• Happy birthday to the Occupy movement
This past week marked the two-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. On September 17, 2011, a small band of activists took over Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park until Mayor Michael Bloomberg cleared them out. An article in Businessweek notes that, in contrast to the thousands who packed the park in 2011, only around 100 people showed up for Tuesday’s anniversary at Zuccotti Park. Perhaps the movement is defunct. Businessweek reports that, recently David Graeber, professor of cultural anthropology at the London School of Economics, said that he is “taking a little time off” from the movement.
• Hearing voices and sometimes killing people
In an opinion piece for The New York Times, cultural anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann of Stanford University writes about the rising “specter of violence caused by mental illness.” She emphasizes that the vast majority of people with schizophrenia never commit violent acts. In fact, they are far more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators of it.
The risk of violence from people with schizophrenia, she says, increases sharply when people have disturbing hallucinations and use street drugs. We also know that many people with schizophrenia hear voices only they can hear, and “They are often mean and violent.”
She asks “whether the violent commands from these voices reflect our culture as much as they result from the disease process of the illness.” The cultural construction of the messages of voices appears to be demonstrated by a comparative study Luhrmann is conducting with colleagues at the Schizophrenia Research Foundation in Chennai, India, to compare the voice-hearing experience of 20 people with schizophrenia in San Mateo, California, and 20 people in Chennai. While both groups of patients have much in common, the voices heard by patients in Chennai are considerably less violent than those heard by patients in San Mateo.
anthropologyworks 