This study analyzes American, Vietnamese and Japanese personal values, attempting to understand how it can be ethnographers find large differences in values between cultures, yet empirical surveys find relatively small, almost trivial differences in personal values between cultures.

Winner ofThe Boyer Prize from the Society for Psychological Anthropology This book explores the experience of suffering in order to shed light on the nature of the human self. Using an intimate life history approach, it examines ways people struggle to cope with experiences that can shatter their lives: a diagnosis of cancer, the death of a spouse, a parent s mental illness. The volume takes readers deep into private worlds of suffering in American culture, and invites reflection on what the subjectivity of suffering tells us about being human. Addressing universal themes in a way that...

While Islam has become a controversial topic in the West, a growing number of Westerners find powerful meaning in Islam. Becoming Muslim is an ethnographic study based on in-depth interviews with Swedish and American women who have converted to Islam.

A lively indictment of American culture's pervasive use of the psychotherapeutic metaphor to explain behaviours, a habit that has crossed the Atlantic in recent years, arguing that psychotherapy and excessive individualism has only ensured the continuance of social problems.