UNC ANTH 405 MIDTERM

Personhood (anthropological definition)

Refers to the culturally and socially constructed status of being recognized as a person

Personhood (diversity of types)

· Egocentric: independent, self-contained, autonomy, resides in the self

· Sociocentric: interdependent, socially dispersed, social exchange, resides in relations

“Euroamerican construct of emotion” (Lutz reading)

• argues that what Euro-Americans consider “emotion” is culturally constructed, rather than simply a universal biological experience.

• Emotions are not simply biological reactions. They are also cultural categories and social practices.

major themes in the anthropology of emotions (as culturally relative; as social practice emotions and morality; as historically contingent)

o Emotions as social practice

• Seen as practices rather than internal states

• They are performed in specific ways

• Help maintain social roles, power relations, and group identities

o Emotions and morality

• Emotions are tied to moral systems

• As such, they guide behavior and reinforce norms

o   Emotions as historically contingent

•   Emotional norms and expressions change over time

Distinction between “normal’/’abnormal” as cultural

What is considered normal in one culture may be considered unusual in another.

Classification of mental disorders (DSM, ICD)

o   Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM)

• Used primarily in the United States to classify and diagnose mental disorders

o   International classification of diseases

• Includes mental disorders but covers many other diseases and health conditions as well

o   Classification determines who receives a diagnosis, what counts as illness, what treatments are offered, and more

Wakefield’s “harmful dysfunction”

o   “harmful” is a value term, referring to conditions judged negative by sociocultural standards

o   “dysfunction” is a scientific factual term, referring to failure of biological design functioning

o   Both are needed because something can be unusual without being a disorder, and something can be harmful without necessarily being a  biological dysfunction

Categorical vs. dimensional approaches to psychiatric disorder

o   Categorical

• “all or nothing” approach

•   Enables diagnosis; aids treatment decisions

• Approach most frequently used in clinical practice

•   Used extensively in DSM and ICD systems

o   Dimensional

• “how much? Approach

• Recognizes most symptoms fall on a continuum

latah (what is it? what is its particular significance in Java – Geertz)

o “Deviant” behaviors that result from a person experiencing sudden shock, May result in screaming, cursing, dancing-type movements, uncontrollable laughter

o Latah is significant because it demonstrates that what counts as abnormal behavior or a mental disorder is influenced by culture. Geertz uses latah to challenge universal Western ideas of mental illness and show how psychological behaviors can have culturally specific meanings and social functions.

work of culture (Obeyesekere)

is the process whereby painful motives and affects such as those occurring in depression are transformed into publicly accepted sets of meaning and symbols

“category fallacy” and ethnocentrism in psychiatry (Kleinman)

o   “category fallacy”

• occurs when we assume that a psychiatric category developed in one culture applies identically to another culture.

o   Ethnocentrism

• the act of judging other cultures using the standards and values of your own culture

culture-bound syndromes (what are they? What are some problems in classifying them?)

o   Said to be specific to a society or culture; subject of large (and contentious!) body of literature

o   Challenges:

•   What should be included? (what can be reasonably called an “illness” (vs. a set of customary beliefs/ practices)?

• Generalized vs. specificity (e.g., trance-like states, possession)

Idioms of distress (what are they? How do they seek to move past “culture-bound syndromes”?)

· Ways of expressing distress: provides collective, shared ways of experiencing and talking about personal or social concerns, “ground-up” rather than “top-down” approach

· Seeks to move past by treating culturally specific expressions of suffering not simply as unusual disorders but as meaningful ways people communicate and experience distress

schizophrenia (studies of etiology)

· Considered one of the most “biological” of mental disorders, but clear etiology is still unidentified

·  Combination of genetics, brain chemistry, and environment

• Prenatal and obstetrical risks; psychosocial stressors

• Neurotransmitter dysfunction and brain structural changes

·      Diathesis-stress model

• Established framework to explain how environmental factors interact with preexisting vulnerability in the etiology and course of the disorder

• Focus on neurobiology of stress response

Luhrmann's 2014 study on cultural differences in voice-hearing among people diagnosed with schizophrenia (in California, Ghana, and India)

· Compared people diagnosed with schizophrenia in those three places

· Even though they have the same diagnosis doesn’t mean they will have the same subjective experience

Internal/external locus of self (Watters)

·      Internal locus of self

• Internal, individual, psychological, independent

·      External locus of self

• Relationships, family, community, and social obligations

·      Connection to schizophrenia

• Cultural models of the self may influence how people interpret unusual experiences.

