"Attached Files": Anthropological Essays on Body, Psyche, Attachment and Spirituality - Hardcover

"Imre Lazar's new book represents a bold and provocative attempt to integrate the various strands of anthropology: the evolutionary and the symbolic, the materialist and the idealist. To this end, he advocates a `tetrahedronic sphere' that seeks to describe and account for the `basic ecological interrelations of Nature, Society, Technology and Ideas,' while at the same time always leaving room for the spiritual as well. This approach is delivered by means of a number of lectures that Professor Lazar has held over the past decades in the field of Medical Anthropology, broadly conceived. Thus, many of the chapters are concerned with embodiment, with the relationship between mind and body, and with physical, mental, and spiritual health. The first few essays focus explicitly on the body as an object of various healing systems and techniques, while the second part deals with birth, motherhood, and attachment, and the third part with modern dystopias, in which the body-centeredness of the first part gives way to an approach focusing on the spirit, its sorrows and its attempts to secure freedom. All in all, this book offers a number of highly original ideas regarding anthropology in general and medical anthropology in particular, along with much wisdom about the human condition." William S. SaxProfessor and Head, Department of Anthropology, South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg"Truly valuable books share a characteristic whereby the reader is tasked with half of the work. Lazar's book will enlighten and challenge in equal measure. Its central tenet is attachment, offering multi-faceted explorations of human relationships based on cultural history, philosophy, literature and biomedical sciences. The book aims to facilitate our re-enchantment with each other, a very timely antidote in today's alarmingly isolationist world. A must-read for all `helping professionals' in the widest possible meaning of the term, Imre Lazar's work provides particularly valuable insights into the understanding of the interaction of body and mind. Readers from all fields will gain new appreciation of the Shakespearean question `What a piece of work is Man?'"Peter MolnarEmeritus Professor, Faculty of Public Health, Debrecen University

"Attached Files" is a selection of lectures and papers written by Imre Lazar, a medical anthropologist with twenty-five years of experience, situated at the crossroads and frontiers of several disciplines, including anthropology, health sciences, religious studies, human ecology, and environmental ethics. The shared focus, connecting these borderlands into a common semantic network, is the problem of the synergic logic of human bonds and attachment embodied by somatic, social, institutional and symbolic structures. The first part of the book deals with pluralism and the enculturation of the medical practice and its anthropological perspectives. The concept of attachment, metaphorized by the title, also provides a common ground to envisage cultural history, philosophy, literature, and biomedical sciences in terms of synergic human agency and its obstacles. The book integrates various strands of anthropology, such as the evolutionary and the symbolic, and the materialist and the idealist. The book will be useful for those interested in the fields of medical anthropology, health psychology, religious studies, human ecology, ecophilosophy, and environmental ethics.