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Book review: Religious globalization = Engaged cosmopolitanism?

Published on September 30, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, globalisation, religion cosmology, Us and Them

Can studying religious movements give us new insights into globalisation or even cosmopolitanism? Anthropologist Tulasi Srinivas thinks so.

Antropologi.info book reviewer Tereza Kuldova has taken a closer look at Srinivas’ new book Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism Through the Sathya Sai Movement.

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Book Review: Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism Through the Sathya Sai Movement by Tulasi Srinivas, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010

Tereza Kuldova, PhD Fellow. Museum of Cultural History, Department of Ethnography, University of Oslo

Tulasi Srinivas draws us with her book into the intriguing world of a transnational religious Sathya Sai movement, a movement that crosses regional, national, religious and cultural boundaries and thus creates something that she labels ‘engaged cosmopolitanism’.

Through the focus on this religious and cultural movement that has its roots in India and that has managed to grow into a huge global movement with millions of followers and devotees, she tries to resolve what ‘cultural globalization’ might mean in contemporary world. At the same time, she addresses the questions of the nature of transglobal economies of spirituality, affect and religio-cultural identity and the meanings and forms of new pluralism, as they can be exemplified through this movement.

Her detailed ethnographic study based on nine years of fieldwork, makes it clear that processes of globalization cannot be perceived in terms of westernization, as some would like to have it. They must be understood in terms of interactions, flows and movement between variously localized cultural centers and in terms of the resulting variously spatially and culturally localized translations of these interactions, images, ideas and discourses. To put it simply, flows are multidirectional (though I would say, this has never been different).

“Dynamic ethnography”

Tulasi Srinivas is throughout her work making an appealing argument for a ‘dynamic ethnography’, which operates with the concepts of mobile description and multi-sitedness. The problem she tries to resolve in her writing is how to comprehend mobility and how to deal with translocal phenomena and that within a discipline so ill equipped to understand them. Hers is a critical hermeneutic study of religious globalization, where concepts such as complexity, relationality, networks, interaction and affectivity play a crucial role.

Even though this type of logic is generally appealing and without any doubt trendy, there is still something that disturbs me in her work. It might be the constant concern with ‘cultural globalization’ and ‘cultural translation’, even after reading the book I still find myself wondering what exactly does that mean, where does one culture begin and the other end, what is borrowed, what authentic, what reinterpreted? Maybe we are just looking here for artificial isles of safety in a sea of constant flux… The question is – can we not do without these isles?

Hinduism-Muslim culture of saints, Christian teaching + indigenous healing rituals

Let me now provide you with a brief sketch of the book and then discuss one of the chapters in more detail.

Throughout her book, Tulasi Srinivas introduces us to the story of the Sathya Sai movement. This movement is sixty-five years old and draws on a Hindu-Muslim culture of saints and mystics and on several strands of religion in the subcontinent, from Sufi mysticism, popular Hinduism, and Buddhism to indigenous healing rituals, Zoroastrianism and contemporary Christian teaching. The movement is centered on the charismatic personality of Shri Sathya Sai Baba (b. 1926).

sathya sai baba Pictures, Images and Photos

Sathya Sai Baba. Source: Nebbie2006, photobucket

Sai Baba was born in a remote village of Puttaparthi in Andhra Pradesh and “after suffering a series of seizures and falling into trances, he declared his greatness at the age of thirteen and proclaimed that he was Sai Baba, a reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba, a Muslim saint from Mahara who had died in 1918” (p. 9). He substantiated his claims by performing miraculous acts, such as materializations of sacred ash that devotees apply on their foreheads. These materializations continue to be central to his practice and are a matter of dispute among the members of anti-Sai movement.

Spiritual travel and “sexual healing”

Tulasi Srinivas maps the way this movement of his following has grown and became popular with people all around the world. She devotes a part of the book to the discussion of the nature of contemporary spiritual travel to the ashram in the village of Puttaparthi and the viewing and experience and magical encounter of darshan (witnessing of divinity) of Sai Baba. She takes us into the world of the global Sai community that stretches from the village of Puttaparthi to Tokyo, London, Hollywood, Mumbai, Bangalore and many other places around the globe and tries to grasp what it means to be and become a part of this global Sai community.

