Give Me Slack

Depression, Alertness, and Laziness in Seattle

Bibliographic Data

ID2987385
AuthorsJohn Marlovits (0000-0002-9944-6162, San Jose State University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume24
Issue2
Pages137-157
Publication date2013-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropology of Consciousness (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1053-4202 • E-ISSN: 1556-3537
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/anoc.12011
OpenAlexW1910494984
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited21

This article is about alertness and depressive enactments in Seattle, Washington. It tracks depression and depressive disorder as something beyond a psychiatric diagnosis—more as a generative cultural analytic and mode of alertness that people use to track affect and a sense of ordinariness-gone-tilt. I argue that depressive enactments constitute a mode of alertness used to track something emergent, unknown, unpredictable, and often disruptive—affective currents that are sensed but not clearly understood. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Seattle in 2003–2004, I draw on examples of the cultural performance and training of alertness across a range of registers and spaces—individual sufferers, community mental health clinic routines, and popular culture figures such as Kurt Cobain and the “slacker”— in order to demonstrate how disturbances in normative modes of alertness are contested and worked through. Alertness in Seattle operates as a window onto cultural impasses at work in ordinary habits and dispositions. Thus, I suggest that figures of mental illness, as well as the slacker, are enactments through which individuals disengage from the reiteration of those impasses and attempt to reshape and relearn habits

Affect (linguistics · Alertness · Epistemology · Normative · Psychiatry · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Communication · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Psychology · Social and Cultural Dynamics

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