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Paper short abstract

This paper revisits medical anthropology’s critique of global mental health as an inherited legacy. It asks how critique itself has become epistemic authority, and explores emerging approaches that move beyond binary toward more reflexive and collaborative forms of knowledge production.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers a conceptual reflection on medical anthropology’s early critical engagement with global mental health (GMH) and argues that the critique itself has become an object in need of re-examination. Since the emergence of the GMH movement around two decades ago, medical anthropology has produced a substantial body of critical scholarship examining its assumptions and modes of knowledge production.

A first wave of GMH critique exposed the field’s colonial epistemic hierarchies, manifested in the universalisation of Western psychiatric knowledge, and continues to shape anthropological perspectives to this day. Yet, these early works contributed to establishing a dominant mode of critique that relied on binary framings of global/local and universal/specific, at times essentialising local knowledge and healing practices as pure alternatives to Western psychiatry – perhaps contributing to what Sa’ed Atshan calls an “empire of critique,” where critique itself becomes a form of epistemic power.

As Dörte Bemme’s recent work shows, GMH has become increasingly reflexive and participatory, challenging medical anthropology to re-examine its once politically relevant critical tradition. Standing on the shoulders of earlier critics, a new generation of anthropologists working on GMH is increasingly moving beyond oppositional, binary critique towards more collaborative and self-reflective practices of knowledge production. This requires maintaining critical sensitivity to power while reimagining critique as a collaborative and conversational practice in shaping epistemic futures.