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P03


Anthropological approaches to anxiety and anxiety disorders 
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, -