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By the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, neurasthenia, or ''nerve weakness,'' had become a highly fashionable symptomology of characteristically modern anxieties. Its various symptoms-insomnia, lethargy, depression,... more
By the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, neurasthenia, or ''nerve weakness,'' had become a highly fashionable symptomology of characteristically modern anxieties. Its various symptoms-insomnia, lethargy, depression, hypochondria, hysteria, hot and cold flashes, asthma, hay fever, ''sick-headache,'' and ''brain-collapse''-graphically marked the effects of urbanization, industrialization, and the rationalization of everyday life. Its fretful preoccupation with bodily vigor and decay articulated the conflicts, contradictions, and haunted sensibilities of pervasive social changes (Lutz 1991: 4-5). As a disorder, neurasthenia embodied a new anxious sensibility of the excitable subject as symptom, mirror, and source of worldly forces; suddenly, both the self and the surrounding world seemed at once diffuse, weightless, floating, and unreal, weighted down with symptoms, haunted, immobilized, and excessively sensory and concrete (Lutz 1991: 15-16). As a discourse, neurasthenia articulated both the mysterious malaise of a subject affected by broad and dimly perceived social processes and the emerging therapeutic dream of revitalization through medicine, self-help, talking cures, and eclectic spiritual cures. Neurasthenia was an unsteady, fraught structure of feeling, mixing a gothic imaginary of hidden threats and unseen forces and the optimism of a new consumerist-therapeutic ethos of self-realization, personal magnetism, and corporate charisma (Fox and Lears 1983). It became a true cultural lin
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Apocalypticism and millennialism are the dark and light sides of a historical sensibility transfixed by the possibility of imminent catastrophe, cosmic redemption, spiritual transformation, and a new world order. This essay briefly... more
Apocalypticism and millennialism are the dark and light sides of a historical sensibility transfixed by the possibility of imminent catastrophe, cosmic redemption, spiritual transformation, and a new world order. This essay briefly surveys work by anthropologists and like-minded scholars that focuses directly on endtime movements. It then reviews at more length a varied literature focusing on American apocalypticisms and millennialisms. Turning to contemporary America, we survey the ways in which an apocalyptic/millennial sensibility-as a mode of attention, mode of knowing, and voice-has come to inhabit and structure modern American life across a wide range of registers.
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Page 1. Susan F. Harding American Protestant Moralism and the Secular Imagination: From Temperance to the Moral Majority social research Vol 76 : No 4 : Winter 2009 1277 the reverend jerry falwell, his hair in a pompadour ...
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A Portrait in Scenes by Amira MittermaierFor Saba by Susan HardingRecollections of a Friendship by Michael Lambek
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... The study is funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. ... and non-denominational churches in America that profess premillennial dispensationalism and listen to sermons and Bible studies on the End... more
... The study is funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. ... and non-denominational churches in America that profess premillennial dispensationalism and listen to sermons and Bible studies on the End Times, the Tribulation, and the Millen-nium. ...
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Antonia did not speak to Juan for fifteen years. He had offended her in public while she was in mourning for her husband. As he was trying on shirts that -a salesman was hawking in the village plaza, he flaunted his bare chest in... more
Antonia did not speak to Juan for fifteen years. He had offended her in public while she was in mourning for her husband. As he was trying on shirts that -a salesman was hawking in the village plaza, he flaunted his bare chest in Antonia's face and asked her if she liked his "shirt." ...
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... Further Reflections. Susan Harding. Article first published online: 28 OCT 2009. DOI: 10.1525/can.1994.9.3.02a00010. ... No abstract is available for this article. Get PDF (258K). More content like this. Find more content: like this... more
... Further Reflections. Susan Harding. Article first published online: 28 OCT 2009. DOI: 10.1525/can.1994.9.3.02a00010. ... No abstract is available for this article. Get PDF (258K). More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: Susan Harding. ...
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In this exchange, Mayanthi Fernando and Susan Harding reflect on the norms and taboos of the secular academy and on what scholars can and cannot do with uncanny experiences-their interlocutors' and their own-that defy the epistemological... more
In this exchange, Mayanthi Fernando and Susan Harding reflect on the norms and taboos of the secular academy and on what scholars can and cannot do with uncanny experiences-their interlocutors' and their own-that defy the epistemological and ontological limits of secular reason.
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This essay examines some of the conventions of secular narration that shape mainstream journalism, scholarship, and other non-fiction literatures. By bracketing the agency of non-natural forces, the conventions generate an authoritative... more
This essay examines some of the conventions of secular narration that shape
mainstream journalism, scholarship, and other non-fiction literatures. By bracketing
the agency of non-natural forces, the conventions generate an authoritative authorial
position outside the narrative, a worldly kind of God’s-eye view or “higher ground,”
and generates secular knowledge that can be exchanged by diverse supernaturalists
and naturalists. Similar conventions are also at work in much mainstream American
fiction. Indeed, abiding by such secularizing conventions is part of what defines a
literature as mainstream.
mainstream journalism, scholarship, and other non-fiction literatures. By bracketing
the agency of non-natural forces, the conventions generate an authoritative authorial
position outside the narrative, a worldly kind of God’s-eye view or “higher ground,”
and generates secular knowledge that can be exchanged by diverse supernaturalists
and naturalists. Similar conventions are also at work in much mainstream American
fiction. Indeed, abiding by such secularizing conventions is part of what defines a
literature as mainstream.
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Over the past few decades the concept of “religion,” as it has been understood in anthropology and related disciplines, has undergone a variety of critiques about the ways it was, and is, implicated in Western projects of domination. The... more
Over the past few decades the concept of “religion,” as it has been understood in anthropology and related disciplines, has undergone a variety of critiques about the ways it was, and is, implicated in Western projects of domination. The anthropology of religion has responded to these critiques, but, in addition, two new approaches to the phenomena known as “primitive religion” and “world religions” have emerged, approaches that radically reconfigure our thinking about those phenomena, so much so that they cannot be integrated into the anthropology of religion as usual. The new approaches, which I will discuss here, are the anthropologies of ontology and secularism.
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The notions of progress embedded in our concepts and knowledge practices.handicap our ability to anticipate the presence and power of fundamentalisms.
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We did not have a chance to talk to the AMNH anthropology curators for our earlier review, so we promised a second installment based on interviews with them about the Halls and the prospects for seriously reforming the installations. We... more
We did not have a chance to talk to the AMNH anthropology curators for our earlier review, so we promised a second installment based on interviews with them about the Halls and the prospects for seriously reforming the installations. We also interviewed a number of critics and scholars of the AMNH Cultural Halls about their concerns and visions.
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In the politically innocent language of the wall-mounted exhibit labels, we were told that the six AMNH Cultural Halls reconstruct the life ways and adaptions of the world’s diverse peoples as they were before European contact. But they... more
In the politically innocent language of the wall-mounted exhibit labels, we were told that the six AMNH Cultural Halls reconstruct the life ways and adaptions of the world’s diverse peoples as they were before European contact. But they do so as if they were anchored in some prior pristine state. The exhibits portray peoples who had been in direct or indirect contact with Euro-Americans for many decades, sometimes centuries, and then erase the evidence of contact and its profoundly transformative effects. Every “culture” on display is, in effect, a suppressed history of protracted encounters between colonizers and the peoples being colonized