The chapter 4 is noteworthy because of its controversial nature. Tulasi Srinivas poses here the questions considering democracy, transparency and theology within the Sathya Sai Organization and focuses on the discussion of the allegations of ‘sexual healing’ and the ‘strategies of secrecy’ that according to her pervade this organization. In this respect, it is instrumental to read the reactions of the Sathya Sai Organization to her book, and in particularly to this chapter on http://www.saisathyasai.com/tulasi-srinivas/.

This controversy might be of interest to anyone possessing deeper knowledge of the movement and studying it, and it is up to the reader to make any conclusions. However, such critical comments are possibly the result of the fact that Srinivas dared to include the perceptions and views of the anti-Sai movement and did not only restrict her ethnography to the experiences of the committed devotees. On the other hand, how accurate any of the data is, is very hard to judge for anyone outside the movement and without its deep knowledge.

Further, she includes an interesting discussion on the encoded bodily prescriptions in the ashram and the problems they pose to the devotees from different cultures. She understands the failure of certain devotees to abide by the ashram rules as illuminating the “differential understanding of embodiment, salvation, desire and discipline” and believes that it speaks to “problems in cultural translation” (p. 19).

Branding of religious goods

However, the most intriguing chapter is according to me, being keenly interested in material culture, the last one dealing with the paradoxes of the teaching of resistance to the material world on one hand and the excessive consumption of religious objects on the other. In this context, “the material object is rejected as ‘unreal’ and a distraction from the truth of divinity, but the objects themselves become a significant signpost indicating the road to self-transformation” (p. 290).

Tulasi Srinivas shows us nicely how the consumption of these religious objects, be it gifted sacra or bought ephemera, has the power to directly transform the selves and the habitus of the devotees.

The gifted materializations (rings, necklaces, talismans, sacred ash, ambrosia etc.) from Sathya Sai Baba are the most important of the religious objects. “The reception of a materialized object instantly raises one’s standing among the community of devotees, as it is read as a sign of divine favor and an index of one’s active piety” (p. 285).

The materialized objects gifted by Sai Baba are believed to be transformed by the contact with him and thus possess a magical transformative power within them, “capable of transforming people’s bodies and minds from sick to well and from skeptical to devotional” (p. 294). “The gifting of the materialized objects to the faithful is the key element of transformative interaction between deity and devotee, as it is believed to be the material form of the much hoped for transference of the divinity’s grace and power as a blessing to the devotee” (p. 297).

Though gifts are the most important religious items for the Sai devotees, most of them never meet Sai Baba and are thus dependent on the global distributive network of Sai Baba goods, that can be purchased almost anywhere in the world. However, the further from the village of Puttaparthi, the less ‘authentic’ and powerful these objects get.

This chapter thus draws us also into the world of branding of religious goods, and the branding of the movement as such. What began as small business in touristic souvenirs in the 60s was turned into a bigger business in religious souvenirs in the early 70s mostly for spiritual tourists. By the beginning of 80s a huge business in religious objects of international scale, dealing in all kinds of objects, ranging from images, photographs, CDs, books, to jewelry, all featuring Sai Baba, was in place.

After all, the “Sathya Sai movement is known to be the largest faith-based foreign exchange earner for India, earning approximately Indian Rs. 881,8 million (approx. $5 million) for the year 2002-2003” (p. 12). Srinivas draws us also into the intricacies of the trade in the Sai Baba goods, where the SSSO claims to be the only ‘authentic’ source of ‘blessed’ goods by Sai Baba and where the struggle for perfection of the purchased goods is central.

Engaged cosmopolitanism or Hindu superiority?

To conclude, we can contrast the idea of ‘engaged cosmopolitanism’ which Srinivas uses with a statement of one of my informants, a lady who has been a spiritual tourist for the last 20 years and managed to escape her obsession: “After seeing all these babas and the way they treat people, you realize that most of what is happening is about power and money, the one who gives most gets those materialized gifts, the one who pays most gets to sit next to Sai Baba, in the end it is only a huge money-making industry and highly hierarchical one. And what is worse, the whole agenda of this money-making business is not a peaceful message of acceptance and equality of all religious beliefs, but rather the opposite, namely the superiority of Hindu thought and the Hindu dominance in a global sphere, after all India is shining. And magic, they can do no magic, why don’t they treat the lepers waiting outside their ashrams?” (Interview, 18. august 2010).

