Category: RLF

Family narratives of Israeli immigrants in Berlin under changing political climate

This project examines how shifting political climates in Israel since 2023 are influencing the narratives and experiences of Israeli immigrants in Berlin regarding their family life and sense of home. It seeks to explore the interplay between intimate family dynamics and broader socio-political conditions, asking how political upheavals in Israel reshape concepts like responsibility, loyalty, and belonging — both to kin and to the nation-state. The ethnographic fieldwork will be situated within the Israeli community in Berlin, focusing on individuals who are actively reflecting on their life settings in response to recent changes in either their family conditions or the political climate. Drawing on psychological anthropological approaches, the study will attend to their moral selves, emotional processes, and narratives, aiming to provide a deeper understanding of how they navigate and reconfigure their family relationships and national identities in turbulent times.

“Personality and its Disorders: A Break from the Past”

This project examines how personality disorders function as a category in the Indian psychiatric system, and in the context of growing Hindu nationalism. It asks 1) what is a personality in the Indian context? And 2) what is a disordered personality? It examines these questions by studying how ideas about the personality and personality disorders circulate in and out of biomedical and non-biomedical spaces, and how the contemporaneous configuration of the personality in India breaks from Euro-American anthropological and biomedical canons.

“How to Decide: Exploring Advanced Care Planning and Spirituality in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania”

This project investigates the place of advanced care planning practices in the relationship between spirituality, care, and the experience of dying in the United States. It seeks to understand the relationship between advanced care planning and spirituality by exploring how individuals make decisions about their advanced care planning wishes, documentation, or lack thereof. The project takes place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

La Bobera: Under the Spell of Forgetting and the Politics of Memory in the Shadow of Alzheimer’s in Antioquia, Colombia

In 1995, Colombian neuroscientists diagnosed an early form of memory loss, understood as the curse of ‘la bobera,’ as early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, a rare condition affecting families in Antioquia, Colombia. My ethnographic research explores how individuals and families navigate early memory loss across biomedical frameworks, local understandings of a curse, and Colombia’s politics of collective memory. It raises several questions: How do individuals and families in Antioquia navigate early memory loss in a landscape where biomedical models, local understandings of forgetting, and charged politics of memory converge? How do individuals and their families make sense of life with forgetting? What knowledge emerges from viewing memory loss as a curse? How is early memory loss experienced in a place where forgetting and remembrance extend to the collective? In a region shaped by histories of violence, memory loss carries multiple layers of meaning, extending beyond the clinic into collective struggles over remembrance and forgetting. Through ethnographic encounters with families, sensory ethnography using sound, and archival research, I trace how experiences of forgetting exceed neuroscientific framings and unfold within Colombia’s collective memory. I approach memory loss not only as a clinical symptom but as a method and a site of memory politics.

“Madness in the Age of the Neural: Hysteria and the Psychic Life of Neuroscience in the UK”

The project studies Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), a contemporary neuroscientific model of hysteria. Through fieldwork in London, England it seeks to explore FND and the psychic life of neuroscience. It asks what aspects – e.g. subjectivity; legitimation and/or obfuscation of the roles of social factors such as sexual violence or poverty in mental health; narratives of injury and imaginations of recovery; or the relationships between culture, emotion, and the body – do neuroscientific imaginaries intervene in most vividly?

“Negotiating Care : An Ethnography of Mental Health Governance and Community-based Services in Rio Negro, Argentina”

This project investigates the ethics and expertise involved in mental health care and policymaking in Rio Negro, Argentina. It examines competing conceptualizations and interventions for serious mental illnesses (SMI), through fieldwork in Rio Negro’s interdisciplinary Mental Health Review board and a community mental health care center combined with archival research. It asks: how do review board actors and patients negotiate and constitutes SMI and good care for SMI? How are debates about good care shaped by histories of political violence, neoliberal health reforms, and community mental health activism? And how do board actions impact experiences of people living with SMI?

Securitized Suffering: Violence, law and political widowhood in Bangladesh

As a Rob Lemelson Foundation Fellow 2023, I have conducted a total of three months of preliminary fieldwork in Dhaka while living in the city from mid-June to mid-September in 2023. My fieldwork during this time was divided between two primary sites: the Odhiker office in Dhaka district, where I conducted research with rights defenders and Mayer Daak2 activists, and court houses, where I conducted research with lawyers, political widows and the family members of the victims of police violence. Occasionally, I visited the houses of the victims’ families and the protest events in three Districts of Bangladesh: Dhaka, Brahmanbaria, and Noakhali.

