CULTURE, MENTAL HEALTH, AND HEALING IN E

Why do certain mental illnesses only appear in specific regions of the world? What processes of translation, adaption, and “indigenization” take place when psychiatric diagnostic categories, pharmaceutical regimens, and psychodynamic treatments developed in the West travel to China, Japan and South Korea? How do contemporary East Asian therapeutic modalities destabilize biomedical assumptions about the origins and treatment of mental illness?

This course employs anthropological analysis to explore the paradoxes of “culture-bound syndromes”, examine how biomedical psychiatric practices have been received and transformed, and discuss the ways in which shamanistic rituals and Traditional Chinese Medicine clinical encounters understand their objects of intervention. Focusing on East Asia with a particular emphasis on China, we will employ interpretive and political economic anthropological analyses to explore experiences of people struggling with illness, the practices of health practitioners who treat them, and the broader social and historical contexts that shape these interactions.