D Hollan
Biographic Data
| ID | 2594 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Hollan |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Hollan |
| SIGNATURE | HOLLAN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1877-2917 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 448 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Affecting with and being affected by person-centered interviewing and observation
Person-centered interviewing and observation-an ethnographic approach that attempts to describe and represent human behavior and subjectivity from the point of view of the acting, desiring, intending, sensing, reflecting, and attentive subject-inevitably engages the emotions and memories of ethnographers and subjects alike as they interact and affect one another in both intended and unintended ways. In this article, I provide two brief examples o…
Hands in memory and in imagination
We use our hands for many tasks and sensory orientations, including eating, communicating, and bathing. We hold, and manipulate a variety of objects, artifacts, and people, feeling for warmth, coldness, texture, hardness, and softness. We approach people or objects with greetings, embraces, and caresses, and to shove, hit, or defend ourselves against other people and potentially dangerous things. Yet just because our hands play such a central rol…
Who is Haunted by Whom? Steps to an Ecology of Haunting
The haunting metaphor is rapidly catching on in anthropology and other disciplines as a way of drawing attention to aspects of social experience that typically fall outside the scope of conventional social analysis: to feelings and experiences of loss, dispossession, unease, unfairness and injustice, regret, remorse, lack of recognition or misrecognition, and so on. Yet because many scholars contributing to the hauntology literature have unwittin…
Dreamscapes of Intimacy and Isolation: Shadows of Contagion and Immunity
In this article, I use the study of selfscape dreams to discuss contagion-like processes not as unique or extraordinary phenomena per se, but rather as a particular kind of social influence more broadly conceived. In particular, I argue that dream consciousness gives us clues about how social influence (and contagion) actually works: partially, incrementally, in a "condensed" way, through a variety of sensory and perceptual modalities, contingent…
Psychoanalysis and Ethnography
In this commentary, I discuss some of the theoretical and methodological issues the contributions to this special issue raise collectively, namely: how do we as anthropologists pick and choose among the many diverse psychoanalytic concepts available to us, especially when these concepts may come embedded in very different, and sometimes contradictory, theoretical assumptions about human behavior? Once we find a psychoanalytic concept that is usef…
From Ghosts to Ancestors (and Back Again): On the Cultural and Psychodynamic Mediation of Selfscapes
In this article, I use the retelling of a dream experience from a Toraja elder to illustrate how cultural and psychodynamic factors combine and intertwine to mediate self-other and intraself relationships. I use the concept of "selfscapes" to suggest how dynamic, fluid, and contingent self-other distinctions often are but also to capture the perduring aspects of memory and self-organization that are sometimes lost or underemphasized by the strong…
Sleeping, dreaming, and health in rural Indonesia and the urban U.S: A cultural and experiential approach
Coping in plain sight: Work as a local response to event-related emotional distress in contemporary U.S. society
This article examines how middle-class psychotherapy clients in Southern California use work as a coping strategy in the aftermath of distressing life events. It begins by arguing why all such distress in the aftermath of unbidden and unanticipated events are “local” distresses, embedded in particular social and interpersonal contexts, and then discusses the various ways in which people may use cultural resources, including ordinary, mundane, eve…
On the Varieties and Particularities of Cultural Experience
I argue that certain varieties of psychoanalysis and cultural phenomenology are not antithetical, and that indeed, their respective foci and methodologies each have strengths that balance out the other's limitations. Put more strongly, the two perspectives need one another. Experience should not be reduced to solipsism, nor should specific individuals, each marked by their own "pinch of destiny" and experiential heaviness, be lost in the haze of …
The Influence of Culture on the Experience and Interpretation of Disturbing Dreams
This issue is devoted to an analysis of the relationship between trauma and dreams. With the exception of Deirdre Barrett's 1996 edited volume, this is a relatively understudied subject. Barrett (p. 2) suggests that the lack of attention has come about for two reasons. (i) Until recently many dream researchers-whether or not interested in nightmares and disturbing dreams-following Freud and his theory that dreams are disguised wish fulfillments, …
Being There: On the Imaginative Aspects of Understanding Others and Being Understood