Through participant observation and ethnographic interviews at these locations, I learned about different ways through which the suffering of political widows, terrorism defendants, and their families are securitized and managed. Using network sampling, I followed these leads and engaged with a wider variety of interlocutors and locations. To date, I have conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with political widows (8), terrorism defendants and their family members (6), human rights defenders (3), and lawyers (3). I have also conducted participant observation at a number of relevant sites, including the house of the organizer of Mayer Daak, two protest events, and a press conference event organized by Mayer Daak. While in Bangladesh, I also held an institutional affiliation with Brac University from 2019 to 2021, the top-ranked private university in Bangladesh. This allowed me to meet with scholars in anthropology, political science, history, and law, who provided crucial feedback on this research project.

In addition to preliminary fieldwork in Dhaka, I regularly participate in online group meetings and private discussions organized by Odhiker and Mayer Daak. I also continue to closely monitor developments in terror trials and legal battles through newspaper articles, blogs, and social media sites. At Odhiker, I worked as an unpaid human rights defender, participated in daily activities in documenting and categorizing human rights violations, and collaborating with political widows, victim families, and international agencies. I volunteered and attended workshops and training sessions they organized to train Mayer Daak activists. I observed the day-to-day activities of the rights activists of Odhiker to understand how they count the dead and rewrite human rights violation narratives, countering the government narratives. Working as a volunteer in the Odhiker office allowed me to observe the collaboration with victim families. I joined three sessions where they discussed the strategies to counter the government narratives on violence and to navigate everyday suffering. They also facilitated counseling sessions and collaborated with psychiatrists to manage pain and suffering.

At Courtroom, I worked as an assistant to a criminal lawyer. As an assistant, I participated in daily activities, including ongoing case management of terrorism, torture and disappearance, bail hearings, and trial sessions. I recorded how court officials not only authorize harassment of political widows, secret detention, and physical torture in judicial custody but also keep secret the official records of torture and dismiss the testimonies of political widows and the victims of police violence as inconsistent and exaggerated by framing them as ‘hyper,’ ‘brainwashed,’ and ‘mentally disordered.’

Based on this early research, I have developed four initial observations about the securitization of the suffering of political widows, terrorism defendants, and their families in Bangladesh: (1) legal practices and human rights activism, rather than curing suffering and ensuring justice, have become ways of living with suffering and trauma; (2) despite the state’s designation of the political activists as a “terrorist,” the latter received widespread support from all walks of life except the authoritarian regime; (3) The state violently utilize the law to silence political widows and the victim of police violence, leaving virtually no recognition of victimhood and emphasizing their status as criminalized. (4) the employment of large-scale security technologies, at once imbues the lives of political widows and terror suspects with the fear of persecution and also constitutes the material conditions of possibility for the same people to articulate a collective memory, political community, and moral codes to live through this suffering and fear.

Expecting Transgender Futures: Uncertain Lives with Gender Transgressing in Guangzhou, China

This summer I completed a short-term, pre-dissertation fieldwork project with several transgender-centered nongovernmental organizations in Guangzhou, China. My research seeks to understand how transgender youths in Guangzhou, who are excluded from mainstream normalized life trajectories, make sense of their unexpected futures. I am using the term “unexpected” to capture the multiple ways that transgender folks are rendered culturally unintelligible in contemporary urban China. Like other young people, trans youths face overwhelming pressures from Chinese nationalism and familism to forge a cis-heteronormative life, which makes a nonnormative trans life hardly imaginable. At the same time, local medical technologies, grassroots nongovernmental advocacy, and global gender affirming discourses promote possible ways of achieving transness, which primarily set up transgender as a problem to solve rather than a life to live. These ways of achieving “healthy” transness through medical treatments and/or upward mobilities offer ways for trans youths to expect a feasible future, but this expectable future is unevenly accessible to different bodies. Thus my project examines how these vastly different expectations—previously worked-out life trajectories promoted by the non- queer, cis-queer, and trans-centered networks—shape mainland Chinese trans individuals’ sense of their own futures.

With the support of the fellowship, I was able to travel to Guangzhou, China and conducted fieldwork there. During the summer of 2023, I connected with and interviewed two trans- and queer-friendly therapists, one doctor specialized in gender dysphoria, and eight NGO workers to get to know about the current cultural, political, and medical milieu that transgender folks live in. I also started volunteering for two support networks for local transgender youths, the Trans Well-Being Team and Yuele Health. The Trans Well-Being Team is specifically founded to make accessible trans-friendly psychological care for trans individuals and to promote transgender visibility for a better collective trans future; Yuele Health is an NGO founded to promote accessible sexual health care for transgender folks. Working with these two groups offered me the opportunities to connect with and interview trans-friendly therapists, doctors, NGO volunteers, and transgender individuals to complete my preliminary research. While diverging in how they offer help, these two NGOs both aim to better transgender lives. These two connections are crucial to my future long-term dissertation research where I can further explore their difference in promoting better futures for local transgender youths.

