Robert Desjarlais is a professor of anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College, specializing in how cultures construct both experience and subjectivity, how language operates in complex societies, and social understandings of illness and healing. His ethnographic fieldwork in places as disparate as Nepal and Boston have led to the publication of several studies dealing with these interests, which include Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas (1992); Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless (1997); and Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths Among Nepal's Yolmo Buddhists (2003).

This excerpt from Shelter Blues considers how one comes to analyze and explain experience, an issue of particular importance to Desjarlais as he studied the lives of forty homeless (and often also mentally ill) individuals living in Boston. Desjarlais presents the reader with a complex, interwoven look at how homelessness and mental illness are understood in American society, concluding that these experiences are not the simple result of one homeless person's isolated, interior state, but are, instead, determined and formed by an intricate web of cultural images of illness and personhood, as well as political and economic forces.

Thus while he is interested in the face value of the phenomenon of homelessness and mental illness, Desjarlais' investigation does not, out of necessity, end there. In this aptly entitled essay, “Rethinking Experience,” Desjarlais offers background on the different theoretical models that have been used to approach the category of experience. By assuming that human experience is constructed—that it is “a process built sharply out of cultural, historical, political, and pragmatic forces”—Desjarlais paves the way to present the experiential world of the homeless as one that is significantly formed and manufactured by society.