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Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on what it means to ‘attend to’ realities of people living with mental troubles in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, an urban landscape where such experiences are attended to differently in different spaces and by different people.

Paper long abstract:

My PhD research is centred around the evolving storylines of different people with experience of mental troubles in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, who I met through the psychiatry ward of a university hospital. Their stories about life and illness took various shapes, in relation with different social situations and healing spaces, conflicting strands of knowledge and shifting lines of interpretation. In this paper I want to reflect upon what it means to ‘attend to’ such realities as researcher. I often felt that my ways of attending differed from those of other people (family, doctors, healers…), and also from person to person. With some people, I felt that our attentions slowly started to correspond (Ingold 2017), leading to forms of mutual understanding about the world, to ways of ‘attending together’ to “that which is not easily knowable” (Good 2012). Other people taught me that attention may also (unwillingly) become intrusive, posing questions about the idea that attention is a form of care (Ingold 2017). These and other research experiences make me reflect on what attention (as well as shifting your attention) ‘does’, for those who participate in anthropological research and for researchers, and why and how it makes parts of experience and certain reflections (in)visible. I also want to explore how the concept of attention can help us more broadly to understand people’s movements, with “affliction” (Das 2015), through a landscape where such affliction is attended to differently in different spaces and by different people.