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- Convenors:
-
Allen Tran
(Bucknell University)
Merav Shohet (Boston University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 7 April, -
Time zone: America/Chicago
Short Abstract:
This panel follows anxiety's flows across social networks, political and medico-scientific institutions, and national boundaries to examine it not just as a register of the present moment's uncertainties but also as an analytic to rethink the affective and material construction of self and society.
Long Abstract:
In recent years, much has been made of anxiety as a mental health crisis hidden in plain sight. In 2020, however, anxiety has been brought to the foreground due to the coronavirus pandemic, environmental disasters, and a reckoning with racial inequalities. While cross-cultural research on mental health and illness has yielded landmark studies on schizoaffective disorders, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders have been curiously overlooked. Addressing this lacuna in anthropological scholarship, this panel examines the cultural, economic, and personal patterning of mundane and extraordinary as well as normative and pathological forms of anxiety and how local systems of knowledge, relationships, and practices inform and are informed by anxiety. Following anxiety's flows across social networks, political and medico-scientific institutions, and national boundaries takes us through some of the most critical issues of the present historical moment, such as rapid socioeconomic change, political and environmental crises, and the expansion of biomedical psychiatry. Rejecting the individualizing and universalizing claims of the dominant perspectives on anxiety from philosophy, psychology, and, increasingly, neuroscience, this panel uses an ethnographic lens to view anxiety as a social practice, not just an emotional state, a pathological symptom, a biochemical process, or an existential condition. Finally, as psychological anthropologists increasingly examine longstanding structural inequalities, anxiety is not just a register of the present moment's uncertainties but also provides an analytic to rethink the affective and material construction of self and society.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 7 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper proposes a critical phenomenological framework for the ethnographic study of anxiety and anxiety disorders.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing from research on the rising rates of anxiety disorders in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, this paper outlines a cross-cultural framework for the ethnographic study of anxiety and anxiety disorders that is grounded in the mutual construction of self and society. Moods reveal the fundamental ways people relate to the world, and perhaps none does so as sharply as anxiety (Heidegger 1962). As a process of orienting and becoming oriented to the world (Csordas 1994), selfhood requires an Other to orient towards in an ongoing process of becoming and possibility. However, anxiety is distinct from other affective states insofar as it is defined by the lack of an object and underscores the general configuration of the world and the future constitution of the self (Bloch 1995). Emerging patterns of anxiety in Vietnam increasingly reflect how people meet the demands of a precarious future through neoliberal technologies of the self, specifically psychiatry, psychotherapy, and social work. In using psy-theories of the mind to explore their most authentic selves, people are not so much engaged in an act of self-discovery as a process of reinvention. Anxiety is evidence of people’s struggles with reconciling the competing demands of the individual and the social in a time of radical social transformation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the production of ‘normal anxious subjects’ and ‘pathological anxious subjects’ by psycho-social support providers during the pandemic in the Maldives and the various ways locals respond to these diagnostic categories in a context of resource-scarcity and structural inequality.
Paper long abstract:
In the context of the Covid-19 crisis, a central focus of intervention in the South Asian republic of Maldives by both international health and humanitarian organizations and the state has been nafsānī ijtimāī ehī (psycho-social support or PSS). Drawing on conversations with volunteer PSS care providers and care seekers, I demonstrate how the provisioning of this form of care is based on a ‘grammar of crisis’ and a ‘grammar of chronicity,’ which, respectively, produce ‘normal anxious subjects’ and ‘pathological anxious subjects.’ These grammars and subjectivations are indexical of humanitarian and biomedical knowledge systems. I propose that, as ethnographers, we center the voices of the intended care recipients of global mental health projects in order to understand how such individuals navigate contexts of crisis rather than reproducing particular biomedical and humanitarian discourses of subjects as or in crisis. Drawing on person-centered narratives of individuals living in the capital city of Male’ who identify as experiencing nafsānī bali (lit. ‘self illness’), I illustrate the various ways my interlocutors engage with, depart from, or refuse the aforementioned diagnostic categories of ‘anxiety’ and the associated forms of care. These narratives show the emergent forms of self-making in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, during a time when everyone is considered by international and state organizations to be susceptible to ‘anxiety’ by virtue of being a citizen, these narratives show the impact of humanitarian mental healthcare on individuals’ subjectivities in a local setting that is resource-scarce and marked by multiple forms of structural inequality.
