Our last Clinical Ethnography workshop of the Fall quarter will be held on Tuesday, November 17, in the HD third floor classroom.  Julia Kowalski, a doctoral student in Human Development, will be presenting material from her dissertation proposal as she prepares to depart for the field at the end of the year!

“’So You Make Them Understand:’ Emotion and Middle-Class Modernity in Jaipuri Families”  download the paper

Discussant: Amy Sousa, Department of Comparative Human Development

November 17th, 4:30-6:00 pm, Comparative Human Development South building, 5736 S. Woodlawn, Room 301

abstract: This project is a study of the role of emotion in shaping the
experience of middle class Indian families living in Jaipur.   How do
middle-class Jaipuris use emotion practices—the expression and
management of emotional experience–to understand, adapt to and resist
the economic and cultural changes taking place in contemporary India?
In brief, my answer is that they cultivate forms of what I call
emotional accommodation that allow them to both conform to
“traditional” demands of gender and hierarchy, while at the same time
taking advantage of the “modern” benefits available through India’s
new economy.  My goal is to demonstrate that such emotion practices
create, out of multiple, often conflicting expectations about gender,
generation, and status embedded in middle-class Indian family
ideology, a coherent middle-class experience that is at once
authentically “Indian” and globally competitive.  I plan to explore
the role of practices of emotional accommodation in shaping
middle-class life through both participant observation and in-depth
interviews.  I will base these two sets of methods in two sites: a
family counseling center (FCC) in a middle-class neighborhood in
Jaipur, and among families in the same neighborhood who are not
affiliated with the counseling center.  Specifically, I intend to
examine the role of emotional accommodation from two perspectives.
First, how do practices of emotional accommodation structure the
circulation of the resources that play a key role in the reproduction
of status in middle-class families? Second,  how do practices of
emotional accommodation structures position individuals as particular
subjects able to manipulate and make use of such resources in
culturally appropriate ways?

Julia Kowalski graduated from the University of Chicago with a
BA in Human Development and in South Asian Languages and
Civilizations.  Her BA thesis investigated understandings of choice
and ambition among students at a women’s college in Delhi.  For her MA
thesis, she returned to North India to investigate the connection
between beliefs about family life and beliefs about modernity among
the middle-class in Jaipur.  She is interested in the roles that
gender, emotion, and family life play in processes of cultural change
in North India and beyond.

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Talia Weiner, tweiner1@uchicago.edu or Marianna Staroselsky, mariannas@uchicago.edu.

Please join us on Tuesday, November 3rd, back at our regularly scheduled time and location for a presentation by Dr. Rick Shweder, Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago.

“The Cultural Psychology of Suffering: The Many Meanings of Health in Orissa, India (and Elsewhere)”  Download Shweder_Cultural Psychology of Suffering

Discussant: Les Beldo, Department of Comparative Human Development

November 3rd, 4:30-6:00 pm, Comparative Human Development South building, 5736 S. Woodlawn, Room 301

Abstract: In this article, I honor Jerome Bruner’s meaning-centered and person-centered approach to the study of cultural psychology by describing aspects of the cultural psychology of suffering in and around a Hindu temple town in Orissa, India. I also outline the ‘‘big three’’ explanations of illness (biomedical, interpersonal, and moral) on a worldwide scale and recount some of the many meanings associated with the word health, as in the English language survey question ‘‘How would you rate your overall health?’’

Richard A. Shweder is a cultural anthropologist and the William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. degree in social anthropology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University in 1972, taught a year at the University of Nairobi in Kenya and has been at the University of Chicago ever since.

His recent research examines the scopes and limits of pluralism and the multicultural challenge in Western liberal democracies. He examines the norm conflicts that arise when people migrate from Africa, Asia and Latin America to countries in the “North”. They bring with them culturally endorsed practices (e.g., arranged marriage, animal sacrifice, circumcision of both girls and boys, ideas about parental authority) that mainstream populations in the United States or Western Europe sometimes find aberrant and disturbing. How much accommodation to cultural diversity occurs and ought to occur under such circumstances? He has co-edited two books on this topic (with Martha Minow and Hazel Markus) (published June 2002 and April 2008) entitled Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies and Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference (Russell Sage Foundation Press 2008). He is currently writing a book provisionally titled Customs Control: Un-American Activities and The Moral Challenge in Cultural Migration. During the 2008-2009 academic year he was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Please join us for a special Monday evening Clinical Ethnography Workshop with Professor Michael Kral, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Toronto.  Dinner will be served!