Engaged cosmopolitanism? Depends on what you imagine under this term.

This book on its all appears to be well-researched and is without doubt well-written, though at times it might seem too chaotic and the arguments unnecessarily literally twisted. A struggle for more clarity would be advisable. That does not diminish the contribution of the author to the studies in transnational religious phenomena. The book would be of interest to any scholar or student of globalization, religious movements, India, and to anyone interested in the methodological challenges posed by multi-sited fieldwork. And I would say, it is a must read for any Sathya Sai devotee!

Tereza Kuldova

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>> Information about the book by the publisher (Columbia University Press)

>> Review by Peter Berger (The American Interest, 3.8.2010)

>> Interview with Tulasi Srinivas (Lokvani 3.2.2006)

See more reviews by Tereza Kuldova, among others The deep footprints of colonial Bombay and Hindi Film Songs and the Barriers between Ethnomusicology and Anthropology or Colonialism, racism and visual anthropology in Japan: Photography, Anthropology and History and my look at her master’s thesis That’s why there is peace

Can studying religious movements give us new insights into globalisation or even cosmopolitanism? Anthropologist Tulasi Srinivas thinks so.

Antropologi.info book reviewer Tereza Kuldova has taken a closer look at Srinivas' new book Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism…

The "illegal" anthropologist: Shahram Khosravi’s Auto-Ethnography of Borders

Published on August 14, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, Europe, globalisation, journal articles / papers, migration, Us and Them

Globalisation means for most people on this planet higher fences and less movement across borders. The new book by anthropologist Shahram Khosravi is an auto-ethnography of illegalised border crossing.

‘Illegal’ Traveller is based on the anthropologists’s own journey from Iran to Sweden and his informants’ border narratives. “Studies of migrant illegality are often written by people who have never experienced it”, he writes in the introduction. “My aim has been to offer an alternative, partly first-hand, account of unauthorized border crossing that attempts to read the world through ‘illegal’ eyes:

This book is the outgrowth of my own ‘embodied experience of borders’, of ethnographic fieldwork among undocumented migrants between 2004 and 2008, and of teaching courses on irregular migration and the anthropology of borders. It also emerges from my activities outside academia: freelance journalism, helping arrange events such as film festivals about border crossing, and volunteer work for NGOs helping failed asylum seekers and undocumented migrants in Sweden.
(…)

Auto-ethnography lets migrants contextualize their accounts of the experience of migrant illegality. It helps us explore abstract concepts of policy and law and translate them into cultural terms grounded in everyday life.

(…)
In my years as an anthropologist, I have been astonished at how my informants’ experiences overlapped, confirmed, completed, and recalled my own experiences of borders. One interesting aspect of the auto-ethnographic text is that the distinction between ethnographer and ‘others’ is unclear.

I haven’t found any reviews yet, but what I have found is a fascinating paper by him, published in Social Anthropology three years ago. The title: The ‘illegal’ traveller: an auto-ethnography of borders (~~subscription required~~ now open access!).

In this paper he describes his journey from Iran to Europe as “illegal” refugee and theoreticizes about the ‘world apartheid’ we live in according to him and criticizes the ways we think about borders and migration:

Based on a capitalist-oriented and racial discriminating way of thinking, borders regulate movements of people. However, borders are also the space of defiance and resistance.

It is because of this resistance he is still alive. In September 1986 he tried to leave Iran ‘illegally’ for the first time. “I had then just finished high school and I was called up to do military service during the ongoing terrible war between Iran and Iraq. To come back alive from the front was a chance I did not want to take”, he writes.

It was a long journey via Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. He ended up in Sweden via human smugglers. They saved him his life.

Human smuggling is in his opinion recurrently misrepresented by the media and politicians as an entirely mafia-controlled criminality. One of his helpers was Homayoun, a 25-year-old Afghani man, an undocumented immigrant, who had lived clandestinely in Iran since he was 15:

According to immigration law, Homayoun was a human smuggler, a law breaker and a criminal. But in fact he saved my life in one of the most dangerous places, under the rule of ruthless criminal gangs, corrupt border guards and fanatic Mujaheddin. (…) Homayoun facilitated my escape from undesired martyrdom in a long and bloody war.

