Reviewed by Patrick McLane, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta (CA)

François Cooren’s masterfully synthetic Action and Agency in Dialogue brings Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory together with Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction to generate a unique perspective on discourse analysis. From Derrida (1988) Cooren takes the ideas that figures of speech cannot be isolated from their literal meanings and that action cannot be reduced to actors’ intentions. From Latour (2005) he gets the notion that humans are not the only actors.

[Image credit: Patrick McLane]

This combination leads Cooren to focus on how nonhumans (institutions, texts, principles, objects, etc.) are active in dialogue. He argues that when people say ‘the memo dictates’ or ‘the lights alerted the burglar’ researchers should not supplant the memo with its author or disregard the lights in looking for the person who turned them on. The way action is attributed makes a difference with regards to findings of responsibility and opportunities for intervention. For example, to say ‘the hot coffee burned Denis’ invites inquiry into the temperature of the beverage and the way it was served (as in the notorious case of Liebeck v. McDonald’s). To say ‘Denis burned himself with his coffee’ still reports that Denis was burned and that a cup of coffee was involved but invites evaluations of Denis’ wakefulness and competence (162-163).

Likewise, saying ‘the jealous wife killed him’ is not the same as saying ‘jealousy struck again.’ As such Cooren writes that we should attend to how things like jealousy, scalding coffee and other people become present and active in our conversations (61, 76). How does jealousy take credit for something like a murder, lifting the burden off psychosis, culture and perhaps even the murderous lover? How is poor Denis made a klutz who needs his coffee served cold?

Action and Agency in Dialogue speaks to the importance of space and culture in understanding attributions of responsibility by prompting us to consider how material objects, virtual actors and human agents support, excuse and implicate one another. The book would be an excellent text for an advanced qualitative methods course. Students will be encouraged to think critically about what it means to act and how agency is distributed while being introduced to major thinkers ranging from John L. Austin through Harold Garfinkel and Michel Foucault. It is also a must read for those of us who think Latour and Derrida should be put to work together.

The book’s only fault is in its choice of examples. Cooren relies on fragments of talk recorded during ethnographic research with Medecins sans Frontiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These call for more comprehensive analysis than is accorded to them as illustrations of the book’s theoretical points. For instance, commentary on the role of racial or colonialist prejudice in conversations between MSF administrators and African hospital staff is absent. Cooren explains that his three days in the field did not allow him to grasp subtle forms of discrimination (120) and he compensates for this with a useful discussion of the ways other authors have studied ethnocentrism through conversation analysis (113-121). However, it seems to me that by applying his novel ideas on action and agency to issues like prejudice Cooren would better show their applicability to everyday talk and utility for sociological research.

References

Derrida, J. (1988). Limited Inc. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stella Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, P.T.S., Inc. and McDonald’s International, Inc. 1995 WL 360309 (D.N.M. 1994).

[photo credit: KANIEN’KEHAKA ONKWAWENNA RAOTITIOHKWA CULTURAL CENTER]

TAKE’s Space issue (May 2010) considers the spatialities of digital and lived environments. Videoconferencing collapses geography and shifts social spaces from offices to screens, making one more aware than ever before of the different layers and modalities of interaction which flatten and collapse, or expand and extrude space. TAKE covers original art work and poetry, interviews, municipal anti-panhandling regulations that push the poor into specific areas, life in and out of prison, space versus place, the performative creation of olympic space during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, the mobile spatialization of aboriginal ironworkers who specialize in construction at extreme heights, theatrical versus cinematographic space, the space of the signature, and the Canadian-New Zealand experience of living next to more powerful states and being dwarfed by them, by landscape or by the sea. An appraisal of the 2010 American Association of Geographers Conference rounds out this issue.

TAKE has a ‘zine aesthetic but is in effect an academic journal. At its best it uses novel formats to present critical analysis couched in its contributors’ lived experience. Life as theory. Its format varies to suit its topics.

A new issue of this limited edition journal on the miniature (pdf) is already out. Previous issues have covered flora and fauna, chaos theory, DIY, love and beyond.  More information can be found here.