Monday, October 26, 5:30-7:00 pm

Harper 145

“Suicide as a Postcolonial Disorder and Indigenous Youth Resilience in the Circumpolar North” Download supplementary reading: Kral & Idlout 2009

Indigenous peoples in the circumpolar Arctic from Siberia to Greenland may currently have the highest suicide rate globally. I will describe my research with Inuit in Nunavut, Canada, looking at social/cultural change since the government colonial era of the 1950s and 1960s. Inuit life was transformed, and I will argue that at the core of their social problems are changes in kin relations. Suicide among Inuit youth has become embedded in their romantic relationships, and we will look at male youth in particular. Finally, we are finding that when communities take charge of suicide prevention, from the community’s point of view, positive outcomes emerge including suicide prevention. I will describe an Inuit youth organization in Igloolik, Nunavut, to highlight the process of this action. In closing I will describe a new comparative study of Indigenous youth resilience in communities from Siberia to northern Norway.

Michael Kral completed his PhD in medical anthropology at McGill U in 2009, and has a PhD in clinical psychology from an earlier life. He is assistant professor in psychology and anthropology at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in psychiatry at University of Toronto. Michael has been working with Inuit in Nunavut, Canada since 1994 on participatory action research projects, examining suicide and its prevention. He is currently looking at Indigenous youth suicide and resilience in communities from Siberia to northern Norway.

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Talia Weiner, tweiner1@uchicago.edu or Marianna Staroselsky, mariannas@uchicago.edu.

Our next clinical ethnography workshop will be held on Tuesday, October 20, at 4:30  pm in Haskell Mezzanine 102. Matt Spitzmueller, a doctoral student at the School of Social Service Administration, will be presenting material from his dissertation proposal.  This presentation is jointly sponsored by the U.S. Locations Workshop.

“The Making of Community Mental Health Policy in Everyday Street-Level Practice: An Organizational Ethnography” Download the paper

Discussant: Aaron Seaman, Department of Comparative Human Development

Community mental health has been the major mental health policy and treatment initiative of the past fifty years. It emerged in the early 1960s as an alternative to treatment in centralized state mental hospitals, calling for a decentralized, non-coercive system that promoted patients’ right to self-determination within collectivist recovery settings (Berlim et al., 2003). Like other policy initiatives, community mental health evolved over time, partly through changes in formal policy, but also through changes in administration and, ultimately, organizational practice. This dissertation will examine the street-level response to shifts in policy and administration, offering a closely textured organizational ethnography of a prototypical community mental health provider that has survived two major cycles of change. The objective is to understand how community
metal health policy takes shape in street-level practice and how policy is effectively interpreted and reconstituted through these practices.

Matt Spitzmueller is a fourth year doctoral student at the School of
Social Service Administration.  His research is located in the areas
of the history of social welfare, policy and implementation, and
community mental health practice.  His current research project
focuses on “community” as a contested policy category and its
implications for service providers and recipients at the street level.

Please join us on Tuesday, October 6th at 4:30 PM for the first Clinical Ethnography workshop of the year.

Comparative Human Development South building, 5736 S. Woodlawn, Room 301

Clinical Ethnographic Research: Managing the Challenges and Maximizing the
Benefits

Clinical ethnography is a fascinating and important field of research. Actually
setting up and carrying out a clinical ethnographic research project, however,
brings many challenges that can feel daunting, especially to a first-time
independent researcher. In this panel discussion, three students (Hallie Kushner,
Elizabeth Nickrenz and Christine Nutter) who are currently working on clinical
ethnographic projects in the US and abroad will raise and answer questions
about the day to day practice of arranging, carrying out and publishing a
research project in clinical ethnography. Areas to be covered include:

-       Arranging access to clinical populations
-       Navigating Institutional Review Boards
-       Explaining ethnographic research to “gatekeepers” at clinical field sites who
might be more familiar with other forms of research or have misconceptions
about qualitative work
-       Positioning oneself professionally as an ethnographic scholar of clinical
issues
-       Publishing clinical ethnographic research
-       Managing multiple roles: practitioner and scholar, consumer and producer
of knowledge and simultaneous observer of knowledge production, et cetera.

Come with questions and experiences to share!

Hallie Kushner, Elizabeth Nickrenz and Christine Nutter are Ph.D. candidates in
the Department of Comparative Human Development.

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Talia Weiner, tweiner1@uchicago.edu or Marianna Staroselsky, mariannas@uchicago.edu.

After a brief hiatus, we are happy to announce that the Clinical Ethnography workshop is back this year!  We also have a new time and location:

1st and 3rd Tuesdays, 4:30-6:00 pm*

in the new HD classroom,

5736 S. Woodlawn, Room 301

*in general; there will occasionally be sessions scheduled on a different day/time.

We have an exciting lineup of U. Chicago students and faculty from several departments presenting, as well as outside guests Michael Kral, Emily Martin, Ken Gergen, and Tanya Luhrmann.  In the Spring quarter, we will welcome an additional faculty coordinator to the workshop: new HD hire, Eugene Raikhel!

Please contact Talia (tweiner1@uchicago.edu) or Marianna (mariannas@uchicago.edu) with any questions.

You can subscribe to the workshop listserv here.

