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- Convenors:
-
Yehuda Goodman
(The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Jack Friedman (University of Oklahoma)
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- Format:
- Plenary
- Start time:
- 10 April, 2021 at
Time zone: America/Chicago
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel considers both the history of psychological anthropology's relative lack of engagement with topics of justice and injustice, and proposes a pathway toward a future psychological anthropology that is more fully engaged with the study of justice and injustice.
Long Abstract:
Why has psychological anthropology been so (relatively) silent on topics of injustice and the struggle for justice across racial, ethnic, national, economic, gender, and environmental domains? And, while there are some notable exceptions to this trend, this is particularly difficult to understand when, in fact, scholars who identify as psychological anthropologists have often been deeply enmeshed in, engaged with, and supportive of struggles for justice. We ask, then, is there something in the ways that psychological anthropology has framed its questions, drawn on particular methods, valued particular analytics, deployed certain theoretical tools, or chosen the communities and people who we study that encouraged this distancing from issues of justice and injustice? Is this an outcome of the moral modest temperament of SPA scholarship and scholars, or is it something about the ways we think about our interlocutors? These questions set the context for exploring how psychological anthropology can better engage with issues and experiences of injustice and struggles for justice. We encourage participants to consider four questions in this regard: First, what can be drawn from within traditions of psychological anthropology to provide foundations for the study of justice and injustice? Second, strategically, what and who should we study in order engage with injustice? Third, what analytics and theoretical tools could we deploy? Fourth, what methods should psychological anthropologists draw on to accomplish these ends? Historical, theoretical, and methodological reflections as well as ethnographic inquiries are all welcomed.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
In this paper I introduce a theory of recognition as way of theorizing a subject's becoming. I focus on how a theory of recognition can be useful for understanding one of the mainstays of social injustice in the U.S., namely, educational inequity.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I introduce a theory of recognition as way of theorizing the process of becoming. I take recognition to be a psychosocial phenomena by which a subject is recognized as a particular type of person. In contrast to previous theories of recognition that assume recognition is a presuppositional matter in which the always-already-there subject is either accurately recognized or not, I develop a theory of recognition as a process with creative potential such that recognition can enable the becoming of the subject being recognized. This moment of recognition is mediated by 1) the available array of available macrosociological identities and types (broadly construed to include identities proper as well as psychological states and traits), what I will refer to as regimes of recognition and 2) the complex semiotics which are locally realized in interactional, institutional, and sociocultural practices and through which it is communicated, often unwittingly, the answer to the question “Who do you think I am?”. The proposed theory of recognition has consequences for understanding such classical anthropological concerns as gift-giving, initiation rituals, and bridwealth. In this paper I focus on how recognition can be useful for understanding one of the mainstays of social injustice in the U.S., namely, educational inequity. I argue that the weight of recognition hangs unevenly on people across various categories of identity by enabling certain affordances for action and thus for becoming.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues for a form of ethnographic writing that does not resort to narrations of patient history or diagnosis. It proposes opacity as a strategy that decenters the clinical and ethnographic gaze and questions medical authority and narrative construction.
Paper long abstract:
“I tell you this because I want to tell you, but don’t put it in your book!” On several occasions, the woman I call Ms. Dats clearly demarcated what she shared with me in confidence from what could be written about in my ethnography of the Guadeloupean rehabilitation clinic where we met. Beyond her ethnographic refusal, she also practiced diagnostic refusal and asked doctors to refrain from defining her condition. In both instances, she demanded to be heard at the same time as she demanded to not be reduced to facts or syndromes. She demanded that her unknowability be recognized. Doubling down on her refusals by adjoining to hers my own, my writing makes explicit that the full story of Ms. Dats isn't for me to share or my audience to know, yet there is a lot to learn from the practice of opacity she draws us in. I follow her as she strategically navigates treatment in a fraught French Caribbean healthcare system and builds therapeutic alliances while maintaining opacity. I question the recourse to life-narrative and case study in medical and psychological anthropology and argue for a form of ethnographic writing that does not resort to narrations of patient history or centers on diagnosis. Instead, I explore how her practice of strategic opacity decenters the clinical and ethnographic gaze and pushes to re-examine medical authority and narrative construction.
