Paper short abstract:

This paper intends to interrogate the categories of the local and the universal, both with respect to nosology and aetiology, through an ethnography of psychosomatic medicine in a German Reha Klinik.

Paper long abstract:

This paper intends to call into question the presumptive

conceits of Euro-American anthropology, particularly as it pertains to

what it calls "mental illness". Anthropology often functions as the

handmaiden and distant double of psychiatry at "home", collecting

curious tales of possession, exorcism and healing as it traverses the

world away from home, with the home always imagined as a Euro-American

navel, and the addressee implicitly presumed to be one's peers and the

public in this narcissistic navel. One example of this narcissism,

without any sense of irony or embarrassment, is called "medical

anthropology at home". One of the many side-effects of this narcissism

is to be blind to two possibilities: that there are enough tales of the

curious kind at home and, either this has always been the case, or

close to two centuries of curio collecting has so infected and

inflected the categories at home that the other has come home to

roost. This paper will wrestle with both these possibilities by

ethnographically examining German psychosomatic medicine and its

penchant for past-life aetiologies brought about by inducing trance

through breathing and breath work, and through the playing of exotic

Hindu music like the Hanuman Chalisa. It will then proceed to ask

whether "universal psychiatric categories" have been inflected if not

infected by the "local", or whether all universals are nothing other

than the local, and doubly so as in the German case these exotic

aetiologies and their attendant therapies are paid for by socialised

health insurance, especially the Beihilfe.