Invitation: Online Lecture

Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience

The School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, invites you to an online lecture on

Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience

Speaker: Professor Liah Greenfeld, University Professor and Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology, Boston University, USA.

Date: Monday, 7th April 2025 Time: 9am Eastern Time (6:30 pm IST)

Zoom Link:

https://zoom.us/j/91683342845? p wd=COiI5KFAFNIywKLca84VbNtXmn0cd G.1

Abstract

The lecture will discuss Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience – the concluding volume of Liah Greenfeld’s nationalism trilogy. It will place the book within the framework of human science, defining humanity as an empirical reality of its own kind and locating it among other realities (the material – matter, studied by physics, and the organic – life, studied by biology) shaping our common existential experience. It will then apply the fundamental concepts of symbols, mind, and culture to the empirical focus of the book: the functional mental illnesses of major depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia – all severe medical diseases of unknown organic origin, causing great suffering and not infrequently leading to the lethal outcome – interpreting them as symbolic, mental, cultural phenomena. This will explain these diseases causally, connecting them and the increase in their rates to the dynamics of modern culture and, specifically, nationalism.