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- Convenors:
-
Eleni Kotsira
(Alma Economics)
Maya Fischer (Aberdeen University)
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- Discussant:
-
Nigel Rapport
(St. Andrews University)
- Stream:
- Health, Disease and Wellbeing
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
How can we measure wellbeing? Is it something that is individually constructed or is it made in relation to others? This panel will explore the construction of health and wellbeing through both embodied practices and collective experiences of belonging.
Long Abstract:
This panel will explore how the subjective experiences of health, wellbeing, and disease are constructed through habitual embodied practices, in response to natural disasters, and through collective construction of the sense of belonging within a wider identity group. We are interested in ethnographic examples looking into how communities negotiate binary terms such as health and disease, life and death, and how this is an ongoing process shaped by particular social, cultural and natural phenomena which may challenge a community's known routine. This panel welcomes papers that engage with contexts in which health and disease are critical to experiences of cultural belonging, but also to personal wellbeing, including the wellbeing of the researcher in the field. Do people understand wellbeing in the same way in different environments, physically, socially, economically, and culturally? And how can some personal experiences come to define the collective dimension within which communities emerge, and vice versa?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This contribution aims to discuss wellbeing and sickness in an Amazonian community of descendants of African slaves. The focus will be both on the role of the relationship with places in the construction of disease and on the importance of sharing the path of diagnosis and treatment.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I intend to focalize the attention both on the role of the relationship with places in the construction of sickness and on the importance of sharing the path of diagnosis and treatment.
I will explore this topic starting from the idea that the bodily experience of the anthropologist can be a source of knowledge even when his/her body is defined "sick" according to local nosological categories. During the fieldwork, my interlocutors related my states of malaise to the frequentation of the forest or the river, according to an aetiology of illness based on the interaction between bodies, places and non-human entities. Therefore, in order to understand what was perceived as wellbeing and disease by my interlocutors, a reflective - in Csordas’ sense of this term - analysis of my own body interactions with spaces was essential.
At the same time, fieldwork experience showed the importance of sharing the path of diagnosis and treatment during both private consultation of the shaman and collective afro-indigenous healing rituals.
Paper short abstract:
Natural disasters challenge our conceptions of being and feeling well, in terms of both physical and mental health. This presentation discusses the case of environmental trauma on a remote island in Northern Greece, as the result of a catastrophic deluge and in the absence of mental health care.
Paper long abstract:
In the morning hours of 26 September 2017, the village of Chóra on the island of Samothraki filled with rushing torrents carrying mud, rocks detached from the mountain and detritus. Extensive floods were also recorded elsewhere across the island and caused roads to collapse, destroyed individual properties and immobilised local administration for weeks to come. According to the locals, it was unprecedented for the mountainous village of Chóra to flood – as ‘the water would always flow downwards’. The island of Samothraki was declared in a ‘state of emergency’ from 26 September 2017 to 26 September 2018.Though financial and infrastructural damages were addressed relatively quickly, the residents’ mental health remained an untouched issue. Reports of trauma and fear toward the environment became soon widespread however, evidently introducing ruptures in the community’s everyday life and habits. Combining symptoms of PTSD from psychiatry with historical data about the island’s population growth and immigration movements, this presentation will seek the reasons behind the lack of mental health support and contextualise the residents’ emotional responses in the months that followed, as these were recorded during 15 months of fieldwork and supplemented by a large-scale online survey. In particular, I am introducing the term ‘environmental trauma’ to analyse the potential and the challenges of having one’s perception of their surrounding natural and human-made environment altered. I am also considering this as a pivotal moment for the community to assume organised action and ameliorate the living conditions on the island.
Paper short abstract:
What does it mean to be healthy? Can a culturally bounded group of people be healthy or unhealthy together? This paper examines the collective construction of identity in Morocco and how, through colonialism, religion, and modernity, it has been referred to as ‘schizophrenic’ by key informants.
Paper long abstract:
What is cultural identity and how is it moulded? How does it change over time and what can affect it? This paper will examine cultural identity as a fluid and changing concept through two key case studies with young women in Rabat, Morocco in 2018. When asked about Moroccan identity, two separate informants described it as ‘schizophrenic’. In this discussion, I will discuss how anthropologists have looked at cultural identity in the past and what it means to identify as ‘unhealthy’. I will examine what it means to belong to a both a traditionally conservative group while also becoming in the modern world. I will explore how some Moroccan Muslims engaged with the concept of identity and wellness in everyday life, but also in broader contexts. Throughout this paper, it will become increasingly clear that our personal identities are constructed based on a myriad of factors and I argue that wellness, and illness, can be present both on the individual and group level.
Paper short abstract:
Among the Wana people no healing process is possible outside the community. Inside this culture almost every action is an expression of kasintuwu, sense of community. This is evident during healing rituals and funerals, where the community behave as single being to be renerated and healed.
Paper long abstract:
The illness or death of a person are critical moments for a small community and its survival; they breaks the delicate balance inside it and cast a shadow of insignificancy on life and the future of it. To avoid being overwhelmed by the emotional wave caused by an unexpected loss or illness and to retrieve the social balance, the Wana people of Morowali act together to state that although a member is ill or dead the Wana, as a community, are eternal.In a culture where the community is more important of the single members, each Wana contributes to the wellbeing of the others and is made aware that without each other no healing, or even death, could happen; in a constant expression of kasintuwu (sense of community).By examining Wana mythology, the momago (shamanic ritual) and the kayori (funeral), I intend to describe and analyse the intricate connections between the single and the community and how their wellbeing is assured by the sense of belonging that these rituals reaffirm through the reacting of the primordial density of the mythical era. In the end, the recreation of this mythological density, where there is no distance between single members and the community, transforms a negative event in a playful moment that will heal the community and assure its future.Data have been collected during two fieldworks conducted in 2011 and 2016 and are part of a bigger study on Wana musical and emotional world.