Paper short abstract:

This paper delves into the fluid intertwining between psychiatric and indigenous medicine discourses and its effects on the trajectories of indigenous women who have experienced sexual violence (violent intergenerational incest) and are hospitalised at Bolivia’s National Psychiatric Hospital.

Paper long abstract:

Based on an ethnographic research, this paper focuses on the influence that ethnic, gender and class classification schemes have on the intertwining of psychiatric and indigenous discourses around the trajectories of indigenous and peasant women who have experienced sexual violence (specifically violent intergenerational incest) and are now hospitalised at the Chronic Unit of Bolivia's National Psychiatric Hospital. The definition of humanness is at the centre of such articulation, and is the locus that allows for the fluidity of exchanges between apparently distant worlds of meaning. Both in the communities of origin of the hospitalized women, and within the hospital, the production of the human is defined as the midpoint between poles of scarcity and excess of vital energies, as these are defined in each context. Giorgio Agamben's and Roberto Esposito's work concerning particular modes of defining humanness in different historical scenarios will be used to analyse, within psychiatric, judicial and community settings, what I describe as a continuum of forms of experiencing and delineating what to be human means. Humanness is never a definitive concept but is rather contested and adjusted in the intersection between collective practices and individual experiences within conflictive but interrelated contexts. Violence and power play a crucial role in determining the scope of any attempt to reproduce or change such definitions.