Areas of Research/Interest

Anthropology of science and medicine, gender, cultures of the mind, emotion and rationality, history of psychiatry and psychology, US culture and society.

Publications

Affiliated with other programs

-- Founding editor of the general interest magazine Anthropology Now (www.anthronow.com) sponsored by the American Ethnological Association, funded in part by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and published by Paradigm Publishers. To subscribe visit www.paradigmpublishers.com/journals/an
Journal website is at http://anthronow.com

--With Louis Sass and Elizabeth Lunbeck, Martin co-organizes the regional seminar, The Psyences Project. The Psyences Project brings clinicians into dialogue with academics around common interests in mind and brain as understood by disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, and psychopharmacology in cultural and historical context. (http://www.nyu.edu/fas/ihpk/Psyences/PsyencesSP2006.htm)  

--Research Director (with Elizabeth Lunbeck) of a 2009 Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship program funded by the Social Science Research Council, on “Cultures and Histories of the Human Sciences.”

Publications
1973. The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village. Stanford: Stanford University Press, reprinted 1988.

1981. Chinese Ritual and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, reprinted 2007.

1981. The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, coedited with Hill Gates. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

1987. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press. Winner of Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, 1988.

1994. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS, Beacon Press.

2007 Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture, Princeton University Press. Bipolar Expeditions is affiliated with a website intended to provoke readers’ engagement and participation: www.livecrazy.org.

Other information

For more details, see http://web.me.com/em81/work/Welcome.html

Current News / Projects
Updated July 2009

Last fall the general interest magazine Anthropology Now launched itself at a lively session at the AAA meetings. The many, many people who worked toward this goal breathed a collective sigh of relief. The second issue, the “Atomic” issue, has now gone to bed and we are receiving lots of submissions for future issues.  Please consider sending us a pitch (www.anthronow.com).  With the help of Will Thomson and Wenrui Chen, the website is soon to be launched anew: Stay tuned! A group of us had a wonderful time in a related course in the spring called “Public Anthropology.”  After reading intensively in the history of public intellectuals in anthropology and other social sciences, we wrote in a variety of genres (op-ed, pitch, essay, poem, etc.) every week and considered each person's writing collectively.  We heard the perspectives of a New Yorker editor, a trade press editor, and our very own novelist, Ceridwen Dovey.  We hope to continue these discussions informally. I just returned from the 2009 SSRC DPDF workshop in New Orleans. The program supports two professors from two fields and two universities to train a small group of graduate students in an emerging field. My co-director is Elizabeth Lunbeck at Vanderbilt and our emerging field is “The histories and cultures of the human sciences.” The students were excellent (including our own Dwai Banerjee).  We organized a tour of the city led by Dan Usner, historian of New Orleans and the American South, that was worth the trip all by itself.  The students now go their separate ways for a summer of research and we reconvene in September in Philadelphia.
I am continuing to work on the history of sleep and hope to follow the "mobile sleep van" this summer in Baltimore.  I'll present this work at two conferences this summer, one in Berlin and the other in Switzerland. The German-speaking countries of Europe have an astounding number of events on “neurocultures.”  I don't know why, but common funders seem to be Volkswagen and Bayer. At the same time, I am starting a new project on the history of psychology: How, in the early 20th century, was the psychological “subject” stabilized?  Those early psychologists had intriguing kinds of techniques and apparatuses to get subjects to hold still in time and space.  In connection with this, I have begun to volunteer for NYU psychology experiments . . . what an adventure.