Beyond blasphemy or devotion: art,the secular,and Catholicism in Paris

In this article I explore the relationship between the secular and ‘cultural’ Catholicism in France through the lens of a contemporary art exhibit displayed at a new project of the French Catholic Church. Visitors’ varied responses to the exhibit, I argue, ultimately reinforced the organizers’ claim that the activities that occur within this ‘non‐religious’ space of the French church are self‐evident aspects of a broadly recognizable and ‘secular’ French or European culture.     

Mulberry trees: The basis and remnant of the Utah silk industry

Mulberry trees in Northern Utah were located by historical references to local sericulture and by examining vegetation in proximity to pioneer-era two-story houses. It was usually in the upstairs bedrooms of these larger homes where silkworms were raised, and many of these houses planted one or two mulberry trees in their yards. Although mulberry planting and sericulture were once advocated by early Mormon leaders as a means to achieve economic self-sufficiency, ultimately this social and economic experiment failed, leaving relic mulberry groves dotted throughout Utah. Most of these groves have now disappeared in the wake of urban expansion. Preservation of a few relic trees is proposed as a means of preserving cultural ties to the past.     

“We lost all we had in a second”: coping with grief and loss after a natural disaster

Natural disasters cause immense suffering among affected communities. Most occur in developing countries, which have fewer resources to respond to the resulting traumas and difficulties. As a consequence, most survivors have to rely on their own coping resources and draw from what support remains within family, social networks and the wider community to manage and deal with their losses and consequent emotional distress. Taking the 2004 Asian tsunami as an example, this article reports findings from a qualitative study designed to investigate how survivors responded in Sri Lanka, and the range of coping strategies adopted and resources mobilized. In‐depth interviews were conducted with 38 survivors purposively sampled from the Matara district of southern Sri Lanka. Survivors' accounts emphasized the importance of extended supportive networks, religious faith and practices, and cultural traditions in facilitating recovery and sustaining emotional well‐being. Government and external aid responses that promoted these, through contributing to the re‐establishment of social, cultural, and economic life, were particularly valued by participants. Recourse to professional mental health care and Western psychological interventions was limited and survivors preferred to seek help from traditional and religious healers. Our findings tentatively suggest that long‐term mental health following disaster may, in the first instance, be promoted by supporting the re‐establishment of those naturally occurring resources through which communities traditionally respond to suffering.     

Charismatic Catholic Renewal in Bougainville: Revisiting the power of Marian devotion as a cultural and socio‐political force

This article explores the interplay between culture and Christianity by detailing the history, experience, and impact of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1985, the PNG Catholic Bishops' Conference approved the charismatic movement as one of the authentic movements for spiritual renewal of the Catholic Church in PNG. However, the conference stressed this renewal not to be made independent or outside of the Church. In this article I discuss how in Bougainville the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) has been predominantly operating ‘outside’ the institutional Catholic Church, drawing upon both Catholic and cultural logics to mobilise devotees across Bougainville towards renewal and political change. In particular, I will focus on various local Marian movements, elucidating the power and force of the CCR in contexts of Bougainville's civil war (1988–1998). In doing so, this paper will explore what Catholicism and CCR may contribute to discussions about the positioning of culture within Christianity, at the same time showing how charismatic Marian devotion invites reassessment of recent prevailing discussions on cultural ‘continuity’ versus ‘rupture’, as well as doctrinal boundaries held so dearly by the CCR and the Roman Catholic Church in general.     

Beyond Critique: Rethinking Roles for the Anthropology of Mental Health

The current supremacy of the ‘bio-bio-bio’ model within the discipline of psychiatry has progressively marginalized social science approaches to mental health. This situation begs the question, what role is there for the anthropology of mental health? In this essay, I contend that there are three essential roles for the anthropology of mental health in an era of biological psychiatry. These roles are to (i) provide a meaningful critique of practices, beliefs, and movements within current psychiatry; (ii) illuminate the socio-cultural, clinical, and familial context of suffering and healing regarding emotional distress/mental illness; and (iii) act as a catalyst for positive change regarding healing, services and provisions for people with emotional distress/mental illness. My argument is unified by my contention that a credible anthropology of mental health intending to make a societal contribution should offer no opposition without proposition. In other words, any critique must be counter-balanced by the detailing of solutions and proposals for change. This will ensure that the anthropology of mental health continues to contribute critical knowledge to the understanding of mental suffering, distress, and healing. Such social and cultural approaches are becoming especially important given the widespread disenchantment with an increasingly dominant biological psychiatry.     

