On the rational distribution of rationality

✍ Scribed by Robert A. Hahn

• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 1981
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 214 KB
• Volume: 5
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0165-005X
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00054776

✦ Synopsis

Young makes excellent arguments that anthropologists, including medical anthropologists, have been significantly misled, and themselves continue to mislead, by assuming a more-or-less rational 'man' (Is the gender choice deliberate?) and a more-or-less rational patient -even a severely sick one. Neglected have been the complexly interconnected non-cognitive realms of dreams, rituals, and 'expressive culture', emotion and volition, and the public and private facets of discursive genres and capacities. Also neglected, and focal to Young's concerns here, are the different forms of (cognitive) knowledge -their internalization (underplayed in Young's account), inner workings, and expression. The symptoms of any disease may include not only pathologies of physiology, but of expressive (and receptive) capacities and modalities as well. Young points out that to understand patients we must understand such capacities, modalities, and their alterations. (It may also be that those who continuously confront the diseases of others likewise suffer alterations of their capacities and modalities, and these, then, should be appropriately understood as well.)

As they encounter the intersecting domains of symbol, psyche, and soma, medical anthropologists ought to be especially attuned to such dynamics. Young's arguments, however, have profound implications far beyond medical anthropology, for the understanding of those social and personal processes in which people construct their own rationality and that of others.

KNOWLEDGE AND OTHER REALMS OF MENTAL LIFE

Since the 1950s the narrow focus of anthropologists on the light of knowledge,