Saris, A. Jamie
(1999)
Producing Persons and Developing Institutions in
Rural Ireland.
American Ethnologist, 26.
pp. 690-710.
ISSN 0094-0496
Abstract
In this article, I examine a community psychiatric nurse's highly commodified
descriptions of the activities and interests of two clients of a mental hospital in rural
Ireland. These examples show an intimate relationship between a discourse of
economics and a discourse of rationality that can also be discovered in sources
connected to the history of Ireland's mental hospital system. Using these and other
connections, I argue that the distinctive utilitarian rationality associated with
modernity, as well as reactions to it, can be promulgated and maintained at a local
level through means other than economic markets. At the same time, I explain how
the mental hospital now has a place within a local moral world. These two insights
provide a novel perspective on a venerable debate in social scientific work on
Ireland (and, by implication, many other peripheral areas of the global economy),
that is, if, how, and in what respects the place has "modernized." [asylums, Ireland,
rationality, modernization, commodity logic]
| Item Type: |
Article
|
| Keywords: |
Producing Persons; Developing Institutions;
Rural Ireland; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology |
| Item ID: |
8387 |
| Depositing User: |
Dr. A. Jamie Saris
|
| Date Deposited: |
28 Jun 2017 12:23 |
| Journal or Publication Title: |
American Ethnologist |
| Publisher: |
American Anthropological Association |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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