The empathic work of understanding is often written about as if it depended solely on the emotional, imaginative, or mind reading capabilities of the empathizer. But if it is embedded in an intersubjective encounter that necessitates ongoing dialog for its accuracy, then it implicates the imaginative and emotional capacities of the person to be understood as well. I argue that we should be investigating more actively the ways in which people in d…
Whatever Happened to Empathy: Introduction
In this special issue, we examine the problem of empathy in anthropological theorizing and practice. Noting the relative lack of explicit interest in or systematic exploration of empathy in anthropology, we explore some of the issues related to defining, recognizing, and enacting empathic-like processes in cultural context. We also highlight similarities and differences in the way contributors examine empathy, and based on this comparative perspe…
Setting a New Standard: The Person-Centered Interviewing and Observation of Robert I. Levy
Robert I. Levy gave us a way of doing ethnographic and theoretical work that transcends his own exemplary studies of Tahiti and Nepal. I examine Levy's use of person-centered interviewing and observation to elicit and analyze psychocultural phenomena, and I suggest why this approach remains valuable to us today
Mind and Experience in Tahiti, Nepal, and Beyond
The anthropology of dreaming: Selfscape dreams
Self Systems, Cultural Idioms of Distress, and the Psycho-Bodily Consequences of Childhood Suffering
In this article, I examine the effects of childhood suffering in two cases - one from my anthropological fieldwork in the central highlands of Sulawesi in Indonesia and one from my psychotherapeutic practice in Los Angeles. I argue that although people will always carry with them the psycho-bodily signature of their past social experience, these signatures are affected by the cultural idioms of distress into which they are woven and from which ps…
Culture and Dissociation in Toraja
This article examines the extent to which some psychoanalytic ideas about dissociation and its correlates are useful in helping us to understand possession behavior and related phenomena in places such as Toraja, Indonesia. Although some of these ideas can be useful to us, data from Toraja challenge us to modify some key psychoanalytic assumptions about dissociation. The article demonstrates how cross-cultural data can be used to broaden our pers…
The Relevance of Person-Centered Ethnography to Cross-Cultural Psychiatry
In this article the relevance of person-centered ethnography to cross-cultural psychiatry is discussed. The term person-centered ethnography is first defined, the historical development of this line of anthropological research is traced, and how and why it might be used in cross-cultural psychiatry is examined. Following this introduction current developments in person-centered ethnography are reviewed, while focusing especially on the strengths …
To the Afterworld and Back: Mourning and Dreams of the Dead among the Toraja
Suffering and the Work of Culture: A case of magical poisoning in Toraja
In this article, I use Obeyesekere's concept of the work of culture to examine a case of magical poisoning among the Toraja (South Sulawesi, Indonesia). I argue that episodes of suffering must be situated not only culturally but also within the context of the individual sufferer's life experience, and suggest that we must consider carefully why only certain symbolic transformations of painful emotions may "work" for a given individual, why a symb…
The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Gananath Obeyesekere
Cross-Cultural Differences in the Self
The sharp contrasts often drawn between "Western" and "non-Western" selves have very likely been exaggerated because researchers often contrast simplified and idealized cultural conceptions of the self rather than comparing descriptive accounts of subjective experience. Using data collected through nondirective interviewing techniques, I illustrate this point by showing that one can find evidence, in some contexts, of an independent, autonomous s…
Indignant suicide in the Pacific: An example from the Toraja highlands of Indonesia
The Personal Use of Dream Beliefs in the Toraja Highlands
Staying "Cool" in Toraja: Informal Strategies for the Management of Anger and Hostility in a Nonviolent Society
Whatever Happened to Empathy: Introduction
In this special issue, we examine the problem of empathy in anthropological theorizing and practice. Noting the relative lack of explicit interest in or systematic exploration of empathy in anthropology, we explore some of the issues related to defining, recognizing, and enacting empathic-like processes in cultural context. We also highlight similarities and differences in the way contributors examine empathy, and based on this comparative perspe…
Being There: On the Imaginative Aspects of Understanding Others and Being Understood
The empathic work of understanding is often written about as if it depended solely on the emotional, imaginative, or mind reading capabilities of the empathizer. But if it is embedded in an intersubjective encounter that necessitates ongoing dialog for its accuracy, then it implicates the imaginative and emotional capacities of the person to be understood as well. I argue that we should be investigating more actively the ways in which people in d…