Prof. Thomas Csordas will join us for a discussion of the methodology of clinical ethnography. The focus of the discussion will be a study entitled Southwest Youth and the Experience of Psychiatric Treatment which addresses the experience of Navajo, Pueblo, Hispanic, and Anglo adolescent inpatients in a state public hospital and an Indian Health Service hospital.

Thomas J. Csordas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California San Diego.  His research interests include anthropological theory, comparative religion, medical and psychological anthropology, cultural phenomenology and embodiment, globalization and social change, and language and culture.  He has conducted fieldwork funded by the National Institute of Mental Health on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement, and among Navajo Indians.  He has served as co-editor (with Janis Jenkins) of Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology (1996-2001) and as President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (1998-2002). Among his publications are The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); (edited) Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Language, Charisma, and Creativity: Ritual Life in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; paperback ed. Palgrave 2002); Body/Meaning/Healing (New York: Palgrave, 2002); and (edited) Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

Please join us at 7 pm, 4/10/2008 at Bert’s house for Dr. Kalman Applbaum’s presentation.

“‘Consumers are patients’: Shared decision making and treatment
non-compliance as business opportunity.”

This paper describes an aspect of the progressive insertion of commercial interests into the relationship between patients and their clinicians, with particular reference to psychiatry. Treatment non-compliance, long an obstacle intractable to amelioration by healthcare professionals, has lately drawn the attention of the pharmaceutical and allied industries as a site at which to improve return on investment (ROI). Newfound corporate “compliance departments” and specialized consultancies that regard non-compliance as a form of marketing failure are seeking to rectify it with reinvigorated models and strategies. This intervention stands to impact patients’ experience of illness as well as the participation of those formally (physicians, case managers, etc.) and informally (family, friends, etc.) involved in treatment. My analysis draws from compliance conferences to demonstrate the contrasting models of patient empowerment implied by the marketing
vs. medical approaches. I propose a research agenda for measuring the effects of industry compliance programs.

Kalman Applbaum received his PhD from Harvard University, specializing in medical anthropology. He has published on marketing and psychiatry in the US, Israel and Japan. His books include: /The Marketing Era: From Professional Practice to Global Provisioning/ (Routledge, 2003) /Consumption and Market Society in Israel /(with  Yoram S. Carmeli, Berg, 2004). He is currently interested in the comparative role of
psychopharmaceuticals in the transformation of psychiatric practice and the deinstitutionalization of mental healthcare between Japan and the United States. Rather than conceiving of the two healthcare environmnets as two very different places, he looks at the commonalities in psychiatric institutionaltization. His focus is on globalization itself
not as an incidental context or consequence but as a direct subject – a possible irritant in the increase of mental illness around the world.

Please join us at 7 pm, 4/10/2008 at Bert’s house for Dr. Kalman Applbaum’s presentation.

We have a very exciting spring schedule, including the upcoming 2 presentations:

 4/10/2008  Dr. Kalman Applbaum

4/24/2008 Prof. Thomas Csordas

We hope you will join us!

Rebecca Seligman, PhD., Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University

Toward a Cultural Psychiatry of Dissociative Experience:  Integrating Narrative, Metaphor, and Mechanism

Approaches to trance and possession in anthropology have tended to treat dissociative phenomena as purely discursive processes of attributing action and experience to agencies other than the self.  Within psychology and psychiatry, understanding of dissociative disorders has been hindered by polemical “either/or” arguments: either dissociative disorders are real, spontaneous, alterations in brain states that reflect basic neurobiological phenomena, or they are imaginary, socially constructed, role performances dictated by interpersonal expectations, power dynamics, and cultural scripts. In this paper, I outline an approach to dissociative phenomena, including trance, possession and spiritual and healing practices, that integrates notions of underlying mechanisms with sociocultural processes of the narrative construction and social presentation of the self. This integrative model can advance ethnographic studies and inform clinical approaches to dissociation through careful consideration of the impact of social context.

Rebecca Seligman is a medical and psychological anthropologist who focuses on transcultural psychiatry, or the study of mental health in cross-cultural perspective.  She recently completed a Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) funded postdoctoral fellowship in the department of Psychiatry at McGill University.  Her past research has explored the connection between mental health and religious participation in Northeastern Brazil.  This research examined the ways in which a particular religious belief system shapes the meanings of individual psychosocial stress and psychological distress, and showed that intense religious participation functions therapeutically for vulnerable individuals.  Rebecca Seligman’s other research projects include an examination of the relationships among symptoms of PTSD, dissociation, and psychosis in traumatized immigrant and refugee patients treated at a psychiatric clinic in Canada, and how culture factors into diagnosis and treatment in this context. She is currently developing a project investigating how cultural background and
acculturative processes affect the unusually high rates of PTSD found among Latino immigrants in the U.S.

Please join us for Prof. Seligman’s talk on Thurs, Feb 14th, 2008, at 7pm at Bert Cohler’s home, 5408 S. BlackstonePersons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Rachel Brezis, brezisrs@uchicago.edu or Nicole Martinez,  girasol@uchicago.edu.