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.