Maybe one can say that the smugglers did what the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) was supposed to do? Khosravi tells shocking stories about the UNHCR who seems to be responsible for several deaths, including suicides, among refugees. Almost everyone in the refugee community had the same answer: “There is no point in going to the UNHCR”. You won’t get any help. Khosravi’s application was rejected as well. In the view of the UNHCR officer, his “fear of being killed in a horrible war was not ‘well-grounded’ enough.

He tells us the story of Henry’s suicide:

Henry, a young Iranian-Armenian man (…) was an activist within a communist militia, Cherikhaye Fadai, in Iran. But the UNHCR did not believe him. The reason was a wall painting in a corridor in the basement of a prison in Isfahan, where Henry had been detained for several months before his escape to Pakistan. In the interview Henry was asked by the UNHCR official to say what was painted on the wall in the corridor, to test his reliability. Henry had not seen such a painting and consequently his application was rejected. How did the UNHCR officer know about the wall painting? How could she or he be sure that there was any painting at all in that corridor?

Henry was desperate and did not know what to do. Just a few weeks before my departure from Karachi, one morning when the UNHCR officials arrived in their dark-windowed cars, he poured gasoline on himself and struck a match in front of the UNHCR.

With a false passport, Khosravi escaped to India. There he found a smuggler with good reputation, Nour:

During my five months in New Delhi I shared rooms with many persons in transit. All are now residents of Europe or North America – thanks to the smugglers.

He finally ended up in Sweden, a country that he at that time was not able to locate on a world map.

He explains:

The choice of destination was rarely as it was intended and designed. An ‘illegal’ journey is after all arbitrary. Sometimes the migrants end up in a country just coincidentally.
(…)
First of all, the destination was determined by the payment. A few hundred dollars could change the destination from one continent to another. Masoud, a roommate, was Nour’s mosafer (client) at the same time as I was. He had US$500 more than me and today he is a Canadian citizen, lives in Toronto and his children’s mother tongue is English. I am a Swedish citizen, live in Stockholm and my children’s language is Swedish: US$500 destined our lives so differently.

Border crossing is, he continues, is in anthropological sense a ritual:

The border ritual reproduces the meaning and order of the state system. The border ritual is a secular and modern sort of divine sanctity with its own rite of sacrifice. Several hundred clandestine migrants die en route to Europe each year. From January 1993 to July 2007 the deaths of more than 8800 border-crossers were documented in Europe. The Mediterranean Sea is turned into a cemetery for the transgressive travellers.

Border crossing can be experienced in terms of honour and shame:

A legal journey is regarded as an honourable act in the spirit of globalism and cosmopolitanism. The legal traveller passes the border gloriously and enhances his or her social status, whereas the border transgressor is seen as anti-aesthetic and anti-ethical (they are called ‘illegal’ and are criminalised). We live in an era of ‘world apartheid’, according to which the border differentiates between individuals. While for some the border is a ‘surplus of rights’, for others it is a ‘color bar’ (Balibar 2002: 78–84).

Khosravi ends his paper with some “final remarks” from 18 years later (2006), when he arrives at Bristol airport, along with colleagues from Stockholm University. He was convener for a workshop on ‘irregular migration in Europe’ at the biannual conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA).

At the immigration control, he is illegalised again in the name of the “war on terror”:

After passing immigration control, I was stopped by a security official who let my blond fellow travellers pass. In the middle of a narrow corridor a mini interrogation began which lasted for half an hour.
(…)

My status as a Swedish citizen disappeared at the border because of my face. I answered questions about myself, my education, work, purpose of visit to Bristol. Then she asked about my parents, where they lived and what they did. I was not willing to disclose to her any kind of information about my elderly parents, who have been subjected to persecution by the Iranian state for decades. When I refused to answer her questions about my parents, she threatened to detain me first for nine hours and then, if necessary, for nine days according to the Anti- Terrorism Act.

I protested that she had targeted me because of my ‘Middle Eastern’ look and her selection of suspicious persons was racist. She did not even deny it and said ‘you [me and who else?] want to kill us. We have to protect ourselves’.

Khosravi has published some articles in Swedish, see my earlier post – Ikke kall dem for illegale

SEE ALSO:

More Global Apartheid?

For free migration: Open the borders!

Why borders don’t help – An engaged anthropology of the US-Mexican border

Research in refugee camps: Too political for anthropology?

