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Paper short abstract:

Ethnographic study of Chinese psychotherapy training reveals the ways in which ‘culture’ is intersubjectively created as a shifting abstract object to which various kinds of subjects try to form and reshape themselves in relationship with.

Paper long abstract:

As the panel abstract observes, anthropology still often constructs its object of study as a kind of abstract context (culture, society, discourse, ontology) within which people develop values, selves and activities. Even more so, it is the case that other fields that have adapted ‘culture’ as a heuristic or governmental tool in recent decades have tended to adopt a model of ‘culture’ that objectifies it in a deterministic manner. Psychotherapy is one such field where ‘cultural competence’ is increasingly taught to trainees in this manner. Yet psychotherapy also provides a ground for the observation of the counterpart of this presentation, namely the grounds for the emergence of a conceptualisation of culture as a ‘thing’ or an ‘entity’. In this paper, I use ongoing ethnographic research of Chinese psychotherapy training to explore the grounds for this emergence of ‘culture’ as a kind of ‘object’ to which various kinds of subjects shape themselves in relation with. I argue that the different positions within shifting networks of social relationships (e.g. client-therapist, therapist-supervisor, trainee- training institute, client/therapist-Chinese nation) leads to rapidly shifting and sometimes mutually incommensurate constructions of ‘culture as object’. In particular, I explore the differences in how Chinese trainees and mainly Euro-American trainers differentiate between ‘cultural’ and other factors in the therapy is indicative of the ways in which psychotherapy provides a fertile ground for the observation of an essential human process; the intersubjective construction of abstract objects through which we reshape ourselves as human subjects.