-Rob

Reviewed by Peter Lugosi, School of Services Management, Bournemouth University (UK)

Jansson and Lagerkvist’s edited collection explores the processes through which spaces become uncertain, opaque…strange.  At times these uncertainties emerge as negativities – fear, loss, exile, discomfort, but they may also be positive in the form of novelty, excitement, amusement and wonder. Some things are strange because they are new, and fall outside existing norms or even systems of classification, while others become strange as they become outdated, abandoned and increasingly obscure. Jansson and Lagerkvist’s text brings together concepts from geography, media and cultural studies in stressing how the immediacy and apparently straightforward nature of space inevitably obscures and excludes. Familiarity, therefore, cannot be disentangled from the strange; the ordinary exists alongside and in relation to the extraordinary. The various chapters in this book examine, through different contexts, the processes and agencies that produce, and, more importantly, mediate strangeness. A thread running through all the chapters is the importance of the media, mediation and representation in uniting the mundane with the fantastic, or the obvious with the obscure, thus normalising or extinguishing strangeness in the creation of effect or experience. However, the chapters also show how mediation can serve to delineate the deviant, the extraordinary, and the fantastic or highlight the strangeness of those things that are somehow vague. The authors demonstrate how strangeness emerges through changing relationships of power in which it is experienced differently by various people, at different times, and how strangeness is absorbed into cultures and societies.

[cc image credit: Joseph Robertson]

The book is split into three sections: part 1 examines the different scales at which opacity emerges and how mediation influences the manifestation of strangeness. In the opening chapter Carney and Miller wrestle with notions of vagueness in general and with how vagueness emerges in urban contexts, before offering two specific forms of cultural practice that at once captures strangeness but can also be read as attempts to mobilise it. The first of these is early 20^th century photography of derelict, marginal urban spaces, which presents possibilities for vagueness and strangeness to emerge in amongst, and in contrast to, the ordered sensibilities of cities. The second example offered by Carney and Miller is the Eruv, a process through which large urban and suburban areas are redefined by its Jewish residents as one enclosed space, thus allowing them to travel between premises and to transport objects without breaking the rules of the Sabbath. Both these examples of mediation and social practice offer different readings, interpretations and the possibility for alternative experiences of the spaces being represented, thus allowing socio-spatial practices to challenge or disrupt existing power relationships.

In the following chapter Löfgren changes the scale of analysis to the microcosm of the home and considers the fate of media objects and technologies, for example, photographs, cassettes, videos, records, CDs, reels of home movies, slides, computer games, consoles, diaries, drawings and media players. In their prime these objects amuse, enchant and capture moments in people’s life, but once they become redundant, they are hidden, and people attempt to dispose of these strange remnants from the past. While individuals retain, or recapture, a nostalgic connection with some objects, such as photo albums, diaries and video footage, they are estranged to many others. Löfgren narrates his own experiences and relationships with the dying and hidden objects that subsequently haunt him.

Ahrén and Sappol change scale again in focusing on representations and displays of the human body. The chapter takes the form of two dialogues by the authors who take turn to comment on the ways in which representations or displays of the body engage the viewer; how they can, in specific forms, appear to create an image of order and unity, while in others displaying its disordered, dysfunctional nature, but at all times transforming the body into an object of consumption. These processes of representation and display make a series of scientific truth claims, while at the same time reproducing power relationships, for example about the central status of the healthy male body ideal against which the strange other, the female or the sick, is imagined. However, these representations of the body also serve to highlight its strangeness – and, for the authors at least, they challenge the viewer to reflect on their sense of selves and embodied experiences of space. In the final chapter of Part 1, Parks considers an overlooked aspect of mediation and mediatisation, the satellite, which, in their various forms, transmit information around the world, while also casting a digital gaze back on the earth.