Nina Glick Schiller: Who belongs where? A Global Power Perspective on Migration (ASA-blog)

'Illegal' Traveller is based on the anthropologists's…

– Highlight the connections between people!

Published on June 30, 2010 by lorenz Posted in aboriginees, anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, cosmopolitanism, globalisation, history, journal articles / papers, migration, Pacific Oceania, Us and Them

It happened already around 200 years ago: Aboriginal Australians marry Indians. Afghan cameleers open up the interior of Australia for transport and development. Indian seamen fight for Indonesian independence. And long before Australia was colonised by white settlers in 1788, Aboriginees have had longstanding relations with the Indonesian archipelago.

A few weeks ago I met Devleena Ghosh. She is conducting interesting research about the movements of people and ideas in the Indian ocean. We often link transnationalism to today’s world, but Ghosh shows that people have lived globalised lives already several hundred years ago. Australias history consists of more than white settler history.

– It is important to highlight the connections between people, she told me. It is important to challenge the popular belief that migration is something new, that people lived seperated from each other, hating each other. Because that’s not true.

I totally agree with her.

Relationships between South Asians and Australians during the colonial period and earlier have been little investigated. The same can be said of Norwegian history. It was not more than seven years ago, that the first history of immigration was written.

Because of this lack of transnational history writing, the incorrect view of the world as consisting of isolated and self-sustaining societies has been able to dominate the public and scientific discourse. This view has been a fruitful breeding ground for ethnic chauvinism, racism and – in social science – methodological nationalism (pdf).

Devleena Ghosh and her colleagues have published some open access papers:

Devleena Ghosh, Heather Goodall, Lindi Renier Todd: Jumping Ship: Indians, Aborigines and Australians Across the Indian Ocean (Transforming Cultures eJournal, Vol 3, No 1 (2008)

Devleena Ghosh, Stephen Muecke: Cultures of Trade: Indian Ocean Exchanges (Introduction) (pdf)

Goodall Heather: Port Politics: Indian Seamen, Australian unionists and Indonesian independence 1945-1947 (Labour History 94, 2008)

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

Owen Sichone: Poor African migrants no less cosmopolitan than anthropologists

Beyond Ethnic Boundaries? Anthropological study on British Asian Cosmopolitans

The Double Standards of the “Uncontacted Tribes” Circus

Doctoral thesis: Towards a transnational Islam

Anthropologist uncovers how global elites undermine democracy

Published on April 1, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, globalisation, Northern America

Janine Wedel has done something that far too few anthropolologists do: She studied powerful people. Those who rule the world.

In her book “Shadow Elite“, she shows how a new system of power and influence has taken hold globally, one that undermines democracy, government, and the free market.

Why went America to war against Iraq? More and more “government work” is performed by “shadow elites”: consulting firms, companies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks etc, rather small circles of powerful people (she calls them “flexians”) who use their interlocking relationships to control public policy without public input. “Flexians” work often for private interests, academia and government at the same time.

The flexians form “Flex nets”. They cannot be reduced to lobbyists or interest groups. They are according to a review in the Financial Times defined by four features:

1) personalizing bureaucracy, or using personal connections and loyalties to realize goals;
2) privatizing information while branding conviction, or branding the information available only to insiders in this game;
3) juggling roles and representations, or changing spots frequently, wearing the pelt of military leader one day, analyst the next, and concerned citizen the next;
4) relaxing rules at the interstices of official and private institutions, or adjusting accountability and rules that apply to one or more of their pelts from the safety of a seemingly non-aligned position.

One of those flexians is the retired US general Barry McCaffrey, who has been simultaneously a commentator for the media, a consultant to the defence industry and professor. According to a 2008 exposé in the New York Times, he was one of several former military men who helped to shape public opinion on the Iraq war, while simultaneously having undisclosed ties to the Pentagon.

Wedel’s book has received quite a lot of media attention since it was released earlier this year. It was book of the month at Huffington Post (where she has started writing a weekly column) and was also reviewed in mainstream media. She was interviewed both by BBC, Russia Today, MSNBC and Al Jazeera.

