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AAA: Diagnostic (Id) Entities: The Psychiatric Ends of Culture
| Location: | Pennsylvania, United States |
| Call for Papers Date: | 2009-03-23 (Archive) |
| Date Submitted: |
2009-03-09 |
| Announcement ID: |
167447 |
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"Diagnostic (Id)entities: The Psychiatric Ends of Culture"
Proposed Panel for the 108th Annual Meeting of the American
Anthropological Association. December 2-6, 2009, Philadelphia, PA
The papers on this panel explore the interplay of identities and other cultural categories in generating, shaping, negotiating, and enacting psychiatric diagnostic categories. In saying this, we acknowledge both the reality of human suffering that motivates people to seek out clinical encounters and the cognitive/ neuro-chemical/ somatic processes underlying or constituting psychiatric disorders. And yet, different subjects and observers interpret distress in different ways, and many instances of distress admit of multiple possible diagnoses. These negotiations and enactments comprise the role of culture, as well as social processes and cultural forms placing certain individuals and groups under particular stressors and constraining their possible responses.
Cross-cultural psychiatric encounters thus represent cultural spaces and creative avenues for creating, shaping, politicizing and questioning identity, ranging from the micro to macro forms of identities. We examine the gamut of actual and imaged cross-cultural interactions within psychiatric settings, from the uncomfortable, to the oppressive, and violent, and occasionally, the comic, with the intention of elucidating cultural processes and the vectors of power at play when communities respond to naturalized categories of human difference and politicize their identity. In particular, we will explore how psychiatric diagnoses and popular beliefs about mental illness have shaped – and in turn be shaped – by identity politics: gender, race, group or cultural identities with the goal to highlight socio-cultural processes through which personal difficulties, cultural anxiety, micro-political struggles are identified, reacted to, and transformed.
If you are interested in presenting a paper on this panel, please send a paper abstract of up to 250 words to Johanne Eliacin by March 23rd, 2009.
jeliacin@uchicago.edu
Department of Comparative Human Development
University of Chicago
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Johanne Eliacin
Department of Comparative Human Development
University of Chicago
Email: jeliacin@uchicago.edu
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