Cross-Cultural Differences in the Self
The sharp contrasts often drawn between "Western" and "non-Western" selves have very likely been exaggerated because researchers often contrast simplified and idealized cultural conceptions of the self rather than comparing descriptive accounts of subjective experience. Using data collected through nondirective interviewing techniques, I illustrate this point by showing that one can find evidence, in some contexts, of an independent, autonomous s…
On the Varieties and Particularities of Cultural Experience
I argue that certain varieties of psychoanalysis and cultural phenomenology are not antithetical, and that indeed, their respective foci and methodologies each have strengths that balance out the other's limitations. Put more strongly, the two perspectives need one another. Experience should not be reduced to solipsism, nor should specific individuals, each marked by their own "pinch of destiny" and experiential heaviness, be lost in the haze of …
Self Systems, Cultural Idioms of Distress, and the Psycho-Bodily Consequences of Childhood Suffering
In this article, I examine the effects of childhood suffering in two cases - one from my anthropological fieldwork in the central highlands of Sulawesi in Indonesia and one from my psychotherapeutic practice in Los Angeles. I argue that although people will always carry with them the psycho-bodily signature of their past social experience, these signatures are affected by the cultural idioms of distress into which they are woven and from which ps…
From Ghosts to Ancestors (and Back Again): On the Cultural and Psychodynamic Mediation of Selfscapes
In this article, I use the retelling of a dream experience from a Toraja elder to illustrate how cultural and psychodynamic factors combine and intertwine to mediate self-other and intraself relationships. I use the concept of "selfscapes" to suggest how dynamic, fluid, and contingent self-other distinctions often are but also to capture the perduring aspects of memory and self-organization that are sometimes lost or underemphasized by the strong…
Suffering and the Work of Culture: A case of magical poisoning in Toraja
In this article, I use Obeyesekere's concept of the work of culture to examine a case of magical poisoning among the Toraja (South Sulawesi, Indonesia). I argue that episodes of suffering must be situated not only culturally but also within the context of the individual sufferer's life experience, and suggest that we must consider carefully why only certain symbolic transformations of painful emotions may "work" for a given individual, why a symb…
Staying "Cool" in Toraja: Informal Strategies for the Management of Anger and Hostility in a Nonviolent Society
Setting a New Standard: The Person-Centered Interviewing and Observation of Robert I. Levy
Robert I. Levy gave us a way of doing ethnographic and theoretical work that transcends his own exemplary studies of Tahiti and Nepal. I examine Levy's use of person-centered interviewing and observation to elicit and analyze psychocultural phenomena, and I suggest why this approach remains valuable to us today
The Personal Use of Dream Beliefs in the Toraja Highlands
Who is Haunted by Whom? Steps to an Ecology of Haunting
The haunting metaphor is rapidly catching on in anthropology and other disciplines as a way of drawing attention to aspects of social experience that typically fall outside the scope of conventional social analysis: to feelings and experiences of loss, dispossession, unease, unfairness and injustice, regret, remorse, lack of recognition or misrecognition, and so on. Yet because many scholars contributing to the hauntology literature have unwittin…
The Relevance of Person-Centered Ethnography to Cross-Cultural Psychiatry
In this article the relevance of person-centered ethnography to cross-cultural psychiatry is discussed. The term person-centered ethnography is first defined, the historical development of this line of anthropological research is traced, and how and why it might be used in cross-cultural psychiatry is examined. Following this introduction current developments in person-centered ethnography are reviewed, while focusing especially on the strengths …
The anthropology of dreaming: Selfscape dreams
Culture and Dissociation in Toraja
This article examines the extent to which some psychoanalytic ideas about dissociation and its correlates are useful in helping us to understand possession behavior and related phenomena in places such as Toraja, Indonesia. Although some of these ideas can be useful to us, data from Toraja challenge us to modify some key psychoanalytic assumptions about dissociation. The article demonstrates how cross-cultural data can be used to broaden our pers…
To the Afterworld and Back: Mourning and Dreams of the Dead among the Toraja
Psychoanalysis and Ethnography
In this commentary, I discuss some of the theoretical and methodological issues the contributions to this special issue raise collectively, namely: how do we as anthropologists pick and choose among the many diverse psychoanalytic concepts available to us, especially when these concepts may come embedded in very different, and sometimes contradictory, theoretical assumptions about human behavior? Once we find a psychoanalytic concept that is usef…
