knopf, 1996), on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust; and see DavidApter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) ; and Wei-Ming Tu, “Destructive Will andIdeological Holocaust: Maoism as a Source of Social Suffering in China,” in A.<strong>Kleinman</strong> et al., Social Suffering, on Maoist political violence; and Mark Danner,“Bosnia: ‘<strong>The</strong> Great Betrayal,’ ‘ I New York Review of Books, March 26, 1998,pp. 40-52, and his other pieces on Bosnia in the NYRB, November 20, 1997, December4, 1997, February 5, 1998, February 19, 1998, reviewing the major themes