Research Catalog

Of motherhood and melancholia : notebook of a psycho-ethnographer /

Title
Of motherhood and melancholia : notebook of a psycho-ethnographer / Lou-Marié Kruger.
Author
Kruger, Lou-Marié,
Publication
  • Pietermarizburg, South Africa : University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2020.
  • ©2020

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StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
TextUse in library RG525.S6 K78 2019Off-site

Details

Description
382 pages; 23 cm
Summary
"This book is about the slow violence of poverty. Lou-Marie Kruger's clinical and research encounters in the Dwarsrivier Valley attempt to give an account of the complex realities and lived experiences of low-income mothers in post-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on maternal life in a semi-rural community, the work can be regarded as a South African case study, showing how particular happenings, specific events, unique interactions and larger societal processes become intertwined to result in complex narratives. Such intricate narratives do not only show how the past always impacts on the present, but can also implicitly suggest how and why such stories are prone to be repeated. While the book can be seen as a study of a place and a community, the lives of individual people and how they are embedded in the larger matrix of culture, history and the political economy are also present. The pertinent question here is one asked by medical anthropologist Paul Farmer: by which mechanisms precisely, do social forces ranging from poverty to racism to gender become embodied as individual experience?"--Back cover.
Subject
  • Dwars Valley (Western Cape, South Africa) > Social conditions
  • Low-income mothers > Psychology
  • Motherhood > Dwars Valley (Western Cape)
  • Poverty > Dwars Valley (Western Cape)
  • Pregnancy > Dwars Valley (Western Cape) > Psychological aspects
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (pages 332-367) and index.
Contents
Prologue -- Home -- Birth -- Love -- Labour -- Hunger -- Distress -- Death -- Epilogue
ISBN
  • 1869144341
  • 9781869144340
  • 9781869144357 (canceled/invalid)
Owning Institutions
Princeton University Library