Nationalism and the ‘idiocy’ of the countryside: The case of Serbia

The mobilization of the countryside has direct consequences for political discourse about national values and in times of social crisis, the ‘conservatism’ of the countryside has the potential to assume an aggressive, offensive posture. When rural mobilization is accompanied by religious revival, group loyalty and so‐called ‘traditional’ values are sacralized. When rural mobilization, ethnic mobilization, and religious revival occur simultaneously, it signifies that the society is undergoing profound destabilization. Examining the case of Serbia, this article argues that while Serbia is, in cultural and social terms, predominantly rural in character, Titoist Communism imposed the values of the city on that culture, while the 1987 coup by Slobodan Milosevic represented, among other things, the triumph of the countryside over the city in Serbia.

This article begins by characterizing the countryside in cultural terms, provides documentation of the importance of rural traditions in Serbian society, documents the rural character of the Serbian national movement, connecting its ideology and behaviour with populist appeals, and examines the contribution made by the Serbian Orthodox Church to the mobilization of the Serbian countryside.     

Living in a Clinic: The Power of Public Health Promotions

Drawing on an anthropological study of the Cessnock area of New South Wales, this paper considers the politics of recent health promotion campaigns in Australia, placing the new ‘healthist’ discourse in its historical context. Whereas Cessnock people were once said to be bestial, or childish, or sick, they are now said to be fat. Whereas Methodism was once prescribed as the solution, doctors now order a rational and maximising attitude to life. It is argued that the undoubted seriousness of Cessnock's health ‘problem’ and the undoubted good will of the health promoters do not remove the danger of cultural imperialism.     

Cultural Competency and Rural Disorder in PNG Health Promotion

ABSTRACT

Health workers in Papua New Guinea strongly emphasise their duty to provide services to the country’s rural majority. Trained to see rural communities as lacking modern discipline and order, they worry that rural people will resist, perhaps with violence, if health workers fail to ‘show respect for culture’. Examining cultural improvisation among nursing students on a rural experience practicum in the Eastern Highlands, I show how students and teachers tried to craft culturally respectful health education. However, when difficulties emerged, local people were described as unable or unwilling to harim tok (understand, heed or follow instructions). The capacity to follow instructions, cultivated through education and Christian faith, was cast as incompatible with Highlands culture. Rural health promotion activities, when they fail to foment major transformation, can help reproduce the ideological construction of the people of the hauslain (village, hamlet) as emotionally volatile and ungovernable.     

The lapsed and the laity: discipline and lenience in the study of religion

This article cautions against an ‘earnest turn’ within the anthropology of religion, pointing up the tendency for anthropologists of religion to over‐emphasize the role of discipline in the construction of the religious subjecthood over mechanisms of leniency and compromise. Taking the Catholic Church as an example, I show how discipline and lenience have been co‐constitutive of Christian subjectivities, as different movements in a gigantic choreography which have spanned and evolved over several centuries. By looking at certain technologies of lenience that have emerged over the course of Catholic history, I trace an alternative genealogy of ‘the Christian self’; one in which institutional growth, power, and survival depended not only upon the formation of disciplined bodies and interior dispositions but also upon a carefully managed division of labour between clergy and laity, as well as upon a battery of legal commutations and practical avoidances aimed at minimizing the effort and pain of the ascetic approach. Taking the concept of ‘lapsedness’ as cue, I ask to what extent the ‘lapsed Catholic’, rather than indexing an ever‐increasing tendency towards secularism, might already be contained and accounted for within Catholicism as a living, evolving form.     