Hands in memory and in imagination
We use our hands for many tasks and sensory orientations, including eating, communicating, and bathing. We hold, and manipulate a variety of objects, artifacts, and people, feeling for warmth, coldness, texture, hardness, and softness. We approach people or objects with greetings, embraces, and caresses, and to shove, hit, or defend ourselves against other people and potentially dangerous things. Yet just because our hands play such a central rol…
Dreamscapes of Intimacy and Isolation: Shadows of Contagion and Immunity
In this article, I use the study of selfscape dreams to discuss contagion-like processes not as unique or extraordinary phenomena per se, but rather as a particular kind of social influence more broadly conceived. In particular, I argue that dream consciousness gives us clues about how social influence (and contagion) actually works: partially, incrementally, in a "condensed" way, through a variety of sensory and perceptual modalities, contingent…
The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Gananath Obeyesekere
Staying "Cool" in Toraja: Informal Strategies for the Management of Anger and Hostility in a Nonviolent Society
The Personal Use of Dream Beliefs in the Toraja Highlands
Indignant suicide in the Pacific: An example from the Toraja highlands of Indonesia
Cross-Cultural Differences in the Self
The sharp contrasts often drawn between "Western" and "non-Western" selves have very likely been exaggerated because researchers often contrast simplified and idealized cultural conceptions of the self rather than comparing descriptive accounts of subjective experience. Using data collected through nondirective interviewing techniques, I illustrate this point by showing that one can find evidence, in some contexts, of an independent, autonomous s…
The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Gananath Obeyesekere
Suffering and the Work of Culture: A case of magical poisoning in Toraja
In this article, I use Obeyesekere's concept of the work of culture to examine a case of magical poisoning among the Toraja (South Sulawesi, Indonesia). I argue that episodes of suffering must be situated not only culturally but also within the context of the individual sufferer's life experience, and suggest that we must consider carefully why only certain symbolic transformations of painful emotions may "work" for a given individual, why a symb…
To the Afterworld and Back: Mourning and Dreams of the Dead among the Toraja
The Relevance of Person-Centered Ethnography to Cross-Cultural Psychiatry
In this article the relevance of person-centered ethnography to cross-cultural psychiatry is discussed. The term person-centered ethnography is first defined, the historical development of this line of anthropological research is traced, and how and why it might be used in cross-cultural psychiatry is examined. Following this introduction current developments in person-centered ethnography are reviewed, while focusing especially on the strengths …
Culture and Dissociation in Toraja
This article examines the extent to which some psychoanalytic ideas about dissociation and its correlates are useful in helping us to understand possession behavior and related phenomena in places such as Toraja, Indonesia. Although some of these ideas can be useful to us, data from Toraja challenge us to modify some key psychoanalytic assumptions about dissociation. The article demonstrates how cross-cultural data can be used to broaden our pers…
The anthropology of dreaming: Selfscape dreams
Self Systems, Cultural Idioms of Distress, and the Psycho-Bodily Consequences of Childhood Suffering
In this article, I examine the effects of childhood suffering in two cases - one from my anthropological fieldwork in the central highlands of Sulawesi in Indonesia and one from my psychotherapeutic practice in Los Angeles. I argue that although people will always carry with them the psycho-bodily signature of their past social experience, these signatures are affected by the cultural idioms of distress into which they are woven and from which ps…
Setting a New Standard: The Person-Centered Interviewing and Observation of Robert I. Levy
Robert I. Levy gave us a way of doing ethnographic and theoretical work that transcends his own exemplary studies of Tahiti and Nepal. I examine Levy's use of person-centered interviewing and observation to elicit and analyze psychocultural phenomena, and I suggest why this approach remains valuable to us today
Mind and Experience in Tahiti, Nepal, and Beyond
Being There: On the Imaginative Aspects of Understanding Others and Being Understood
The empathic work of understanding is often written about as if it depended solely on the emotional, imaginative, or mind reading capabilities of the empathizer. But if it is embedded in an intersubjective encounter that necessitates ongoing dialog for its accuracy, then it implicates the imaginative and emotional capacities of the person to be understood as well. I argue that we should be investigating more actively the ways in which people in d…
Whatever Happened to Empathy: Introduction
