Contact
OFFICE:?201?Anthropology and Art Practice Building (Formely Known As Kroeber Hall)
E-MAIL:?pandolfo@berkeley.edu
PHONE:?642-9229
OFFICE HOURS
Thursday 12 to 3 pm
By appointment via online sign up sheet. Students will need to email Professor Pandolfo to get the link to sign up.
Special Interests
Cultural Anthropology, theories of subjectivity, postcolonial criticism, anthropology and literature; Islam, Middle East and the Maghreb
Additional Links
Topics
Gender and Sexuality topic pageHealth and Disease topic pageHistorical Anthropology and Archaeology topic pageMedical Anthropology topic pageModernity topic pagePsychological Anthropology topic pageRace and Ethnicity topic pageReligion topic pageSociocultural Anthropology topic page
Research
Stefania Pandolfo studies theories and forms of subjectivity, and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world, investigating narrative, trauma, psychoanalysis and the unconscious, memory, historicity and the hermeneutics of disjuncture, language and poetics, experimental ethnographic writing, anthropology and literature, dreaming and the anthropological study of the imagination, intercultural approaches to different ontologies and systems of knowledge, modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, madness and mental illness. Her current project is a study of emergent forms of subjectivity in Moroccan modernity at the interface of "traditional therapies" and psychiatry/psychoanalysis, exploring theoretical ways to think existence, possibility and creation in a context of referential and institutional instability and in the aftermath of trauma, based on ethnographic research on spirit possession and the "cures of the jinn", and on the experience of madness in a psychiatric hospital setting.
Profile
The study of theories and forms of?subjectivity,?and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world represent the main focus of my current work. My writing, teaching and research cover the following themes: narrative, trauma, psychoanalysis and the unconscious, memory, historicity and the hermeneutics of disjuncture, language and poetics, experimental ethnographic writing, anthropology and literature, dreaming and the anthropological study of the imagination, intercultural approaches to different ontologies and systems of knowledge, modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, madness and mental illness.
Previous ResearchA study of memory, trauma, and the speech of loss in a Southern Moroccan society, through spatial representation, autobiographical recollection, historical narrative, and oral poetry. (Based on?in-depth?ethnographic study, including organization of space, agricultural practices, the body and techniques, the transmission of knowledge, idioms of gender and patriarchy) (See Impasse of the Angels. Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Current ResearchA study of emergent forms of subjectivity in Moroccan modernity at the interface of "traditional therapies" and psychiatry/psychoanalysis, exploring theoretical ways to think existence, possibility?and?creation in a context of referential and institutional instability and in the aftermath of trauma. Based on ethnographic research on spirit possession and the "cures of the jinn", and on the experience of madness in a psychiatric hospital setting. (Book in progress, Knots of the Soul; see articles, Rapt de la Voix, in Awal, 15, 1997; Le Noeud de l'Ame, in Rue Descartes.
ForthcomingThe Thin Line of Modernity in some Moroccan Debates on Subjectivity. In Questions of Modernity, eds. T. Mitchell and L. Abu-Lughod. The University of Minnesota Press.