Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics

TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, UPDATED AND EXPANDED

When Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics was published twenty years ago, it became an instant classic-a beautifully written study tracing the social disintegration of "Ballybran," a small village on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. In this richly detailed and sympathetic book, Nancy Scheper-Hughes explores the symptoms of the community's decline: emigration, malaise, unwanted celibacy, damaging patterns of childrearing, fear of intimacy, suicide, and schizophrenia. Following a recent return to "Ballybran," Scheper-Hughes reflects in a new preface and epilogue on the well-being of the community and on her attempts to reconcile her responsibility to honest ethnography with respect for the people who shared their homes and their secrets with her.

“"This first-hand study of social conditions in the rural west, the most Irish part of Ireland, shows us a melancholy people, almost beyond desperation, isolated by vast social and economic changes. And if Scheper-Hughes started as an observer she ended up as a keener, lamenting a land which had lost its soul. . . . An important book."”

Boston Globe
"[Scheper-Hughes] draws you after her, nodding in recognition, as she dissects and holds up to the light. She is a skillful pathologist of human nature and a strikingly good writer." Irish Times
"Achingly beautiful in places [and] in firm command of an impressive array of evidence." Medical Anthropology Quarterly
"[Scheper-Hughes's] prose is so clear that not only the non-specialist but the average reader can comprehend her arguments and understand the issues she raises." Journal of Mind and Behavior

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the doctoral program in Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her many publications include two books published by California, the award-winning Death without Weeping (1992) and Small Wars (1998).

TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, UPDATED AND EXPANDED When Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics was published twenty years ago, it became an instant classic--a beautifully written study tracing the social disintegration of "Ballybran," a small village on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. In this richly detailed and sympathetic book, Nancy Scheper-Hughes explores the symptoms of the community's decline: emigration, malaise, unwanted celibacy, damaging patterns of childrearing, fear of intimacy, suicide, and schizophrenia. Following a recent return to "Ballybran," Scheper-Hughes reflects in a new preface and epilogue on the well-being of the community and on her attempts to reconcile her responsibility to honest ethnography with respect for the people who shared their homes and their secrets with her.

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