Riz Khan - Shadow Elite - 15 dec 09 - Pt 1

Riz Khan - Shadow Elite - 15 dec 09 - Pt 2

It would be interesting to know how she studied the “shadow elites”. Has she been on fieldwork? I haven’t read all her texts. But in her newest article in Huffington Post, she explains how she came to understand the game: through her experience studying the mechanisms of power and influence in post-Cold War eastern Europe for about 30 years:

(E)xamining eastern Europe up close–through its transformations away from communism over the last quarter century–has been excellent preparation for making sense of how a small group of power brokers helped engineer the invasion of Iraq, and more broadly, how a new system of power and influence has taken hold globally, one that, as I write in my book Shadow Elite, undermines democracy, government, and the free market.

In communist Poland, the necessity of getting around the state-controlled system created a society whose lifeblood–just beneath the surface–was vital information, circulated only among friends and trusted colleagues, information that was not publicly available. Under-the-radar dealings that often played on the margins of legality – this was the norm, not the exception.
(…)
I began to recognize a familiar (to me) architecture of power and influence. I started to follow the networks and overlapping connections in government, foundations, think tanks, and business of a tiny set of neoconservatives – just a dozen or so players I call the “Neocon core”.
(…)
The playbook of the Neocon core seemed to come straight from that of the top players of transitional eastern Europe. In both cases, players who already knew each other set up a host of organizations–organizations that seemed more like an extended family franchise than think tank, populated by the same set of individuals. (…) And despite a new administration in Washington, not to mention the damage done to their credibility since the Iraq invasion, the Neocon core lives on, because networks like it are self-propelling, multipurpose, and enduring.

And she adds that as a social anthropologist, her “focus is not on whether the U.S. should have invaded Iraq, but rather how that decision was made, who made it, and what mechanisms of power and influence were used to make it”.

Exactly!

And in Anthropology News february 2010 (pdf) she explains why we need an “ethnographic focus” on power:

I have concluded that an ethnographic focus is indispensable to sorting out power and influence amid transforming federal governance in the United States, not only under change-of-system conditions such as those found in transitional eastern Europe.

The ethnographic sensibility that enabled scholars of communist and post-communist societies to deal with the complexity, ambiguity and messiness of political and policy processes is ideally suited to examine the interactions between public policy and private interests and the mixing of state, nongovernmental, and business forms that are increasingly preva- lent in the United States and around the world.

By focusing on players and their networks as drivers of governing and policy decisions, these ethnographers have laid the groundwork for badly needed critiques of social science categories such as “state” versus “private,” “top-down versus bottom-up,” and “centralized” versus “decentralized.” They have provided a basis for reexamining conventional models that guide so much thinking about politics, policy and power, and yet obfuscate, rather than illuminate, the real system of power and influence.

Her work is a good example of public anthropology. Her website is really impressive. There you find a great amount of her publications, both newspaper articles and papers (even back to pre-internet and pre-computer times), a collection of book reviews, TV and radio interviews, interviews related to Shadow elites etc

It is popular to lament about the lack of public anthropology, but anthropologists have been highly visible in matters regarding global financial and power issues, see earlier posts Anthropologist Explores Wall Street Culture, Financial crisis: Anthropologists lead mass demonstration against G20 summit and Used anthropology to predict the financial crisis.

Studies on elites are still not as common as studies on marginalized people, though. This is not only true for anthropology. I have to think of a series of great programs at BBC Thinking aloud about white collar crime – a rather neglected topic among sociologists and criminologists as well.

Janine Wedel has done something that far too few anthropolologists do: She studied powerful people. Those who rule the world.

In her book "Shadow Elite", she shows how a new system of power and influence has taken hold globally, one…

The globalisation of the Western conception of mental illness

Published on January 14, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, culture traditions, globalisation, medical anthropology / ethnobothany

(Links updated 1.2.2021) As Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology.net, I was kept awake until late at night by an article in the New York Times Magazine – yesterday for reading, today for writing. It is a fascinating article about a kind of globalisation that isn’t talked about much outside the university, written by Ethan Watters, author of Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, released two days ago. It’s about the globalisation of the Western conception of mental health and illness

“We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness”, he writes. “We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.” And the idea that our Western conception of mental health and illness might be shaping the expression of illnesses in other cultures is rarely discussed in the professional literature.”