Part 2 of the book, entitled Dislocation, disruption and disobedience focuses on the various cultural practices and events that either challenge existing power relationships, or expose some deviant aspect of culture, and thus serve to challenge perceptions and experiences of space and notions of self. Habel examines the experiences of women at the 1897 Stockholm Exhibition and the ways in which various representations and mediations of those experiences shaped women’s engagement with the event. Lagerkvist draws on Lefebvre’s work on rhythms, which she uses in her analysis of representations of China and Shanghai’s past, as they are reconstructed, through the juxtapositioning of objects in a colonial building, the La Villa Rouge. Straw considers the role of 20^th century crime novels and films in creating and reproducing particular representations of cities as criminal spaces and centres of deviance. A similar theme is explored by Wilbert and Hansen in their discussion of walking tours of London crime scenes. They focus on historical and contemporary representations of murder and the relationship visitors share with the spaces in which these events actually took place in London. More specifically they consider several walking tours of these city spaces and discuss how these strange, marginal spaces are performed by guides and visitors in relation to these representations of crime and criminality. Deviance of a different kind is the focus of Hammond’s chapter: she discusses the fate of a modern Spa complex built in the city of Bath in the UK.  Hammond considers the ideologically loaded constructions of Bath as a historical city, which she uses to explain the negative reactions to the Spa.

Part 3, Secrets and Wonders of Media Spaces, shifts focus on to the obscure and magical spaces of the media and of mediation. Ericson’s essay sheds light on a physically present, but hidden media space of Broadcasting House – The British Broadcasting Corporation’s office and studio complex. His discussion is concerned with the physical design of the building, the complex functions entangled in its design and also in the symbolic aspects, which has provoked much debates among architects, critics and commentators. On the one hand this media space is seen as a sacred temple of communication, but it also functions as a carefully controlled machine for the production and transmission of sound. Themes of revelation and control also emerge in Jansson’s chapter, which focuses on two centres of media production and orchestration at the Expo 67: the Operations Control Centre and International Broadcasting Centre. As with the preceding chapter on Broadcasting House, Jansson offers a particular reading of these two facilities as highly orchestrated attempts to make visible and transparent mysterious media backspaces that have considerable influence in shaping the flow of people and information. This orchestrated spectacle demystifies the act of mediation and control but it is an estranging act – obscuring the potentially problematic acts of such centres of mediation and positioning the visitor as an observer of the media spectacle.

Sloan deconstructs the postcard; or, more specifically, pictorial representation of the moon on postcards and interrogates how these playful representations, once they are written, addressed and sent, thus being incorporated into networks of communication, interaction and interpretation,  create strange and fantastic objects for viewers. Jacobs’ objects of attention are representations of museums and galleries in film. In films these venues are liminal sites and places of transgression for those “haunted, in hiding or are in transit” (297), which include spies, criminals, lovers, socially marginal characters alongside tourists and art connoisseurs. Museums and galleries in films reflect the superficiality of touristic consumption, while also demarking and reinforcing social distinction between the educated, the snobbish and those lacking cultural capital; they are spaces of contemplation as much they are sites of deviance, intrigue, danger and excitement where crimes, illicit meetings, chases and supernatural events take place. Representation in films is a theme also explored in the final chapter by Pike. He is concerned with the various manifestations of underground spaces from train lines, tunnels and sewers to hidden dwellings and realms. These hidden places of mystery, resistance, evil and awe sometime act as the backdrop or context to a more immediate, compelling plot, while at other times reflecting more broadly the vertical, hierarchical nature of society.

This is in an eclectic collection of essays, and although the editors make a good attempt to produce a coherent account of the (re)emerging themes of the book, it is inevitably the start of a dialogue on the subject rather than any attempt to produce a definitive notion of strange spaces, if such a thing was ever possible. This eclecticism means the individual chapters will appeal to readers interested in the specific subjects e.g. material culture (Löfgren), touristic sites and the multidimensional nature of touristic production/consumption  (Wilbert and Hansen), cinematic (Pike; Jacobs), photographic (Sloan; Carney and Miller) and textual representation (Straw) or the contested nature of urban space (Hammond; Carney and Miller), but the book’s fundamentally ambiguous theme means it is unlikely to become a core reader of a particular university course or become the basis of a distinct area of academic debate. Nevertheless, this book, like any other provocative academic work challenges us to rethink and to re-imagine what may appear to us as natural, obvious and transparent, and to appreciate its strangeness.

