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Pandolfo begins Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam standing side by side with someone who, while walking on a roof, understands herself to be walking on a map, an atlas of the world. Pandolfo encapsulates, in this brief anecdote, something of the method, theme and ethical stance of this philosophically oriented anthropological study. Ethnography is, for her, ‘both empirical research and a philosophical project’ in which one ‘allows [oneself] to be pierced and guided by the Other, at once an elucidation and a working through’ (p. 19). Ethnography engages with various forms of Otherness - the alterity of another person, of another cultural milieu and of madness itself. Madness, she writes, teaches us more generally about an engagement with alterity, one she explains through the specificity of the language and treatments of madness in Morocco, an ethics of psychoanalysis, and Islamic eschatology.
This beautifully composed and original book about madness and possession in Morocco falls into three sections: ‘Psychiatric Fragments in the Aftermath of Culture’, ‘The Passage: Imagination, Alienation’ and ‘The Jurisprudence of the Soul'. ‘Madness’ itself is not a given - it appears through a variety of Arabic (classical, vernacular and modern standard), Berber and French terms, and within religious, spiritual, jurisprudential, psychiatric and vernacular terminology. It is the culmination of many years of fieldwork, and brings together analyses of contemporary Morocco, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, patients’ lives, Qur'anic cures and Islamic ethical traditions.