Vieda Skultans left Latvia as a refugee at the age of six months. In 1990, she returned for the first time. This text is both a personal account of a homecoming and an anthropology of a people trying to come to terms with its past and to face an uncertain future. Based on more than 100 interviews carried out in the wake of Latvian independence, it gives voice to stories of dispossession and exile and of ambiguous returns. At the same time it unpicks the process of memory itself, showing how personal memory is shaped by the traditional narratives of national history and culture.

Vieda Skultans left Latvia as a refugee at the age of six months. In 1990, she returned for the first time. This text is both a personal account of a homecoming and an anthropology of a people trying to come to terms with its past and to face an uncertain future. Based on more than 100 interviews carried out in the wake of Latvian independence, it gives voice to stories of dispossession and exile and of ambiguous returns. At the same time it unpicks the process of memory itself, showing how personal memory is shaped by the traditional narratives of national history and culture.

Based on the very successful Narrative Based Medicine conference in September 2001. The editors have selected topics around the best sessions and will invite new chapters, not just the papers from the conference. The book is designed to explore the theoretical issues of narrative applied to health care, and how they impact on the practice of medicine and applied social sciences. The book will show how the new approach is more indepth than traditional history taking, placing the individual's story in wider social and ethical contexts. This will be an internationally contributed book and will...

There are many insights and nuggets of value in this collection. Maurice Lipsedge reminds us how badly psychiatry needs anthropology's insights.This book should contribute to the ongoing dialogue between the two fields.' - The Journal of the Royal Antropological Institute The editors states in the introduction that they wish to encourage the reader to meet halfway the other discipline'. This expresses the view which all the contributors clearly feel and which is correct, that psychology and psychiatry and anthropology have much to offer each other and indeed are similar in several respects'....

For more than three decades the author has been concerned with issues to do with emotion, suffering and healing. This volume presents ethnographic studies of South Wales, Maharashtra and post-Soviet Latvia connected by a theoretical interest in healing, emotion and subjectivity. Exploring the uses of narrative in the shaping of memory, autobiography and illness and its connections with the master narratives of history and culture, it focuses on the post-Soviet clinic as an arena in which the contradictions of a liberal economy are translated into a medical language.