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Long Abstract:
This panel is formed of sui generis papers that talk to similar themes.
Accepted papers:
Session 2Uzair Mir (The University of Texas at Austin)
Paper short abstract:
Aporia is natural to the human condition but does more than just evoke anxiety. The paper underlines the productivity of aporia as it occurs in Sufi therapeutics in rural Kashmir. Rather than disrupt the ritual, aporia allows for a more pliant Muslimness of participants, making the ritual possible.
Paper long abstract:
Ritual, as a densely signified social action, starkly manifests the aporias of belief and action in people’s social life. Although their ubiquity and indelibility should point to their utility, the tendency of anthropological theory has been to find a way to resolve such aporias, either by invoking the social structure they symbolize, the social function they serve, or their special role in social poiesis. When some studies do acknowledge the unresolved persistence of contradiction and ambiguity such aporias raise, they stop at admitting to their expected conflictual presence. In this paper, I explore the productive potential of aporia, as it materializes in the ritual event. I analyze Sufi healing in rural Kashmir, a borderland between India and Pakistan, and show two significant cases of aporia. One relates to the self-irony of the Sufi therapist (pir) regarding his spiritual competence and the other to an attending client’s disbelief regarding the ritual. Rather than disrupting the ritual, as the authority of the healer and the client’s faith are central to the ritual, I argue that these aporias foster participation in the ritual, making it possible at all. I show that these aporias inhere in how these individuals construct and construe their Muslim selves. As these selves are social and pliant, they engender aporia—in all its potentiality. To this end, the paper posits that ritual be analyzed as totally continuous with the social whole, distinct but not discrete.
Lara Gotal (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the phenomenon of medical gaslighting within the context of invisible illnesses in the Croatian health system. It investigates the root causes and repercussions of medical gaslighting and offers insights into its manifestation and interpretation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the phenomenon of medical gaslighting within the context of invisible illnesses. While other Western countries actively discuss and address medical gaslighting, it appears conspicuously absent from the narrative in Croatia. Consequently, the primary objective of this paper is to investigate instances of medical gaslighting within the Croatian healthcare system. The research aims to answer key questions, including: How does medical gaslighting manifest in the Croatian health system? Is the term "medical gaslighting" culturally recognized and familiar to narrators? Why do invisible diseases face heightened susceptibility to stigmatization and gaslighting? What are the root causes and repercussions of medical gaslighting? These inquiries are addressed through the implementation of seven semi-structured interviews, where narrators share their personal medical experiences. The paper presents the findings derived from the analysis of both narrator accounts and scientific literature on related subjects, offering insights into the manifestation and interpretation of medical gaslighting within the Croatian context.
Natali Valdez Valdez
Paper short abstract:
This talk explores how reproduction, bodies, and families are heightened sites of inquiry and transformation in relation to generational trauma. By tracing generational trauma across different domains tells a larger story about the crises of expertise, data, evidence, and scientific communication.
Paper long abstract:
Biological mechanisms of transgenerational inheritance are very difficult to trace in human populations. Nevertheless, widespread narratives of trauma as something that can be biologically and socially inherited, also referred to as generational trauma, permeate mainstream discourses. This talk explores how reproduction, bodies, and families are heightened sites of inquiry and transformation in relation to generational trauma. This paper applies a feminist and ethnographic lens onto medical, scientific, and legal cases related to generational trauma that are specific to racist histories of violence and oppression to show how both expert and lay understandings of trauma are transforming and reconstituting conventional ideas of biological reproduction and structural accountability. I argue that tracing the development, translation, and application of generational trauma in social, medical, and legal spaces tells a larger story about the crises of expertise, data, evidence, and scientific communication in contemporary sociopolitical contexts.
Ziqi Xie (Boston University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explicates how and why the national demographic anxiety and the pronatalist call propagated by the state are rarely translated into doctors’ clinical practices in Chinese IVF clinics even though medical professionals are often the active agents of the state’s reproductive governance.
Paper long abstract:
In 2016, China replaced its 36-year-long One Child Policy with a universal Two-Child Policy, which was soon substituted by the Three-Child Policy in 2021. The close interweaving between the state’s population and reproductive governance and Chinese medical institutions often renders the health professionals, as or being viewed as the active agents of biopolitical governance. However, my 23 months of fieldwork in two top-ranking IVF clinics between 2017 and 2023 reveals that even the doctors’ seemingly accordant discourses and practices oftentimes do not parallel the government’s goals. Invoking medical and ethical concerns rather than their role as policy implementers, the doctors position themselves as professionals holding biomedical authority. Whereas the new population policies have transferred the responsibilities and expectations of reproduction from medical institutions to families, doctors rather than the patients often serve as “moral pioneers” to cut off these transfers of reproductive responsibility through their medical authorities. On the one hand, this stance leads to the doctors’ emphasis on women’s “advanced age” and low success rates due to female infertility, which unwittingly helps reinscribe the state’s disparagement of declining fertility rates caused by women. On the other hand, the medical professionals’ advice and practices coincidentally side with the women’s reproductive autonomy which conflicts with their family members’ desire and the state’s call for multi-child families. The state sentimentalizes the demography anxiety and defines reproduction biomedically and demographically, which nevertheless is reframed and reenacted by the doctors, supplemented by their ethical definitions of well-being and moral reasonings about an ideal family.
Baris Kamyab Muhammedrezai (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
It is crucial to understand and analyze the extent and effects of stigmatization through varied perspectives. In this qualitative study, I conducted semi-structered in depth interviews with mental health professionals in Turkey to understand how mental health is stigmatized in contemporary Turkey.
Paper long abstract:
Stigma is an important barrier to health seeking behavior for mental health disorders. Therefore, it is crucial to understand and analyze the extent and the effects of stigmatization. The Republic of Turkey acknowledged this issue in 2006 and there have been efforts to tackle this issue from various institutions. In this study, my goal is to explore how mental health is stigmatized in contemporary Turkey through the perspective of mental healthcare professionals. To achieve this goal, I conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with mental healthcare professionals consisting of 6 psychiatry specialists and postgraduate medical doctors in training. Results have shown that stigmatization is still prevalent in Turkey and the efforts to tackle the issue have not been effective. In the context of Turkey, there is a close relation between mental health stigma and somatic symptom presentation in clinics. Professionals can act as stigmatizers in certain situations and patient fear towards institutional stigma is a prevalent topic in clinical care. Even though the topic of stigmatization has been studied extensively, few studies have been done focusing on the perspectives and the experiences of professionals.