Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Maureen Pritchard
Send message to Convenor
- Formats:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Anthropology & Archaeology
- Sessions:
- Sunday 17 October, -
Time zone: America/New_York
Long Abstract:
Although there is some research being conducted on mental health practices in formerly Soviet spaces, this work has been limited to the Soviet psychiatric system on one hand, and post-Soviet indigenous healing practices on the other (Penkala-Gawęcka, 2019). Little research has been done from a person-centric perspective in which the individual and the particularities of circumstance, including personal experiences of illness are foregrounded (Pritchard, 2014). In emphasizing medical diversity and syncretism in therapeutic practice, little attention has been paid to the processes through which narratives of illness are made, or the ways in which these narratives engage with larger global understandings of illness and health. Even as certain individuals and narratives are marginalized, relegated to zones of social abandonment (Biehl, 2005), others are supported by the state, and by non-state actors who have aligned with the state in their promotion of ethnic-based nationalism. In as much as formal and informal mental health systems and their associated therapeutic practices provide healing for participants, so does the failure of these bureaucracies play out like a crime scene, contributing to social trauma as it becomes mapped upon individual minds and bodies.
In gathering scholars and direct service providers engaged in mental health work in Central Asia, this panel seeks to address these gaps. In attending to the person and to questions of mental health, this panel seeks to humanize life in Central Asia, to ask new questions and to provide fresh and innovative theoretical frames. In attending to individuality, through absence and through presence, panelists will also engage the cultural representations, collective experiences, and subjectivities that Arthur Kleinman has found inseparable from illness (Kleinman and Seeman. 2000).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Sunday 17 October, 2021, -Anna Cieslewska (Collegium Civitas)
Paper long abstract:
In Central Asia, various forms of magic and healing are common. Folk medicine is part of the cultural tradition based on plants, rituals, charms, and prayers. Some sacred practices are associated with the belief that illness can be caused by malevolent spirits whose identification is part of the healing process; these include jinns, albastyi (alvasti), pari, devs, and others. There are different experts including religious leaders such as mullas, ishans, qasida-khons, as well as other healers who deal with the spirits by using various techniques such as reading prayers, amulets, rituals and so forth. People believe that those methods have a therapeutic value, helping to remove bad energies, release tensions, regaining psychological balance. They can profoundly affect feelings, and thus lead to a change of the person’s attitude towards certain situations. Nevertheless, many of these healing practices are not recognized by biomedicine, although in certain situations they replace conventional psychological therapies or psychiatric treatments. Some methods can be complementary combining various healing practices and biomedicine to give a person ‘a double protection’.
In this presentation, I seek to answer what people think regarding mental health in different contexts, what they describe as madness or/and psychological disorders/effect of malevolent spirit. How do they deal with various emotional disorders caused by mishaps, work, migration, others. To address these questions, I present the cases of spiritual healers and healing methods performed in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan as well as in Moscow by migrants from Central Asia. My presentation will be based on various field studies which I conducted in the years of 2006-2019.
key words: healing methods, psychological disorders, religion
Seran Schug (Rowan University) Narine Abrahamyan
Paper long abstract:
• Humanitarian and social services have become an integral part of community life in Armenia, supporting economic growth, democratization, human rights, improved healthcare including mental health for individuals with social, cognitive, emotional and psychiatric problems (WHO, 2009). While there are a few studies of the growth of the mental health system in Armenia (McCarthy, et al, 2013; WHO Report, 2009; Soghoyan and Gasparyan, 2009), there are no systematic studies of the innovations that individual mental healthcare providers have improvised and initiated in urban and rural areas to help citizens of this post-Soviet nation deal with the dramatic social, economic, and political changes that have taken place in the past 25 years. Based on my pilot ethnographic research conducted between 2018 and 2021, I found that the mental health system in Armenia to be a pluralistic synthesis of European influenced medicine and local ideologies of mental health, with significant contributions from individual psychologists to create and grow services for people in need. While local governmental as well as public and private global institutions provide funds and development programs to grow the mental health system in Armenia, it is important to acknowledge that it is through the resilience and ingenuity of individual mental health professionals that the organizations are able to grow and adapt. Even amid broad-based resistance and stigmatization of psychotherapy, marginalization of individuals with acute and chronic mental health issues, and the lack of a governing body that would support standardization and ethical oversight of therapeutic practice, these mental health providers have innovated strategies to insure that they meet high standards of ethics, fight for the human rights for women and other vulnerable communities, employ evidence-based treatment approaches for their patients suffering from trauma from difficult life situations, as well as provide post-war assistance of soldiers, children and refugees from the most recent war with Azerbaijian. Our paper will provide an ethnographic descriptive analysis of the individual therapists who form the basis of the thriving and growing assortment of evidence-based treatment, arts-based trauma informed therapies, social supports, and psychoeducational programming in mobile mental health units, medical mental health clinics, women’s and family support services, orphanages for children with developmental needs, and residential programs for children.