Western conceptions of mental health? Well, as anthropologists stress, illness is not only about biomedicine. It’s not only about parts of the body that no longer work. Our brain is not a batter of chemicals that “needs a fine chemical balance in order to perform at its best” (advertisment for the antidepressant Paxil).

Illness, maybe especially mental illness, is also about culture:

(M)ental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host. (…)

What cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists have to tell us is that all mental illnesses, including depression, P.T.S.D. and even schizophrenia, can be every bit as influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations today as hysterical-leg paralysis or the vapors or zar or any other mental illness ever experienced in the history of human madness. (…)

In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.

Contrary to popular belief, “Western” biomedicine is not culturally neutral either:

The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for “psychologizing” daily existence. These ideas remain deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, the Freudian duality between the conscious and unconscious, as well as the many self-help philosophies and schools of therapy that have encouraged Americans to separate the health of the individual from the health of the group.
(…)
“Western mental-health discourse introduces core components of Western culture, including a theory of human nature, a definition of personhood, a sense of time and memory and a source of moral authority. None of this is universal,” Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry in London observes.

Ethan Watters explains why have American categories of mental diseases become the worldwide standard:

American researchers and institutions run most of the premier scholarly journals and host top conferences in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Western drug companies dole out large sums for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental illnesses. In addition, Western-trained traumatologists often rush in where war or natural disasters strike to deliver “psychological first aid,” bringing with them their assumptions about how the mind becomes broken by horrible events and how it is best healed.

The export of Western biomedical ideas, Watters explains, can have “frustrating and unexpected consequences”, for example marginalization of people with “mental heath problems”. People with schizophrenia in some developing countries appear to fare better over time than those living in industrialized nations.

Several studies, Watters writes, suggest that we may actually treat people more harshly when their problem is described in biomedical disease terms, when we treat mental illnesses are “brain diseases” over which the patient has little choice or responsibility, when the disease has according this model nothing to do with factors in the outside world like unemployment, racism, larger societal structures that lead to loneliness, despair, depressions:

It turns out that those who adopted biomedical/genetic beliefs about mental disorders were the same people who wanted less contact with the mentally ill and thought of them as more dangerous and unpredictable. This unfortunate relationship has popped up in numerous studies around the world. (…) “irrespective of place . . . endorsing biological factors as the cause of schizophrenia was associated with a greater desire for social distance.”

In Zanzibar, in a group of people with “Swahili spirit-possession beliefs”, the illness was seen as the work of outside forces, it was understood as an affliction for the sufferer but not as an identity according to research by anthropologist Juli McGruder:

For McGruder, the point was not that these practices or beliefs were effective in curing schizophrenia. Rather, she said she believed that they indirectly helped control the course of the illness. Besides keeping the sick individual in the social group, the religious beliefs in Zanzibar also allowed for a type of calmness and acquiescence in the face of the illness that she had rarely witnessed in the West.

>> read the whole article in the NYT Magazine

>> Ethan Watters blog

The article was published last Saturday. The same day, Greg Downey wrote Exporting American mental illness, an example for great anthropology blogging. And the day after another fascinating blog post by Eugene Raikhel at Somatosphere: The globalization of biopsychiatry with lots of links to related medical anthropology studies.

Nearly at the same time, medical anthropologist Michael Tan has written about the same topic in his column Pinoy Kasi in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He writes about “special children”, children with what Americans call “global developmental delay” or GDD. This diagnosis does not make sense in the Philippines:

The problem here is defining a delay. (…) For example, around the area of language development, you will find books that say a child should have a vocabulary of around 200 words by the age of 2. I can imagine some of my readers beginning to panic now, as I did when I first heard that standard. Imagine me in the middle of the night doing an inventory of my son’s vocabulary and not even reaching 50 (…)
But the anthropologist in me protested that we don’t have studies in the Philippines that established the norm, and given that all our children are growing up in households with at least two, and often more, languages, there’s bound to be some “delay.” As you might have guessed, my son, who is now 4, cannot stop jabbering, and in three languages at that.

>> continue reading in the Philippine Daily Inquirer

Where shamans understand colonialism as sickness

Why anthropologists should politicize mental illnesses

The Anthropology of Suicide

(Links updated 1.2.2021) As Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology.net, I was kept awake until late at night by an article in the New York Times Magazine - yesterday for reading, today for writing. It is a fascinating article about a kind…