Expressed emotion and schizophrenia

·      Expressed emotion refers to the emotional climate within a patient’s family

·      Family relationships and social environments can affect the course of psychiatric illness

Historical shifts in the care for the mentally ill (reform movements, era of psychiatric institutionalization, de-institutionalization)

-  Care for the mentally ill: family, community, state, jail, asylums

Reform movement

•   Dorthea dix

•   Advocated for humane care of mentally ill

• Documented and exposed conditions

• Helped establish 32 state mental hospitals throughout the US

·      Era of psychiatric institutionalization

• Institutional, long-stay inpatient care model

• Welcomed by families and communities

• Blends custodial and therapeutic functions

• Staffing and funding challenges

·      Deinstitutionalization

• Shift from long-stay psychiatric institutions to community mental health services

• Human-rights-based, global movement

De-institutionalization (vs. transinstitutionalization)

·      De-institutionalization- Shift from long-stay psychiatric institutions to community mental health services

·      Transinstitutionalization- occurs when people leave one institution but end up in another.

Rosenhan experiment, 1973

· Major study that mobilized the anti-psychiatry movement, created public scandal

· Major figures in psychiatry dismissed the study as “pseudoscience”

· Healthy people presented themselves to a psychiatric hospital

· Rosenhan challenged the authority and reliability of psychiatric diagnosis and institutional labeling.

Critiques of institutionalization (Goffman, Rosenhan experiment)

·  “Total institution”

• Closed social system separated from the outside world

• Behaviors tightly controlled and monitored

• Human needs handled in a bureaucratic, impersonal way

• “Hospital inmates”

·      “Moral career of the mental patient”

• Process in which a patient’s moral status and identity are progressively changed

• Three stages: pre-patient, patient, ex-patient

• Labeling theory (sociologists Howard Becker, Emile Durkheim)

Psychiatric power (Foucault)

·  is the authority to define, label, observe, and control behavior.

· What counts as “normal” vs “abnormal” behavior

Suspicion as care (Villa-Palomino)

·      Care does not always look like formal Western healthcare.

·      Something that appears negative—such as gossip or suspicion—can sometimes function as a form of:

• Surveillance

• Protection

• Social responsibility

• Community care

Themes in the anthropology of suicide (global phenomenon but culturally specific forms; slippery in concept and practice; relational)

·  “suicide” itself is slippery in concept and practice

• Individual “choice”? Coerced by others? Both?

• Ultimate act of control? Or of being out of control?

· Suicide is relational

• Matters in relation to social expectations, relationships, and community context

• Not just “private” thoughts and feelings

• Models of personhood matter to the cultural form suicide takes and what it means

Kerala Model of Development

· Kerala, India, achieving relatively strong social development despite relatively modest economic development.

· Challenges the assumption of Economic wealth automatically produces better health and well-being.

Western prototype

o   Monologue suicide

o   Personal agency

o   Private

o   Inner distress

o   “Free choice”

o   Agent

South Asian prototype

o   Dialogue suicide

o   Dispersed agency

o   In the presence of others

o   Relational distress

o   Result of circumstances

o   Social actor

Accumulating death (Chua)

·      Suicide can emerge from a series of accumulating pressures rather than one single cause.

• Family conflict

• Economic problems

• Social expectations

•   Relationship difficulties

• Shame

• Failure

•   Gender expectations

historical ontology (Hickenbottom-Brawn)

is concerned with revealing the conditions, at a particular time and place, that provide possibilities for being a person

enterprise culture (Hickenbottom-Brawn)

encourages people to see themselves as individual projects or businesses

ecological niche (Hacking)

argue that one fruitful idea for understanding transient mental illness is the ecological niche, not just social, not just medical, not just coming from the patient, not just from the doctors, but from the concatenation of an extraordinarily large number of diverse types of elements which for a moment provide a stable home for certain types of manifestations of illness

four vectors (hackings)

o   Medical: The illness fits into a large framework of diagnosis, a taxonomy of illness.

o   Cultural polarity: the illness should be situated between two elements of contemporary culture, one romantic and virtuous, the other vicious and tending to crime

o   Observability: that the disorder should be visible as a disorder, as suffering.

o   Illness: despite the pain it produces, should also provide some release that is not available elsewhere in the culture in which it thrives.

transient mental illness

an illness that appears at a time and in a place, and later fades away. It may spread from place to place and reappear from time to time. It may be selective for social class or gender, preferring poor women or rich men

humanitarian psychiatry

• Involves providing psychiatric care in humanitarian settings such as:

o   War

o   Refugee crises

o   Natural disasters

o   Poverty

o   Displacement

Kathy Waldman. 2021. “The Rise of Therapy-Speak.”