Navigating the shifting landscape of “good” motherhoods: Exploring the everyday experiences of women experiencing postpartum depression in urban China

Thanks to the valuable SPA / Robert Lemelson Foundation Student Fellowship, I finished my preliminary fieldwork at one of the best Obstetrics-Gynecology hospitals in Shanghai, China, from June 13^th to July 20^th, 2023. I obtained women’s narratives about their experience with early pregnancy and perceptions of prenatal depression and mental illness in general via three interviews and 90 surveys; their families’ knowledge and attitude toward prenatal depression; and the obstetric and psychiatric practitioners’ perception and treatment of prenatal depression. I also observed the doctor-patient interactions and medical practices related to pregnancy in the clinical context from Monday to Saturday, dedicating five hours each day for six weeks.

The results of this fieldwork provided me with a deeper understanding of motherhood and prenatal depression in urban China, which allows me to further identify significant research questions. It also helps me construct a good relationship with obstetric practitioners to help me with my future dissertation fieldwork. My paper, drawing on the results of this fieldwork, titled “‘I do not have these problems’: An ethnographic study on early pregnant women’s perceptions of perinatal depression in urban China”, has been accepted by the 2024 SfAA/SMA 84th Annual Meeting. The specific fieldwork and results are as below.

Before the formal fieldwork started, I met with my collaborator Dr. Liang, a public health professor in Fudan University whose project also focuses on prenatal depression, several times to plan my project, which was nested within her own. We had a project launching meeting with the obstetric doctors and nurses at this hospital on June 2^nd.

In the formal fieldwork, every day from 7:30 am to 12:30 pm, I worked with Dr. Liang’s graduate students as interns in the initial prenatal record room to conduct surveys about prenatal experiences, ideas about mental health during pregnancy, and knowledge on mental illness with women who were in their early pregnancy and so initiating prenatal care at this hospital. The survey includes geographical information and several scales to evaluate these women’s mental health such as Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), Modified Social Support Survey (MSSS), General Anxiety Scale-7 (GAS-7) and Self-rating Anxiety Scale (SAS). I will have access to these data as part of Dr. Liang’s team and will be an author on papers resulting from this research.

In addition, I engaged in observation of these women’s interactions with doctors, nurses, their families, and with each other in the initial prenatal record room. I also observed the obstetric outpatient clinic for five days during which these women conducted regular pregnancy care, screening, tests and examinations, including while the doctor explained the results to them and arranged their examinations for next time. I observed the mental health outpatient clinic once, during which the doctor conducted counseling with three women, one in early pregnancy with career issue, one in postpartum period with suicide thoughts, and one in postpartum period with a physical issue-high blood pressure. In addition, I observed a multiple-department treatment of a woman experiencing postpartum depression as the obstetricians and a psychiatrist from the Shanghai Mental Health Center worked together to treat this patient.

Beyond the survey and participant observation, I also conducted semi-structured interviews with three women in their early pregnancy to learn about their pregnancy experience and clinic interactions and knowledge on prenatal depression. I also had an informal interview with the psychological nurse at this hospital and short conversations with pregnant women’s families–mainly husbands– and two mothers.

The results of this preliminary fieldwork show that nearly 20% of 500 women who created the initial prenatal record in June screened either positive in depression or anxiety scales, or had a mental illness history. These women paid much attention to their physical conditions but spoke sparingly of their mental and emotional experience. When I introduced the project to them, they said, “I do not have these problems” and even when the doctors told them they screened positive for depression or anxiety, these women and their families only cared whether it would influence the fetus. The doctor or nurse suggested these women visit the mental health clinic, but only a few (according to staff) would likely follow the referral. In addition, the psychological nurse told me that the notion of “postpartum depression” is to some extent misleading, since it makes pregnant women think only after giving birth, one could get depression.

Exploring therapeutic and environmental processes with Andean-Amazonian healers in Bolivia

This project, conducted with Andean-Amazonian healers in Bolivia, explores how environmental change mediates therapeutic processes, particularly amidst environmental crises caused by extractivist policies. My research questions include: what are the psychic, sensorial and agential relations that are disrupted by capitalist extractivist logics? How are indigenous identities (re)produced through the recuperation of ancestral therapeutic practices? Do they differ from hegemonic indigenous subjectivities envisioned by extractive modes of development under the Bolivian indigenous state (Postero 2017)? How do these reframe notions of ecological and human health? This project focuses on traditional healers’ embodied attunements with more-than-human environmental relations, in alignment with Indigenous Andean-Amazonian philosophies and kinworlds. Given our current planetary milieu of environmental crises, probing the impacts of environmental change through expanding broader frameworks of ecologies of mind (Bateson 2000) and notions of health and healing  to include larger environmental and psychosocial relations is a timely intervention.