Viktoria Akchurina (OSCE Academy in Bishkek)
Paper long abstract:
Human trafficking has been one of the taboo issues in today’s Central Asia. National numbers on trafficking in humans have been nearing zero over the past few years, while international and non-governmental organizations have accounted for ten-folded numbers of victims. Prosecution of convicts often dissolves informally at the lower layers of the state ladder. Yet, policy and financial resources that aim to improve the situation disappear within the net of spectacular bureaucratic networks. Why—regarding vast policy architecture and financial inflows—the issue of human trafficking falls between the cracks of the system on the intersection of international and national security?
This paper argues that the human body as a scene of the crime has become a point of contestation among three layers of oppression: culture, institutional exclusion, and social trauma. Specifically, it shows how the joint (national and international) policy of trafficking in persons, terrorism, and migration has created conditions for the neglect of human life. The goals have been undermined by their own means through reinforcing the cultures of shame and oppression, subsequently leading to more illegible, unseen, and liminal spaces in the state and society relations.
The argument unfolds in three steps. Firstly, the paper lays out the stories the numbers tell by juxtaposing national, international, and NGO statistics on human trafficking. Secondly, it contrasts these numbers with the stories of human beings, who have experienced trafficking. Finally, the paper analyses the international anti-human trafficking infrastructure—built on migration, terrorism, and trafficking nexus—through the lens of the human stories.
In general, the paper contributes to the debate on how international schemes to improve the human condition have failed by focusing on the anthropology of a threat to international security and by showing how a human has been made faceless, voiceless, and invisible.
Sahil Warsi
Paper long abstract:
Ethnographic and historical research on health and healing in Central Asia and among Central Asian migrants illustrates the complex and contingent processes affecting health-seeking behaviors and understandings of illness in the region (An et al 2020; Cieślewska 2020, 2021; Zarcone & Hobart 2016). This growing literature examines influences on service provision, individual choice, and medical pluralism, within a national or regional context, highlighting the fraught social landscapes within which individuals access biomedical and alternative healing practices. In this context, it becomes difficult to neatly delineate distinctions between binary orientations toward health, e.g. state/non-state, religious/secular, etc.
This paper depicts the epistemologically complex context within which citizens and policy makers make heath decisions, by drawing on interviews and observations conducted as an applied health researcher supporting the Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan ministries of health in understanding public attitudes toward new vaccine introduction. While both countries continue to enjoy historically high vaccination rates, increasing vaccine hesitancy is seen by policy makers and others as related to issues such as lack of social development or religious revivalism. Examining moments in which individuals consider how and why vaccine decisions are made by them or others, this paper suggests individuals navigate an uncertain field of overlapping ‘truths’ about health and health behaviors that inform their present. Considering experiences in the US and the UK, one might see this situation as not unique to Central Asia, but indicative of a contemporary global situation.
Rohullah Amin (Universität der Bundeswehr München)
Paper long abstract:
Given over four decades of war, atrocities of ongoing armed conflict and sociopolitical instability, the people of Afghanistan are often praised for their “resilience”, which is aligned with normative patriarchal culture. This paper is an attempt to explore perceptions of resilience, adversity, psychological functionality and well being among those who migrated to Germany between 2010-2018. This work is a critical analysis of underlying assumptions of “resilience” in the context of Afghanistan that implies right and wrong response to adversity; reinforces maladaptive coping styles, and stigmatises vulnerability in context of extreme violence. This paper uses qualitative data analysis of narratives of refugees and their families both in Germany and Afghanistan.