Manic behavior holds an undeniable fascination in American culture today. It fuels the plots of best-selling novels and the imagery of MTV videos, is acknowledged as the driving force for successful entrepreneurs like Ted Turner, and is celebrated as the source of the creativity of artists like Vincent Van Gogh and movie stars like Robin Williams. Bipolar Expeditions seeks to understand mania's appeal and how it weighs on the lives of Americans diagnosed with manic depression.

Anthropologist Emily Martin guides us into the fascinating and sometimes disturbing worlds of mental-health support groups, mood charts, psychiatric rounds, the pharmaceutical industry, and psychotropic drugs. Charting how these worlds intersect with the wider popular culture, she reveals how people living under the description of bipolar disorder are often denied the status of being fully human, even while contemporary America exhibits a powerful affinity for manic behavior. Mania, Martin shows, has come to be regarded as a distant frontier that invites exploration because it seems to offer fame and profits to pioneers, while depression is imagined as something that should be eliminated altogether with the help of drugs.

Bipolar Expeditions argues that mania and depression have a cultural life outside the confines of diagnosis, that the experiences of people living with bipolar disorder belong fully to the human condition, and that even the most so-called rational everyday practices are intertwined with irrational ones. Martin's own experience with bipolar disorder informs her analysis and lends a personal perspective to this complex story.

作者簡介

愛密麗．馬汀（Emily Martin）

現為美國紐約大學人類學系教授。研究領域包括科技人類學、醫療人類學、性別、文化心理、歷史精神病學、英國社會文化等。著有《身體裡的女人：生產的文化分析》（The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, Beacon Press, 1987）與《雙極探險：美國文化中的躁狂與抑鬱》（Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture, Princeton University Press, 2007）等，另與希爾．蓋滋（Hill Gates）合編《台灣社會的人類學》（The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, Stanford University Press, 1981）。其知名論文〈卵子與精子：科學如何建構了一部以男女刻板性別角色為本的羅曼史〉（“The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Sterotypical Male-Female Roles”），中譯曾收錄於《科技渴望性別》（群學，2004）。

愛密麗．馬汀的個人網頁：web.me.com/em81 /work/Welcome.html。