·      examines how psychological and therapeutic language has moved into everyday life. People increasingly use terms from therapy and psychology to describe ordinary relationships, emotions, and conflicts.

·      Therapy-speak shows how psychological ideas become part of everyday culture and influence how people understand themselves and their relationships.

Catherine Lutz. 1986. “Emotion, Though, and Estrangement: Emotion as a Cultural Category”

·      challenges the assumption that emotions are universal biological experiences that mean the same thing everywhere.

·      Emotion against thought

• The distinction between them takes as central a place in western psychosocial theory as do those between mind and body, behavior and intention, the individual and the social, or the conscious and the unconscious

·      Emotion against Estrangement

• The concept pairs that participate in the meaning of this contrast include life against death, community and connection against alienation

Hildred Geertz. 1968. “Latah in Java.”

·      a culturally recognized behavior in Java involving an exaggerated response to being startled.

·      challenges the assumption that unusual behavior automatically represents a universal psychiatric disorder

Gananath Obeyesekere. 1986. “Depression, Buddhism, and the Work of Culture in Sri Lanka”

·      examines depression in Sri Lanka and argues that cultural beliefs influence how people experience and express psychological suffering.

·    work of culture refers to the ways cultural beliefs, symbols, and practices help people interpret and transform personal suffering.

Ethan Waters. 2010. “The Shifting Mask of Schizophrenia in Zanzibar.” In Crazy Like Us.

·      Challenges the idea that schizophrenia looks exactly the same everywhere. He examines schizophrenia in Zanzibar and compares it with Western understandings of schizophrenia.

·      Schizophrenia may have biological components, but its symptoms, meanings, social consequences, and outcomes are shaped by culture and social environment.

Julio Villa-Palomino. 2025. “Suspicion as Care: Rumor and Accusation in Community Mental Health Care.”

·      reading examines suspicion, rumor, and accusation within community mental health care.

·      Care does not always look like formal medical treatment or compassion. In some communities, suspicion, monitoring, and even rumor can function as ways of caring for others.

Jocelyn Chua. 2014. In Pursuit of the Good Life. chapter 4

o   focuses particularly on women's talk, fantasies, threats, gestures, and acts involving suicide or self-harm. Chua argues that these behaviors should not automatically be dismissed as attention-seeking, manipulative, or insincere.

o   Gender expectations in the middle-class family (Push to fulfill housewife role)

o   Domestic violence (physical and verbal abuse in the home)

o   Inheritance and property rights (Economic vulnerability)

o   Suicide as dialogic (self-harm and suicide as dialogic)

Jocelyn Chua. 2014. In Pursuit of the Good Life Chapter 5

o   how young people imagine their futures and the places where they might live, work, study, or escape to

Sarah Hickinbottom-Brawn. 2013. “Brand ‘You’: The Emergence of Social Anxiety Disorder in the Age of Enterprise.”

·      reading examines the emergence of social anxiety disorder in relation to modern ideas about the self and the workplace.

·      If society expects you to constantly present yourself successfully, social interactions can become stressful. Failure to perform socially can be interpreted as an individual psychological problem.

·      argues that changing economic and cultural expectations about self-presentation and personal success can shape the way social anxiety is experienced and understood.

“Instruments of a Beating Heart” (2024)

• film follows a young Japanese student preparing for a musical performance.

•  Explores discipline, childhood, education, and achievement

• Individual emotions and stress are connected to broader cultural expectations about achievement, discipline, and responsibility

“Latah: A Culture-Specific Elaboration of the Startle Reflex” (1983)

• This film demonstrates latah through actual examples of people experiencing exaggerated startle responses.

• There may be a universal biological startle reflex, but culture determines how that reflex is expressed and interpreted

“Against Their Will: Committed to a Psychiatric Facility by the Family” (2023)

·      involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, particularly situations in which family members have someone committed against their will.

·      The film raises questions about the tension between protecting people and respecting individual autonomy, while demonstrating the power psychiatric institutions have over individuals.

“Family Victim” (2010)

·      examines the experiences of families dealing with mental illness and psychiatric systems. It emphasizes that mental illness doesn't affect only the individual diagnosed—it also affects:

o   parents

o   siblings

o   spouses

o   caregivers

o   communities