Title page-Empathy and healing; Contents; List of Figures; List of Tables; Notes on site of original publication; Ch 1-Introduction; Ch 2-Empathy and healing; Ch 3-Bodily madness and the spread of the blush; Ch 4-The symbolic significance of menstruation and the menopause; Ch 5-Women and affliction in maharastra; Ch 6-Anthropology and psychiatry; Ch 7-Remembering and forgetting; Ch 8-A historical disorder; Ch 9-Narratives of the body and history; Ch 10-From damaged nerves to masked depression; Ch 11-Looking for a subject; Ch 12-The expropriated harvest. Ch 13-Narratives of landscape in Latvian history and memoryCh 14-Arguing with the KGB archives; Ch 15-Varieties of deception and distrust; Bibliography; Index.

For more than three decades the author has been concerned with issues to do with emotion, suffering and healing. This volume presents ethnographic studies of South Wales, Maharashtra and post-Soviet Latvia connected by a theoretical interest in healing, emotion and subjectivity. Exploring the uses of narrative in the shaping of memory, autobiography and illness and its connections with the master narratives of history and culture, it focuses on the post-Soviet clinic as an arena in which the contradictions of a liberal economy are translated into a medical language