Roy Richard Grinker

A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma.

How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

Nobody's Normal

A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy. Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity. Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.

Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

A father's attempt to understand his daughter's autism leads him on a journey around the world to learn how societies view the widely diagnosed disorder.

Remapping the World of Autism

Unstrange Minds

When Roy Richard Grinker's daughter Isabel was diagnosed with autism in 1994, he knew nothing about it. It was considered rare, occurring in about 3 in every 10,000 births. Within ten years, however, most Westerners would be familiar with autism. Scientists have now reported rates as high as 1 in 150, and autism has been called an epidemic. Driven to learn more about this dramatic increase - both as an anthropologist and a father - Grinker set forth on a journey around the world, talking to mothers and fathers, physicians and teachers, advocates and scientists, and made a surprising and controversial discovery about the so-called autism epidemic that would change both his understanding of the disorder and his relationship with his daughter.Filled with moving stories, and informed by the latest science and Grinker's own experience, "Isabel's World" is a powerful testament to a father's quest for the truth, and is urgently relevant to anyone whose life is touched by one of history's most puzzling disorders.

Autism and the Making of a Modern Epidemic

Isabel's World

This is the first ethnographic study of the farmers and foragers of northeastern Zaire since Colin Turnbull's classic works of the 1960s. Roy Richard Grinker lived for nearly two years among the Lese farmers and their long-term partners, the Efe (Pygmies), learned their languages, and gained unique insights into their complex social relations and ethnic identities. By showing how political organization is structured by ethnic and gender relations in the Lese house, Grinker challenges previous views of the Lese and Efe and other farmer-forager societies, as well as the conventional anthropological boundary between domestic and political contexts.

Ethnicity and Inequality Among Farmers and Foragers in Central Africa

Houses in the Rainforest

When anthropologist Richard Grinker's daughter was diagnosed with autism in 1994, it occurred in only about 1 in every 10,000 children. Within ten years, rates had skyrocketed, and the media was declaring autism an epidemic. Unstrange Minds documents Grinker's quest across the globe to discover the surprising truth about why autism is so much more common today. Grinker shows that the identification and treatment of autism depends on culture just as much as on science. Filled with moving stories and informed by the latest science, Unstrange Minds is a powerful testament to a father's quest for the truth.

Christopher B. Steiner

Stephen C. Lubkemann

Euclides Gonçalves

Anthropology conducted in Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of the discipline since it was first institutionalized in the late 19th century. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists on the subject, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa compiles a collection of insightful essays that address all aspects of life on the continent of Africa. Chapters within explore the extent to which anthropological thinking on this topic has been, or remains, influenced by the theoretical traditions, whilst others consider the extent to which anthropological thinking has been transformed by growing interest in using anthropological knowledge to critically address practical concerns and public problems such as war, poverty, and public health. This Companion is presented in four parts. The first part looks at enduring themes—tracing the development of anthropological thinking and the current debates about themes such as witchcraft, kinship, law and justice that have demonstrated remarkable staying power in the anthropology of Africa. The second section considers topics that began to garner attention during decolonization and in its immediate aftermath. Such topics include mobility and displacement, urbanism, and political violence. The third part comprises topics such as trauma, social justice, sex and sexuality that have become the central concern of anthropologists of Africa since its many nations gained their independence. It also looks at ‘hot topics’ like social media, humanitarianism, and environmentality. The final section considers the role that Africanist anthropology has played in informing other Africanist disciplines, and reflects on the politics of representation within the discipline as well. Filled with a wide variety of expert opinions and observations across chapters which are highly sophisticated in their coverage, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is an essential reference resource for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researching anthropologists.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

John Patrick Spiegel

John Paul Spiegel

This preliminary report concerning the neuropsychiatric casualties encountered during the Tunisian Campaign was prepared by the authors under the stress and pressure of conditions in the theater of operations. It is reproduced with a minimum of editing in order to make the information available promptly to medical officers in all theaters. It is believed that this document will become a milestone in psychiatric literature, not only because of its practical value in relation to the prevention and treatment of war neuroses, but also because of the richness of the case history material presented. The detailed accounts of rehabilitation of the personality under the authors' psychotherapeutic method, "narcosynthesis", are unique and of great interest from the practical and theoretical viewpoints. -- Foreword.

The Tunisian Campaign, January-May 1943

War Neuroses in North Africa

"Roy Richard Grinker, writing about the relationship between Pygmies and their farmer counterparts, breaks new ground in the theory of social institutions and ethnicity."—Jan Vansina, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Roy Richard Grinker

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