Paper short abstract:
While working with persecuted minorities whose life experiences are marked with discrimination, violence, and social exclusion, the paper asks what and how do psychological anthropologists ‘listen to’ while they are ‘listening to injustice’?
Paper long abstract:
Can there be a narrative of injustice? If yes, then who narrates it, and who listens to it? If no, then how do we engage with the theme of injustice in absence of coherent communication? While working with persecuted minorities whose life experiences are marked with discrimination, violence, and social exclusion, what and how do psychological anthropologists ‘listen to’ while they are ‘listening to injustice’? The paper shares one possibility of such listening at the intersections of politics and psychoanalysis, where one seeks to understand contemporary politics psychoanalytically to engage with the political underpinnings of psychoanalytically developed life histories. Drawing upon my ongoing ethnography of Muslims in north India since June 2019, the paper discusses the ways in which Muslims articulate their experience of being the political enemy in the wake of Hindu nationalism and the way I listen to their experience of ‘being hated’ sharing not only their identity of being an Indian Muslim but also inhabiting the shared space of political threat and social violence. The paper explores the struggle in ‘narrativizing injustice’ that requires working through what can be said in words, and what cannot be expressed—how do we ‘listen’ to what is not said? The ‘work’ of psychological anthropology, this paper posits, becomes not only documenting testimonies of injustice that can be described but also ‘remembering’ injustice that which fraught with forgetting.
Paper short abstract:
Addressing social and other forms of injustice may be achieved by reflecting on theoretical resources within psychological anthropology and by explicitly exploring critically the interface of different groups and the political regimes within which they reside
Paper long abstract:
Psychological Anthropology has been quite “color mute.” Addressing social and other forms of injustice may be achieved by reflecting not only on resources already within psychological anthropology but also by explicitly exploring new themes: First, examining the interface of individuals and groups with the political regimes within which they work; Second, exploring interfaces of subjects and the work of professionals like psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers but also professionals in other fields like economists, environmentalists or architects, and urban planners; Third, choosing issues of social justice as central to the research project and research site; Fourth, drawing upon critical traditions like feminist and post-colonial theories and paradigms and relating them to current and historically rooted forms of injustice while attending to the experiences of individuals. Fifth, adding to person-centered-ethnographies research strategies that look at the broader political picture, like state structures, the education system, the urban environments within which individuals – and communities – live, and interact and struggle. We should ask then explicitly about differences in living spaces and how they reflect on the experiences of individuals, and on ways individuals within such groups struggle with issues of injustice. I will illustrate these themes by analyzing the racialized conversion processes of Jewish immigrants in Israel – how the State tries to construct the subjects of white Russian vs Black Ethiopian Jews differently, and how each group responds to the different conversion tracks offered to them -- individualized vs communal.
Paper short abstract:
How does it feel to experience injustice? Are experiences of justice the opposite of injustice, or is a “just world” simply experienced as morally “normal,” predictable, or uncomplicated? This talk examines what it means to seek to change moral worlds in an effort to better align with expectations.
Paper long abstract:
How does it feel to experience injustice? Is the experience of justice the opposite of injustice, or is a “just world” simply experienced as morally “normal,” predictable, or uncomplicated? Can we understand the experience of injustice with the discrete set of concepts and objects of study that are already well established within the psy-ences, or does the consideration of the political demand a new way of thinking about the entwined nature of identity, experience, subjectivity, and power/political economy? This paper argues that, at the heart of the experience of political engagement is an embodied experience of in/justice that reveals both how people culturally assess the rightness and wrongness of the world, but also how people seek to challenge the link between moralities and the concrete systems that are in place to enforce — legally, politically, economically — that moral landscape. How does it feel, then, when one’s sense of morality does or does not align with the political economy? Drawing on examples from fieldwork conducted among downwardly mobile Romanian and among farmers and ranchers across the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains, I argue that a psychological anthropology of injustice should not simply be reduced to a study of misery and the conditions that create that misery. Rather, this paper argues for a radical rethinking of interiority and exteriority in an effort to build a unique understanding of political selves and subjectivities that complements, but stands apart from, existing types of selves and subjectivities (e.g., gendered, medicalized, etc.).