In this special issue, we examine the problem of empathy in anthropological theorizing and practice. Noting the relative lack of explicit interest in or systematic exploration of empathy in anthropology, we explore some of the issues related to defining, recognizing, and enacting empathic-like processes in cultural context. We also highlight similarities and differences in the way contributors examine empathy, and based on this comparative perspe…
The Influence of Culture on the Experience and Interpretation of Disturbing Dreams
This issue is devoted to an analysis of the relationship between trauma and dreams. With the exception of Deirdre Barrett's 1996 edited volume, this is a relatively understudied subject. Barrett (p. 2) suggests that the lack of attention has come about for two reasons. (i) Until recently many dream researchers-whether or not interested in nightmares and disturbing dreams-following Freud and his theory that dreams are disguised wish fulfillments, …
On the Varieties and Particularities of Cultural Experience
I argue that certain varieties of psychoanalysis and cultural phenomenology are not antithetical, and that indeed, their respective foci and methodologies each have strengths that balance out the other's limitations. Put more strongly, the two perspectives need one another. Experience should not be reduced to solipsism, nor should specific individuals, each marked by their own "pinch of destiny" and experiential heaviness, be lost in the haze of …
Sleeping, dreaming, and health in rural Indonesia and the urban U.S: A cultural and experiential approach
Coping in plain sight: Work as a local response to event-related emotional distress in contemporary U.S. society
This article examines how middle-class psychotherapy clients in Southern California use work as a coping strategy in the aftermath of distressing life events. It begins by arguing why all such distress in the aftermath of unbidden and unanticipated events are “local” distresses, embedded in particular social and interpersonal contexts, and then discusses the various ways in which people may use cultural resources, including ordinary, mundane, eve…
From Ghosts to Ancestors (and Back Again): On the Cultural and Psychodynamic Mediation of Selfscapes
In this article, I use the retelling of a dream experience from a Toraja elder to illustrate how cultural and psychodynamic factors combine and intertwine to mediate self-other and intraself relationships. I use the concept of "selfscapes" to suggest how dynamic, fluid, and contingent self-other distinctions often are but also to capture the perduring aspects of memory and self-organization that are sometimes lost or underemphasized by the strong…
Psychoanalysis and Ethnography
In this commentary, I discuss some of the theoretical and methodological issues the contributions to this special issue raise collectively, namely: how do we as anthropologists pick and choose among the many diverse psychoanalytic concepts available to us, especially when these concepts may come embedded in very different, and sometimes contradictory, theoretical assumptions about human behavior? Once we find a psychoanalytic concept that is usef…
Dreamscapes of Intimacy and Isolation: Shadows of Contagion and Immunity
In this article, I use the study of selfscape dreams to discuss contagion-like processes not as unique or extraordinary phenomena per se, but rather as a particular kind of social influence more broadly conceived. In particular, I argue that dream consciousness gives us clues about how social influence (and contagion) actually works: partially, incrementally, in a "condensed" way, through a variety of sensory and perceptual modalities, contingent…
Who is Haunted by Whom? Steps to an Ecology of Haunting
The haunting metaphor is rapidly catching on in anthropology and other disciplines as a way of drawing attention to aspects of social experience that typically fall outside the scope of conventional social analysis: to feelings and experiences of loss, dispossession, unease, unfairness and injustice, regret, remorse, lack of recognition or misrecognition, and so on. Yet because many scholars contributing to the hauntology literature have unwittin…
Hands in memory and in imagination
We use our hands for many tasks and sensory orientations, including eating, communicating, and bathing. We hold, and manipulate a variety of objects, artifacts, and people, feeling for warmth, coldness, texture, hardness, and softness. We approach people or objects with greetings, embraces, and caresses, and to shove, hit, or defend ourselves against other people and potentially dangerous things. Yet just because our hands play such a central rol…
Affecting with and being affected by person-centered interviewing and observation
Person-centered interviewing and observation-an ethnographic approach that attempts to describe and represent human behavior and subjectivity from the point of view of the acting, desiring, intending, sensing, reflecting, and attentive subject-inevitably engages the emotions and memories of ethnographers and subjects alike as they interact and affect one another in both intended and unintended ways. In this article, I provide two brief examples o…
Psychology (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Psychoanalysis (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Emotions and Moral Behavior (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)