Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the socio-cultural discourses of anxiety disorder, historically situated against the Western ones. I describe how teachers in a post-Soviet Kazakhstan school deploy folk pedagogy to utilize the state of anxiousness to develop positive responses towards collective solidarity.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of anxiety embedded in widespread global practices of Western biomedical psychiatry is closely interlinked with the Eurocentric notions of emotion and person that emphasize individualism and the mind/body dichotomy. The physiological view of emotion is reflected in the definition of anxiety disorder that is believed to originate from an imbalance of the brain chemicals or genetic predisposition. The anxiety in this context is considered a negative emotional experience that prevents an individual to rationally control herself in society. In post-Soviet Kazakhstan, the introduction of the global boom of anxiety treatments tangles with already existing practices of folk concepts of "trevoga/trevozhnost" (anxiety/anxiousness). Unlike the concept of anxiety, the concept of trevozhnost' is not coupled with "disorder", and is not medicalized or individualized. On the contrary, it serves as an effective pedagogical tool to create social order. With psychology still being marginalized as a non-science, the school educators continue Soviet practices to deal with students' emotions that reflect the Marxist view of a person as "the sum total of social relationship". I describe how teachers deploy folk pedagogy to utilize the state of anxiousness to develop collective solidarity. This paper examines how collective socialist ethics embodied in the cultural discourse of anxiety is deployed to redress structural inequalities caused by postsocialist transition to a market society. Further, I discuss that despite both the (post) Soviet and Western discourses of anxiety have been historically situated against each other, they share similar origins as modern technologies of governance.