Author Ethan Watters to deliver IA lecture

Skidmore’s International Affairs Department will welcome author Ethan Watters to discuss “Crazy Like Us:  The Globalization of the American Psyche” at 6 p.m. Monday, March 23, in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Admission to the talk and the reception that follows is free and open to the public.

Watters is an author and journalist who has spent the last two decades writing about psychiatry, social psychology and how culture shapes how we think, feel and act.

Most recently, he is the author of Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, Watters witnesses firsthand that as we sell our drugs and popularize our mental health treatments, attempting to modernize other culture’s understanding of a mental illness, we often end up steamrolling indigenous expressions of madness and replacing them with our own.

Watters is the author of Urban Tribes, an examination of the mores of the “never marrieds”; the coauthor of Making Monsters, an indictment of the recovered memory movement; and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Discover, Men’s Journal, Details, Wired, and This American Life. His writing on the new research surrounding epigenetics was been featured in the "Best American Science and Nature Writing" series. Watters is co-founder (along with Ethan Canin and Po Bronson) of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, a workspace for journalists, novelists, poets and filmmakers.

Here’s a clip of Watters as a guest on The Daily Show in 2010.

In this article published in Pacific Standard magazine, Watters writes about Joe Henrich and his colleagues, who are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way social scientists think about human behavior and culture.

Co-sponsors of the IA biannual lecture are the departments of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Management and Business, the Asian Studies Program, and SkidMarket (SGA).