‘Right Now!’: Historiopraxy and the Embodiment of Charismatic Temporalities

I focus on the experience of time and perception of history within the Word of Life charismatic ministry in Sweden, demonstrating the mutual implication of the physical and the temporal, the biographical and the historical, in members' lives. While conversion draws on a personal frame of reference in relation to the passage of time, spiritualised temporality can also be given a more ambitious frame, incorporating major events that might lead to Christ's return. Believers wrestle with at least two ways of dealing with history. One pertains to a mimetic relation to previous action: invoking history. The other involves the articulation of something discontinuous and new, an ‘event’ that moves towards the ultimate salvationist and transformative aims of the faith: making history. Both raise the question of how novelty can be invoked through deploying cultural resources that, seemingly paradoxically, recall actions taken in the past – a process I term ‘historiopraxy’.     

The annual Day of the Dead song contest: musical‐linguistic ideology and practice,piratability, and the challenge of scale

Building on research theorizing scale, this article proposes augmentations to existing frameworks that will help illuminate how localities are linked to ‘stranger collectives’ like nations, ethnicities, and global religious ‘communities’. In this case of ethnic revival from Mexico's Sierra Mazateca, people use new vernacular literacy practices tied to local musical performances as a way of ‘customizing’ modular forms deployed by national and global institutions to manage indigenous difference. People ‘re‐imagine’ locality through a localized indigenous literacy that takes templates provided by the Mexican state and the Catholic Church and places them in productive tension with local context: musical properties of the indigenous language Mazatec, locally valued performance practices, and local musical‐linguistic ideologies. While this revival movement draws on immanently modular forms, once locally embedded they become ‘unpiratable’, and constitute a new resource for inscribing local belonging. This case suggests the importance of considering linguistic and musical aspects of social context often taken for granted in anthropological investigations of scale.     

Institutional refusal to offer assisted dying: A response to Shadd and Shadd

Ever since medical assistance in dying (MAID) became legal in Canada in 2016, controversy has enveloped the refusal by many faith‐based institutions to allow this service on their premises. In a recent article in this journal, Philip and Joshua Shadd have proposed ‘changing the conversation’ on this issue, reframing it as an exercise not of conscience but of an institutional right of self‐governance. This reframing, they claim, will serve to show how health‐care institutions may be justified in refusing to provide MAID on moral or religious grounds. I argue that it will not make it easier to justify institutional refusal, and is likely to make it harder.     

Transcultural Psychiatry: Cultural Difference,Universalism and Social Psychiatry in the Age of Decolonisation