Reviewed by Julian Jason Haladyn, University of Western Ontario (Canada)

Part of the Critical Studies series at Rodolpi, Essays on Boredom and Modernity examines “the phenomenon of boredom from a multidisciplinary perspective,” as Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani state in their introduction, an approach that facilitates a diverse recognition of boredom as an “interpretive category” of modernity (p.22). The connection between boredom and modernity has been developed in a number of previous studies, the most comprehensive of which is Elizabeth Goodstein’s Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (2005), a source that Pezze and Salzani heavily draw upon in the framing of this volume. In fact, this collection brings together much of the preexisting literature on boredom from a variety of disciplines, allowing for a comparative reading or dialogue between the often distinct views of this modern affect.

cc image credit: Boredom by AliceNWondrlnd

The book comprises an introduction and eight essays, each exploring the concept of boredom from different conceptual or historical perspectives. Isis I. Leslie’s “From Idleness to Boredom: On the Historical Development of Modern Boredom” represents the most general of the texts, opening the collection with a broad overview of the subject at hand. For readers not acquainted with boredom and its relationship to earlier cultural maladies, most notably acedia or apathy, this essay along with the introduction provide invaluable information for contextualizing the importance of the topic; for those already familiar with the intricacies of boredom, these two texts primarily restate a relatively standard history. The following four essays centre around historical figures interested in boredom, such as William McDonald’s look at Kierkegaard, Matthew Boss’ analysis of Heidegger, James Phillips’ discussion of Beckett, and Carlo Salzani’s reading of Benjamin. Of these I personally found the examinations of Kierkegaard and Benjamin most engaging because of the way the authors use boredom to frame the cultural and historical shifts that are at the heart of Kierkegaard’s discourse on belief and secularization and Benjamin’s examination of meaning and history in mass cultural artifacts. All four historical readings none-the-less provide a broad range of possible approaches and understandings of the importance of boredom to modernity.

The final three essays in the collection are more difficult to categorize. Rachel June Torbet’s “The Quick and the Flat: Walter Benjamin, Werner Herzog” is a comparative analysis that looks at the films of Herzog through the lens of Benjamin’s conception of boredom – although, to be honest, Herzog is more than a little short changed. This was one of the texts I found most enjoyable in the collection because of the unique approach taken by Torbet, who rather wittily submits the often overzealous or even plainly tyrannical Herzog to a Benjaminian reading of boredom. In a similar comparative way of looking at boredom, Marco Van Leeuwen’s “The Digital Void: e-NNUI and experience” focuses on the relationship between prevailing views of digital media, again with a Benjaminian flair, and boredom as a failure or inability to interact with people. Although an interesting approach, this text only manages to touch on a series of ideas that require considerable more examination in order to demonstrate this particular reading of boredom within an age of computer interactions. The final text in the collection, Joseph Boden’s “The Devil Inside: Boredom Proneness and Impulsive Behaviour,” is an anomaly. Although the focus of the editors was a multidisciplinary perspective, all the texts to this point have been relatively situated within the realm of cultural theory and practice. Boden’s essay is not simply a departure from this framework but, from my reading, is irreconcilable with the rest of the book. The text comes out of a parallel history of boredom as a psychological condition that is both documented and studied, and in fact arguably has roots in the writing of Kierkegaard, but, since this is the single example of this stream of study, it stands out as a disciplined approach unlike the rest of the volume.

As someone familiar with the major studies on boredom, I found this book to be an engaging introductory text that presents many of the major ideas and historical discussions of this modern phenomenon. Read in conjunction with sources like Goodstein, Essays on Boredom and Modernity can be seen as adding a level of diversity and variation to existing explorations of boredom, which in turn open us new means of interpreting modern and even postmodern views of the world. What is particularly interesting about this book is the cultural vision of modernity that is collectively constructed through this variety of engagements with boredom, one that speaks to the fragmentary and often contradictory experiences of modern culture.

Works Cited
Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.

Raymond Depardon

Ramond Depardon’s photography, known for his depictions of street life, includes a new and compelling exhibition of photos of first impressions of the world’s most populous cities. Nicely presented in the Guardian.

