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Paper short abstract

This paper traces top-down state projects and bottom-up practices through which binary distinctions are reproduced and unsettled in Cuba. It argues for an analysis of emotional polarisation that attends to the interplay between state-led differentiation and bottom-up affective practices.

Paper long abstract

In recent decades in Cuba, questions of who constitutes the Other, the “them” or “they”, and who belongs to the “us,” the “we,” have increasingly come up for debate. For decades, state discourse positioned the United States as the primary external Other (El Imperio), while internally the shopkeeping, property-owning bourgeoisie functioned as a domestic counterpart. Particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, small private businesses were defined out of the social fabric and denounced as “parasitical” and “counter-revolutionary.”

Market reforms in the 2010s, which legalised certain business activities and reflected a more pragmatic stance toward private enterprise, marked an important shift. State authorities began to frame private sector workers as “one more alternative” for legitimate labour and as a component of the revolutionary project. At the same time, Cuba’s official relationship with the United States shifted from open hostility toward a period of partial normalisation.

Drawing on years of ethnographic research among Cuba’s new market actors (2015-present), including small-scale retail vendors and taxi drivers, this paper examines how analytical tools from psychological anthropology help illuminate these historical developments. It builds an analytical bridge between geopolitical shifts and the individual “building blocks” of polarisation by examining the interplay between top-down state projects of differentiation and bottom-up affective practices through which polarisation is reproduced, negotiated, and sometimes unsettled in everyday life. Inspired by psychologically informed anthropological approaches to binary differentiation, the paper treats polarisation as a relational and affective process rather than a purely ideological one.

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I trace how hate is projected into ideological opponents and circulates in the form in which it is initially deposited or is modified before being sent further, critically exploring the usefulness of concepts from various schools of psychoanalytic thought.

Paper long abstract

If we are concerned to describe the inner life of people, not merely their personhood as part of a collective but their individual selves, then psychoanalytic concepts are indispensable. Within psychoanalysis, there has been more than a century of rigorously competing schools, each with its own experimental epistemologies, both for the analytic session and for theories of interpretation. We have, therefore, inherited some rich and rigorous ways to document and analyze the human psyche from different perspectives and with different questions on which to focus. I discuss how concepts are linked in participant observation and in analysis, and how such linking leads to a deeper understanding of what is going on with us humans irrespective of which concepts one begins with. I draw on my fieldwork experience of the forty-year Cold War political division of Germany followed by the over thirty years of efforts to reverse these effects and unify Germany and its residents. My goal is to shed some light on the psychic effects of hate on polarization. Individual and collective processes differ in many ways although the same concepts are useful to describe both, but here I will restrict my analysis to the collective. I will conceptualize three periods: the Cold War division, the period of the dissolution of the GDR and integration into the Federal Republic, and the process of reunification in which German citizens are still living today. I also elaborate several concepts: projective identification, the unconscious, ambivalence, the container and contained, and splitting.

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Engaging debates about 'single stories' in anthropology, this paper discusses how drama-triangle narratives cast communities as victims, states as persecutors, and anthropologists as rescuers. The author then considers anticolonial and psychoanalytic techniques to unsettle these polarizing frames.

Paper long abstract

This paper interrogates anthropology’s current enthusiasm for “theoretical storytelling,” arguing that narrative form can both enable and constrain analytic innovation. While storytelling is often framed as transformative, the author shows how it can sediment “single stories” that reproduce theoretical sameness. Responding to Nolwazi Mkhwanazi’s critique of medical anthropology in sub-Saharan Africa and Sherry Ortner’s account of US theory since the 1980s, the paper identifies a recurrent three-act plot—state failure, cultural suspicion/resistance, and local ingenuity—that, despite empirical plausibility, narrows what can be seen and said. A comparable template is traced in European ethnographic writing on Bhutan, where repeated motifs risk reactivating tropes of Himalayan otherness even in careful fieldwork.