In the mid-twentieth century, in the aftermath of WWII and the Nazi atrocities and in the midst of decolonisation, a new discipline of transcultural psychiatry was being established and institutionalised. This was part and parcel of a global political project in the course of which Western psychiatry attempted to leave behind its colonial legacies and entanglements, and lay the foundation for a more inclusive, egalitarian communication between Western and non-Western concepts of mental illness and healing. In this period, the infrastructure of post-colonial global and transcultural psychiatry was set up, and leading psychiatric figures across the world embarked on identifying, debating and sometimes critiquing the universal psychological characteristics and psychopathological mechanisms supposedly shared among all cultures and civilisations. The article will explore how this psychiatric, social and cultural search for a new definition of ‘common humanity’ was influenced and shaped by the concurrent global rise of social psychiatry. In the early phases of transcultural psychiatry, a large number of psychiatrists were very keen to determine how cultural and social environments shaped the basic traits of human psychology, and ‘psy’ practitioners and anthropologist from all over the world sought to re-define the relationship between culture, race and individual psyche. Most of them worked within the universalist framework, which posited that cultural differences merely formed a veneer of symptoms and expressions while the universal core of mental illness remained the same across all cultures. The article will argue that, even in this context, which explicitly challenged the hierarchical and racist paradigms of colonial psychiatry, the founding generations of transcultural psychiatrists from Western Europe and North America tended to conceive of broader environmental determinants of mental health and pathology in the decolonising world in fairly reductionist terms—focusing almost exclusively on ‘cultural difference’ and cultural, racial and ethnic ‘traditions’, essentialising and reifying them in the process, and failing to establish some common sociological or economic categories of analysis of Western and non-Western ‘mentalities’. On the other hand, it was African and Asian psychiatrists as well as Marxist psychiatrists from Eastern Europe who insisted on applying those broader social psychiatry concepts—such as social class, occupation, socio-economic change, political and group pressures and relations etc.—which were quickly becoming central to mental health research in the West but were largely missing from Western psychiatrists’ engagement with the decolonising world. In this way, some of the leading non-Western psychiatrists relied on social psychiatry to establish the limits of psychiatric universalism, and challenge some of its Eurocentric and essentialising tendencies. Even though they still subscribed to the predominant universalist framework, these practitioners invoked social psychiatry to draw attention to universalism’s internal incoherence, and sought to revise the lingering evolutionary thinking in transcultural psychiatry. They also contributed to re-imagining cross-cultural encounters and exchanges as potentially creative and progressive (whereas early Western transcultural psychiatry primarily viewed the cross-cultural through the prism of pathogenic and traumatic ‘cultural clash’). Therefore, the article will explore the complex politics of the shifting and overlapping definitions of ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ factors in mid-twentieth century transcultural psychiatry, and aims to recover the revolutionary voices of non-Western psychiatrists and their contributions to the global re-drawing of the boundaries of humanity in the second half of the twentieth century.

     

Great Expectations: Hindu Revival Movements in Java

Based on preliminary ethnographic research in five Javanese communities with major Hindu temples, I explore the political history and social dynamics of Hindu revivalism. I reject formalist approaches to the study of religion, including the notion of ‘syncretism’ and instead, treat the Hindu revival movements as an illustration of how social agents employ religious or secular concepts and values in their strategic responses to the particular challenges and crises they may face in a specific cultural, social, political and historical setting. Expectations of a great crisis at the dawn of a new golden age among followers of the Javanese Hindu revival movement are an expression of utopian prophesies and political hopes more widely shared among contemporary Indonesians. These expectations are set to shape the prospects of Indonesia's fledgling democracy. The paper reflects on the historical conditions under which these and similar utopian expectations and associated social movements may either incite violent conflict or serve a positive role in the creation or maintenance of a fair society.     

A Point in the Heart: Concepts of Emotional Distress Among Albanian-Speaking Immigrants in Switzerland

Cultural variability regarding concepts of distress for common mental disorders (CMD) has been reported extensively in cultural clinical psychology across the globe. However, little is known about illness narratives in social communities from Southeast Europe. The purpose of this paper is to identify cultural concepts of distress (CCDs) among Albanian-speaking immigrants in Switzerland and to integrate the findings into literature from other parts of the world. Twenty semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted using the Barts Explanatory Model Inventory (BEMI). A set of concepts was described through content analysis and semantic network analysis. The results show complex expressions of distress, which are mainly associated with post-migration living difficulties. Social problems and life-changing events mark the onset of the most common symptoms. Self-management and social support were described as the most important coping behaviors. Participants expressed trust in physical health care but little belief in psychotherapy. There is indication that mental illnesses are stigmatized in this population. It is therefore important to use non-stigmatizing terms in health communication. Moreover, individuals from this community consider suffering to be part of life, and they assume that this suffering must be endured with patience. It is vital to address these beliefs in psychological interventions.

     

The mobilization of the ethnic vote: A thesis with some Scottish and Welsh evidence*

This article provides a historical and comparative analysis of post‐imperial migrations of ethnic unmixing. It examines the post‐Soviet migration of ethnic Russians to Russia in the light of the migrations of other once‐dominant ‘new minorities’ engendered by transitions from multinational empire to incipient nation‐states: Balkan Muslims during and after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Hungarians after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, and Germans after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the German Kaiserreich.     