Paper short abstract:
This paper positions positions anxiety as a frame characterized by extreme care through which we may view and understand the policy and practice of hospital safety logics and the thin experiential line between safety and danger at the heart of much emergency hospital work.
Paper long abstract:
In a psychiatric emergency department often filled to capacity with patients in acute states of psychiatric illness, the medical professionals at Los Angeles Public Hospital are trained to work in a state of flux and uncertainty. In the midst of carrying out their work in such frequently chaotic spaces, doctors, nurses, and clinical staff members must learn to carefully assess patient circumstances and interactions to minimize the risk of dangerous outcomes. In this paper, I mobilize linguistic and psychological anthropological techniques to interrogate the manner in which anxiety emerges and then frames the articulation and enactment of a “safe” and “therapeutic” hospital environment. Etymologically, anxiety has roots in ancient latin, signifying “extreme care.” Attending to emergence of anxiety both in the rhetoric of hospital policies and in the everyday interactions of hospital staff, this paper positions anxiety as a frame characterized by extreme care through which we may view and understand the practice of hospital safety logics and the thin experiential line between safety and danger at the heart of much emergency hospital work.
Paper short abstract:
This lecture is based on an ethnography exploring the early days of isolation during the COVID-19 outbreak in Israel. The lecture examines the feeling of loneliness and death anxiety, and the attempt to find meaning and significance to blur these feelings.
Paper long abstract:
Endings, annihilation, and finality sometimes occur in our lives in the form of events that affect our lives, forcing us to stop, linger, and accept what is known in advance and yet is denied. The global COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 sent many people into preventive isolation. A forced isolation during a pandemic is such a life-changing event, requiring individuals to stay in one place, between four walls.
This lecture, which is based on an ethnographic research during the early stages of the COVID-19 isolation in Israel, examines the subjective experience of isolated people in the face of annihilation anxiety. Specifically, the lecture addresses questions like: What in the subjective experience of the isolators raised thoughts about death and annihilation? And what, in the existential state of being in isolation, affected the cultural practices used by the isolators to obscure the knowledge of death, which was sometimes overwhelming in the isolation space? I believe that the isolation experience flooded the "anxiety of birth / death", in the spirit of Otto Rank. Thus, the space of isolation became a liminal space, and as figuratively to Rank, a womb from which we are reborn into the world. Within this interpretive framework, I focus on the key practice of finding meaning and purpose in life as emerging from the state of existential anxiety.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores circulations of anxiety through an ethnographic investigation of vaccine hesitancy in the Pacific Northwest. In the context of Covid-19, vaccine hesitancy has intensified. This paper explores vaccine anxiety as encapsulating the “public feeling” of our time.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores individual and societal circulations of anxiety through an ethnographic investigation of vaccine hesitancy in the Pacific Northwest. In a region long-defined by counter-culture and anti-government sentiment, vaccine hesitancy and refusal has become widespread. Regional distrust of vaccines, the vaccine industry, and government-funded research has led to dramatically reduced rates of vaccination among school aged children in the twenty-first century. According to the CDC, Oregon ranks first in the number of kindergarteners with non-medical exemptions for school vaccinations, with a rate of 7.5% state-wide. Public health officials blame recent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in the region, including pertussis (2018) and measles (2019), on increasing vaccine refusal.
In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccine hesitancy has intensified and spread, even among parents who otherwise support childhood vaccines. While a Covid-19 vaccine is highly anticipated and hoped for, promising a return to “normalcy,” it is also the subject of widespread anxiety and dread. Preliminary research among mothers, physicians, and public health officials in Lane County, Oregon (Fall 2020) documents the growing fear and distrust with which Americans view the government, privatized healthcare, the pharmaceutical industry, and institutions more generally. These anxious orientations have dramatically reduced confidence in a potential Covid-19 vaccine and amplified fears of compulsory vaccination. While parents fear a potentially toxic drug, public health officials fear vaccine refusal, protracted illness, and ongoing death. This paper explores such private and public vaccine anxiety as encapsulating the “public feeling” (Cvetkovich 2012) of our time.