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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a study of ‘tension’ - an emic theory of mental and embodied distress experienced by Gaddi tribal women. It offers an alternative approach to studying distress that begins not in the clinic or shrine but follows tension as it emerged from relations within and between households.

Paper long abstract:

In anthropological studies of mental health, ethnographers often start at the ‘clinic’ or the ‘shrine’ – seeing such therapeutic spaces as privileged sites for recruitment and knowledge production. Interlocutors are engaged through a classic set of methods such as the illness narrative or survey. Data generated by such methods is often seductively organised in the neat form of a ‘case’ or ‘cohort’; and forms of distress are classified as culturalist ‘idioms of distress’ (Nichter 1981) or ‘cultural syndromes’ (Good 1977). Though such approaches generate important perspectives on distress and healing, they sometimes risk locking their subjects in a ‘suffering slot’ (Robbins 2013), defined by their deviance or pathology. Such methods can be marked by culturalist, individualising tendencies and scale-blindness; unable to fully capture the relational, structural, intersubjective, embodied and affective terrain of distress. But what methods, if any at all, can be drawn on in their place? This paper presents insights from a study of ‘tension’ - an emic theory of mental and embodied distress that women from the Gaddi tribal community of North India experienced. It offers an alternative approach to studying distress that begins not in the clinic or the shrine but follows tension as it emerged from biomoral relations and flows within and between households in intimate economies. It shows how such a heterodox approach generates different kinds of data, that allow a more ethnographically accurate mapping of forms of mental and embodied distress, as they intersect with inequalities of gender, class, caste, tribe and race.