To theorize how such plots stabilize, the author borrows from transactional analysis Eric Karpman’s concept of a “drama triangle". The paper argues that anthropological narratives frequently position communities as victims and states as persecutors, while the ethnographer’s implicit stance slips into that of rescuer—an arrangement that can echo colonial savior imaginaries and “damage-centered” portrayals. Elaborating on Acey Choy’s “winner’s triangle,” the author proposes an exit from these polarizing scripts through practices that redistribute agency: asserting needs without punishment, problem-solving without victimhood, and listening rather than rescuing.

Finally, informed by anticolonial science studies and by episodic/frame-tale traditions, the paper offers practical “unsettling” exercises: cultivating reflexive thirdness, foregrounding land relations and routes/roots, treating methodological limits as sites of interdependence, and attending to boundaries and necessary exclusions. Unsettling drama triangles, the author argues, can reorient ethnographic storytelling toward relational and political accountability.

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Professional Development Groups at a counselling psychology programme in Bengaluru mandate autobiographical sharing and active listening. The ritual role reversal between wounded-speaker and healer-listener is an affective feedback loop that turns emotion into social force, facilitating containment.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I attempt to read ethnographic material from a counselling psychology programme in Bengaluru, India, through a psychologically informed anthropology. Professional Development (PD) Groups are designed in the programme to deepen trainees’ “counsellor identities” through guided autobiographical readings and themed life reviews, requiring participants to alternate between sharing life stories and practising empathic (‘active’) listening. The course is assessed through internal evaluations, with “self-awareness,” “trust,” and reflective writing counted as learning outcomes. How might eliciting raw emotions in a moderated setting illuminate the dynamics of (de)polarisation? I treat PD as reciprocal affect: it elicits emotion, invokes “contexts” from various points in time, and stabilises it as evidence of “doing the work.” I argue that the mandated rotation of roles—speaker/wounded and listener/healer—functions as a ritualised reversal that seeks to address the opacity in therapist–client relations by facilitating resonance and practices of emotional containment. Acknowledging the complexity of inner life, PD also makes counsellor formation explicitly reciprocal: trainees learn that a therapist is affected by clients' emotional expression and must notice, contain, and respond without rushing to solutions. As trainees oscillate between authentic vulnerability and practised composure, the classroom rehearses resonating with—and stepping back from—others’ emotions. This paper thus follows a feedback loop between emotions and social forces by being attentive to the ecology of a PD batch.

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Drawing on interviews, I examine psychiatrists’ conflicting duties in criminal courts. They are mandated to provide individual risk assessments. However, they also worry about psychiatry’s role in reproducing inequality. I read their ambivalence as a reckoning with diverging responsibilities.

Paper long abstract

This paper reads doctors' recognition of their structural position in the carceral apparatus of the state as a form of ambivalence.

I conducted 12 interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists who work as expert witnesses, and 5 interviews with legal professionals. Clinicians write medicolegal reports that are used in the court process. They document the client's thoughts regarding the offence of which they are accused. One part of the report-writer's task is to assess the risk that the client may commit further offences. Clinicians had diverse, contradictory responses to my questions regarding how relevant feelings of guilt and shame were to future risk. That is, the medicolegal report-writing process did not function as a simple technology of individual responsibilisation with respect to the client.

Instead, several of the clinicians thought deeply about their own responsibilities. They worried about the role of criminal law and mental health practice in entrenching pre-existing inequalities. Interpreting these competing responsibilities as a form of ambivalence can help to guide analysis.

Ambivalence has been at the heart of psychoanalytic thought from Freud onwards. Carveth, following Klein, has argued that it is only from the depressive position that reparative guilt can be felt, reflecting genuine concern for the other. The self-punishment of persecutory guilt – a practised performance for the contemporary professional managerial class – can be understood as a narcissistic evasion of true guilt. This paper traces clinicians’ ambivalence, documenting how they are working through these emotions. Inner polarisation is avoided, but the political ends remain unclear.