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An Archaeology for the Future

are intimately intertwined with economies of morality and wealth in globalizing Sylhet. Sorcery is often blamed as a precipitating cause of madness, and accusations of sorcery in cases of fagol commonly reveal and enact moral, social, and economic tensions among extended kin and within communities. In one case, we see family members modify their etiological explanation of a young woman’s madness in accordance with the waxing and waning of wealth inequalities between themselves and their extended kin. Mental illness serves, in this sense, as the “ground” (Mani 1998) upon which social differences are articulated and performed. Yet we also see how these accusations of sorcery and shifting etiologies impact the experiences of the mentally ill themselves. Patients and Agents also explores the ways healing is undergoing dynamic processes of transformation and re-creation in Sylhet. We meet, for example, a Hindu spiritual healer who prescribes psychopharmaceuticals in a partial adaption of biomedicine’s naturalistic ideologies couched in spiritual terms. As biomedical psychiatry’s forms of modernist reason and practice circulate around the globe (Lakoff 2005), Callan gives subtle attention to how these discourses, rather than displacing local modes of healing, are co-opted, discriminately absorbed, and creatively reframed. Overall, Callan’s is a thoughtful, engaging ethnography that offers rich insight into everyday experiences of mental illness and healing in globalizing Sylhet. Patients and Agents is notable for its exploration into the relationships between socioeconomic change and mental illness, as well as for its grounded insight into the creative and dynamic lives of healing knowledge and practice.