Report:

I carried out preliminary fieldwork in Bolivia from May to August 2023, consisting of interviews with traditional healers in the Andean-Amazonian traditions and participant observation of their therapeutic practices. My goal was to explore how environmental change mediates therapeutic processes. My other research questions included: what are the psychic, sensorial and agential relations that are disrupted by capitalist extractivist logics? How are indigenous identities (re)produced through the recuperation of ancestral therapeutic practices? Do they differ from hegemonic indigenous subjectivities envisioned by extractive modes of development under the Bolivian indigenous state (Postero 2017)? How do these reframe notions of ecological and human health?

In the Andean capital of La Paz, I made trips to the sacred mountain sites of Guaqui and Pajchiri together with traditional Aymara healers for the purpose of conducting sacred rituals and offerings. These healers, locally known as yatiris or amautas (in Aymara and Quechua, respectively), traverse richly interconnected psychic, social, and ecological worlds where the permission and ability to heal is sourced from ancestors, earth beings, healing plants and their spirits cultivated through lifelong, reciprocal relationalities. In my findings, the importance of environmental processes to these healers was very clear – various environmental disruptions ranging from natural events such as eclipses to anthropogenic wildfires were interpreted as having negative impacts on human health and well-being. I also realized that it could be important to study the role of social media in influencing environmental knowledge and awareness. When I asked the healers where they got their information from, most said through social media. Many have also started sharing popular posts about environmental destruction in Bolivia through Whatsapp or Facebook stories, where they can reach many of their clients and followers. For my subjects, especially the younger ones in their mid-20s who identified as Indigenous, recuperating traditional spiritual practices was an important part of their identity, and they did not feel particularly aligned or connected to the state.

In Riberalta, a city in the Northeastern Bolivian Amazon, I conducted participant observation and interviews with an elderly Tacana shaman. He took me into the forest garden that is his backyard, and although it looked no different from a wild forest trail to my untrained eye, it is a carefully cultivated apothecary of medicinal trees and plants. I was reminded of a saying that I have heard from healers many times, “cada planta tiene su medicina” (every plant can be used as medicine). The healer and his community, who identify as non-indigenous campesino (peasant), rely on traditional knowledge of local plants for their health, livelihoods, and well-being. He also described to me how he came to learn the uses for plants while he was apprenticing under a senior healer. He described how plant spirits wearing white lab coats took him to a space he called a hospital, with gleaming walls and bright lights, where they showed him how various plants could be used to cure different illnesses. This seems consistent with mestizo shamanistic practices in the Amazonian region (Beyer 2009). It reinforced the close and reciprocal relationships that healers share with earth beings, and their vulnerability to ecological damage from extractivism. 

I also found that it is comparatively more difficult to find traditional healers in the Amazon region. Speaking generally across Bolivia, the Aymara and Quechua communities in the Andean region have generally preserved cultural practices better. Officially, there are over thirty recognized indigenous peoples in the lowland Amazon region, but the majority are small and fractured communities due to regional histories of rupture and displacement, and it is more challenging to find communities that still have traditional healers actively working and practicing medicine. The role of regional histories of displacement should be foregrounded in this research to explain any potential gaps or absences in this regard.

One unforeseen obstacle to my fieldwork was scheduling difficulties with my subjects. While this might seem like a very basic fieldwork issue, it was arguably the biggest challenge to my fieldwork plans that I faced. The traditional healers are, by nature of their skill and work, very busy and in demand by clients, in addition to the demands of both regular family life and spiritual life. They don’t really operate on set schedules. Even if I have made an agreed-upon appointment in advance for an interview, our plans often would get shelved multiple times (e.g. due to a client emergency, or if they suddenly got called spiritually to travel to a faraway sacred site), which then made it difficult to schedule interviews with other subjects, too. Furthermore, in Bolivia, August is considered a sacred month when Pachamama (Mother Earth) is open to receiving ritual offerings, which meant that healers were constantly busy with clients. As a result, I managed to interview only ten traditional healers and their associates, which is at the low end of my goal. This illustrated the shortcomings of being limited to a short few months for summer fieldwork. This would not be as much of an issue with longer-term research of a year, for example, and I was forced to come up with alternative strategies, such as making up for a relative lack of interviews by spending more time doing participant observation during rituals, or renting a room in the house of a different healer, who was able to spend more time conversing with me during mealtimes or evenings. Although I had only planned to carry out fieldwork for two months, I ended up extending it to three months to make up for these scheduling difficulties.