Arctic Madness: The Anthropology of a Delusion.

In Déléage's own words, the questions at stake are "about the delirious, raving, and phantasmagorical origins of linguistic anthropology in general and of [Déléage's] work in particular" (57) and about the "historical, epistemological, and psychiatric [limits] of scientific knowledge and its authorized institutions" (98). Subtitled I The Anthropology of a Delusion i , I Arctic Madness i is not so much about producing social scientific knowledge on mental health as it is about producing social scientific knowledge from a state of impaired mental health. The book, written by French anthropologist Pierre Déléage, is a short but dense exploration of the life and work of Émile Petitot, a late nineteenth-century French missionary and linguist, as he descends into "madness.". [Extracted from the article]