Johannesburg

Reviewed by Emily Snyder, University of Alberta (Canada)

I am trying to better understand discomfort and disgust – what they reveal, what they conceal. This anxious interest compelled me to read David Gissen’s book on ‘subnatures.’ His unique engagement with things such as insects, odours, and stagnation is much appreciated and he offers a valuable starting point for reconsidering the relationship between architecture, urbanism, and marginalized forms of nature.

cc photo by gloomycorp

‘Nature,’ Gissen describes, is desirable in a city if it can be easily controlled and is pleasurable for citizens (for example, parks, ‘green belts,’ etc.).* Yet there are many natures that defy management and comfort. Gissen refers to these as ‘subnature’ – that which falls “below” (23) nature and threatens the notion of the modern city as clean, efficient, and safe. This includes things such as dankness, exhaust, dust, mud, weeds, pigeons, and crowds. Experiences with subnatures are explained as “the most fearsome, because it describes the limits in which contemporary life might be staged” (23). The fabrication in ‘Western’ societies that we can control and dominate all aspects of our environment is called into question by the critical acknowledgment of subnatures. Gissen shows that the process of what gets categorized as desirable or marginal is a political one and he hopes that his attention to subnatures will encourage readers to “consider the possibilities of exploiting subnature as a form of agitation or intellectual provocation” (25). Specifically, he urges architects and city planners to engage with subnatures in creative ways in order to expand our thinking on architecture and nature.

Gissen’s approach is valuable, as subnatures that evoke reactions of disgust and discomfort are consistently overlooked. Yet I encountered problems with the style and structure of his book, and connectedly, an under-developed theoretical foundation. His method in each chapter, of moving through historical to contemporary examples of how architects perceive various subnatures becomes repetitive and as one is inundated with examples, the discussion becomes more descriptive than analytic. Although his text is meant to be “somewhere between an exhibition catalog and an architectural theory book” (26), I suggest that it should have been more of a theory text given his goal to instigate innovative understandings of subnatures.

While the highly descriptive chapters provide a strong sense of what is ‘out there,’ I was left with several questions. For example, once a subnatural entity is entered into dialogue through architecture, does it begin to move the subnatural into the natural? Asked differently, do we end up removing subnature from the margins and treating it as though it is a ‘controllable’ and ‘pleasurable’ nature? What are the implications of this? Are subnatures meant to stay in the margins? Or is the goal simply to open up discussions on discomfort and to consider the social norms that influence our perceptions of nature? Gissen remarks that “at the very least, [a building that engages subnatures] enables the constituent features of nature to be understood, debated, and perhaps ultimately transformed, while leaving a record of an earlier struggle” (211). Yet at the end of his book, I still wonder how far we can push ourselves with discomfort in practice. How do we account for reactions of disgust to subnatures, especially the visceral aspect of these experiences of disgust, and the potential of the visceral to shut down engagement (see Kristeva, 1982; Ahmed, 2004)? I also wonder about the tensions of engaging with subnatures in highly governed spaces (building codes, health and safety regulations, etc.) and how these restrictions impact possibilities for activist subnature structures. Gissen argues that it would be undesirable, if not unethical, to embrace subnatures in all situations. Thus ethics must be woven more explicitly into the theoretical analysis that needs to emerge from this book. Overall, the concept of ‘subnature’ is a necessary one, and the value of Gissen’s work is that he initiates a much-needed discussion on several difficult subjects. It is worthwhile though to think further about the fundamental theoretical issues that subnatures compel.

Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

* ‘Citizens’ is used strategically here. As Gissen makes clear, those deemed lower class or less-than-citizens are perceived to have a very different relationships to subnature – harbourers of disease and dirt, ‘natural’ inhabitants of subnatures, etc.

Adam Pańczuk – Karczeby (2008-2009)

“In one of the dialects spoken in the east of Poland, which is a mixture of Polish and Belorussian, people strongly attached to the soil they had been cultivating for generations were called ‘Karczeby’. With their bare hands Karczeby cleared forests in order to grow crops. The word karczeb was also used to describe what remains after a tree is cut down — a trunk with roots, which remains stuck in the ground. This also applied to people — it was not easy for the authorities to root them out from their land, even in the Stalinism times. The price they paid for their attachment to their soil was often their freedom or life. After death, buried nearby their farmland, a karczeb himself became the soil, later cultivated by his descendants.”

via

A Coffee Guide to Wellington

“This tea towel, probably from the mid-1960s provides a coffee guide to Wellington, complete with descriptions of the type of food served in each café.”

