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POSTCOLONIAL DISORDERS

University of California Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................................................................................................xiPostcolonial Disorders: Reflections on Subjectivity in the Contemporary World Byron J. Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, and Sarah Pinto........................................................1PART I: DISORDERED STATES1. Madness and the Politically Real: Reflections on Violence in Postdictatorial Spain Begoa Aretxaga............................................................................................................432. Indonesia Sakit: Indonesian Disorders and the Subjective Experience and Interpretive Politics of Contemporary Indonesian Artists Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good and Byron J. Good....................................623. The Political Dimensions of Emasculation: Fantasy, Conspiracy, and Estrangement among Populist Leaders in Post-New Order Lombok, Indonesia John M. MacDougall.................................................1094. Haunting Ghosts: Madness, Gender, and Ensekirite in Haiti in the Democratic Era Erica Caple James.............................................................................................................1325. Laboratory of Intervention: The Humanitarian Governance of the Postcommunist Balkan Territories Mariella Pandolfi.............................................................................................157PART II: SUBJECTIVITY IN THE BORDERLANDS6. Everyday AIDS Practices: Contestations of Borders and Infectious Disease in Southwest China Sandra Teresa Hyde................................................................................................1897. Of Maids and Prostitutes: Indonesian Female Migrants in the New Asian Hinterlands Johan Lindquist.............................................................................................................2188. Ambivalent Inquiry: Dilemmas of AIDS in the Republic of Congo David Eaton.....................................................................................................................................2389. To Live with What Would Otherwise Be Unendurable, II: Caught in the Borderlands of Palestine/Israel Michael M. J. Fischer.....................................................................................260PART III: MADNESS, ALTERITY, AND PSYCHIATRY10. The Mucker War: A History of Violence and Silence Joo Biehl.................................................................................................................................................27911. Institutional Persons and Personal Institutions: The Asylum and Marginality in Rural Ireland A. Jamie Saris..................................................................................................30912. The Knot of the Soul: Postcolonial Conundrums, Madness, and the Imagination Stefania Pandolfo................................................................................................................32913. Consuming Grief: Infant Death in the Postcolonial Time of Intervention Sarah Pinto...........................................................................................................................35914. Postcoloniality as the Aftermath of Terror among Vietnamese Refugees Janis H. Jenkins and Michael Hollifield.................................................................................................37815. Cross-Cultural Psychiatry in Medical-Legal Documentation of Suffering: Human Rights Abuses Involving Transnational Corporations and the Yadana Pipeline Project in Burma Kathleen Allden.....................397Contributors......................................................................................................................................................................................................419Index.............................................................................................................................................................................................................425

Chapter One

Reflections on Violence in Postdictatorial Spain

Begoa Aretxaga

When I was invited to take part in this seminar I was happy to have an opportunity to discuss some of my current work with former colleagues and friends. I have been increasingly preoccupied with the problem of madness as it plays and as it is displayed in the theater of politics. This is for me the beginning of a dialogue about this issue that one could broadly call "politics and madness." In this sense what I am speaking about today is more the beginning of a formulation than a crafted thesis.

One of my worries as I started to think about this seminar was that I know close to nothing about postcolonial psychiatry except perhaps for the work of that major and wonderful theorist of coloniality, Frantz Fanon. And to make matters worse I am not properly speaking about questions of postcoloniality either, even though I know a bit more about this issue, having worked for a long while in Ireland, the land of "Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics" as Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1979) dubbed it, and known most recently as the land of crazy violence and terrorism.

But it is not about Ireland that I want to speak today but my current research in the Basque Country of Spain. The Basque Country is not a colonial or postcolonial setting, although some Basque radicals think of the Basque Country in these terms. Yet one could argue that after thirty-six years of dictatorship Spain has gone through a veritable change of status that transformed the country into another state of being. One could say that the series of issues that arise out of this transition and transformation from a totalitarian to a democratic polity have a family resemblance to at least some issues arising out of the postcolonial setting. At the risk of using postcoloniality here as a metaphor of a particular existential state let me say nevertheless that something that characterizes the postcolonial state and the transitional state of countries like Spain or those of the former socialist bloc is a marginal status within the global political and economic order. The second related characteristic is a certain dislocation and often violent disarray of things. It is a state in which the logical order of Cartesian thinking doesn't quite work and yet doesn't quite not work either. It is a state in which things are a little off where they should be and sometimes very much off, so that the state of things seems crazy. And it is frequently through the trope of madness that these "altered states" are made sense of. It is this discourse on madness, national identity, and statehood that I am trying to think about here. What does this discourse say about both the lived experience of politics in these altered states (transitional, changed states) and about the changing nature of the state in our postmodern global world (Fabian 2000; Siegel 1998; Bhabha 1994; Fanon 1967; Geertz 1973)?

I have been thinking about the question of political madness because it has become a privileged trope in the current discourse on Basque violence, particularly since the...