Identity and healing in three Navajo religious traditions: sa'ah naagháí bik'eh hózh [symbol: see text

In this article, we elucidate how the Navajo synthetic principle sa'ah naagháí bik'eh hózh [symbol: see text] (SNBH) is understood, demonstrated, and elaborated in three different Navajo healing traditions. We conducted interviews with Navajo healers and their patients affiliated with Traditional Navajo religion, the Native American Church, and Pentecostal Christianity. Their narratives provide access to cultural themes of identity and healing that invoke elements of SNBH. SNBH specifies that the conditions for health and well-being are harmony within and connection to the physical/spiritual world. Specifically, each religious healing tradition encourages affective engagement, proper family relations, an understanding of one's cultural and spiritual histories, and the use of kinship terms to establish affective bonds with one's family and with the spiritual world. People's relationships within this common behavioral environment are integral to their self-orientations, to their identities as Navajos, and to the therapeutic process. The disruption and restoration of these relationships constitute an important affective dimension in Navajo distress and healing.     

Understanding: Between belief and unbelief

This paper addresses issues raised in Taylor’s work concerning how communities may come to work in normatively secular ways. For Taylor, it seems to be sufficient for believers (and nonbelievers) to acknowledge that their own ‘construals’ are not shared by everyone. However, this leaves open the question of how the acknowledgement of difference may be turned into respect. A common strategy is to require that faith‐based truth claims are ‘bracketed out’, treating secular and religious discourse as ‘nonoverlapping magisteria’. This secularising strategy is, however, problematic on a number of counts. The article makes a case for a less confrontational, more cosmopolitan conversation between secular and religious reason in a postsecular age, examining in particular the possibilities for conversation between science and mysticism. It concludes that it is possible to retain a commitment to naturalism and yet also accept some of the most mystical of propositions, thereby establishing a bridge between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ forms of reasoning.     

“How I Floated on Gentle Webs of Being”: Psychiatrists Stories About the Mental Health Treatment Gap in Africa

A strong movement has emerged recently which is highlighting the high levels of untreated mental illness in Africa and making proposals for reducing this ‘gap’ in mental health care. This movement has been criticised for insufficiently attending to the epistemologies embedded in its recommendations, and inadequately considering the views of practitioners ‘on the ground’. Employing a narrative-based approach, I accessed the stories about the mental health ‘treatment gap’ of 28 psychiatrists all working clinically in public mental health care settings in South Africa, Uganda, Nigeria or Ethiopia. Rather than focusing on the content of these stories, I was more interested in their underpinning meaning-codes and epistemological politics. Dominant thinking about the ‘treatment gap’ was heavily informed by a biomedical paradigm, and associated epistemological order of European Colonial Modernity. There were, however, cracks in this master narrative, which crystalised in the stories that were told by three particular psychiatrists. Their narratives operated within an alternative paradigm, one which appears to be informed by the tradition of phenomenology, and in particular the ideas associated with French philosopher Merleau-Ponty. This more marginalised thinking may offer important insights into reducing the mental health ‘treatment gap’ in Africa in ways very different from those created by current seats of power.     

Pyrogeography,historical ecology,and the human dimensions of fire regimes

In our 2011 synthesis (Bowman et al., Journal of Biogeography, 2011, 38 , 2223–2236), we argued for a holistic approach to human issues in fire science that we term ‘pyrogeography’. Coughlan & Petty (Journal of Biogeography, 2013, 40 , 1010–1012) critiqued our paper on the grounds that our ‘pyric phase’ model was built on outdated views of cultural development, claiming we developed it to be the unifying explanatory framework for all human–fire sciences. Rather, they suggest that ‘historical ecology’ could provide such a framework. We used the ‘pyric transition’ for multiple purposes but did not offer it as an exclusive explanatory framework for pyrogeography. Although ‘historical ecology’ is one of many useful approaches to studying human–fire relationships, scholars should also look to political and evolutionary ecology, ecosystems and complexity theories, as well as empirical generalizations to build an interdisciplinary fire science that incorporates human, ecological and biophysical dimensions of fire regimes.