Wellington café culture + media gallery

“Wellington’s café culture is today an integral part of its identity as a city. This culture began in the 1930s with the arrival of the milk bar, followed closely by coffee houses in the 1950s. After a period of decline in the 1960s and 70s, the city’s café scene has grown in spectacular fashion over the last 20 years…”

Cafés and civic life have long interested scholars of space and culture, and Wellington is considered one of the best cities in the world for drinking coffee. Midnight Espresso, located stumbling distance from my office,  is where I most often procure the flat whites (and cheese scones) that sustain my work. But after seeing this strangely fascinating coffee log, I’ve been careful to make sure most of that money goes to our holiday fund instead.

Louis Faurer, “Accident, New York City,” 1952. Deborah Bell Photographs, New York / © Mark Faurer

Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940–1959
Milwaukee Art Museum, January 30–April 25, 2010

“[The] graphically charged and emotionally engaging photographs evoke the excitement and unease that characterized the era, as popular culture, the arts, and everyday life underwent substantial, dramatic changes. They not only emphasize the candid experience of being an anonymous individual amongst an impersonal, fast-moving crowd but confront the viewer with the material presence of their photographs.”

(via)

A North Korean woman carries water she collected from the Yalu River in the North Korean city of Hyesan, which borders China’s Changbai county, April 6, 2009. (REUTERS/Reinhard Krause)

A young girl and her dog looks out from a vehicle as she and her family wait for security clearance at a checkpoint on the outskirt of Bannu, a town on edge of the Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009 as they flee a military offensive in South Waziristan. Pakistani troops and the Taliban fought fierce battles in Waziristan, a militant sanctuary near the Afghan border, with both sides claiming early victories in an army campaign that could shape the future of the country’s battle against extremism. (AP Photo/Ijaz Muhammad)

Supporters of ousted Honduras’ President Manuel Zelaya clash with soldiers near the presidential residency Tegucigalpa, Monday, June 29. 2009. Police fired tear gas to hold back thousands of Hondurans outside the occupied presidential residency as world leaders from Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez appealed to Honduras to reinstate Zelaya as president. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

Pakistani men pray next to a bullet-ridden vehicle parked in the compound of radical Lal Masjid or Red mosque as the chief cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz, not seen, talks to his supporters during Friday prayers, in Islamabad, Pakistan, on April 17, 2009. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

A Hindu woman devotee offers prayers after taking a holy dip in the waters of river Ganga in the northern Indian city of Allahabad May 4, 2009. (REUTERS/Jitendra Prakash)

A hunter holds his hawk during an annual hunting competition in Chengelsy Gorge, some 150 km (93 miles) east of Almaty, Kazakhstan on December 5, 2009. (REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov)

Fishermen row a boat in the algae-filled Chaohu Lake in Hefei, Anhui province, China on June 19, 2009. China invested 51 billion yuan ($7.4 billion) towards the construction of 2,712 projects for the treatment of eight rivers and lakes in 2009, Xinhua News Agency reported. (REUTERS/Jianan Yu)

A leopard walks with a tranquilizer dart hanging from its neck, in the residential area of Jyotikuchi in Guwahati, the capital city of the northeastern state of Assam, India on March 15, 2009. Three people were mauled by the leopard after the cat strayed into the city before it was tranquilized by forestry department officials. The full grown male leopard was wandering through a part of the densely populated city when curious crowds startled the animal, a wildlife official said. (BIJU BORO/AFP/Getty Images)

Thousands of scrapped taxis are abandoned at a yard in the center of Chongqing city on March 4, 2009. Traffic congestion and pollution have worsened dramatically in Chinese cities as the country’s long-running economic expansion has allowed increasing numbers of consumers to make big-ticket purchases such as cars. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

A mental patient named Totok reacts as he is given a shower at the Galuh foundation house in East Bekasi, outskirt of Jakarta, Indonesia on October 23, 2009. The Galuh foundation house has housed more than 285 underprivileged mental patients since it was founded in 1982 by Gendu Mulatip. (REUTERS/Beawiharta)