Annie Tucker

The Bird Dancer: Social Rejection and Social Suffering

The ethnographic film The Bird Dancer depicts Gusti Ayu, a young Balinese woman diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome. Gusti’s symptoms are moderate but largely unfamiliar in rural Bali, eliciting concern, fear, and ridicule in her family and community. Gusti has spent years pursuing unsuccessful traditional and Western treatments while struggling to overcome the stigma and suffering that has resulted not primarily from her Tourette Syndrome but from the web of cultural significance spun around it. After presenting Gusti’s life story, the chapter conducts an intersectional analysis of her experience as informed by traditional healing therapeutics, gendered habitus and family practices, and the Balinese Hindu caste system. It then reflexively examines the role of psychiatric treatment and empathetic listening in Gusti’s personal trajectory and the filmmaking process.

Shadows and Illuminations: Interpreting and Framing Extraordinary Experience

The ethnographic film Shadows and Illuminations focuses on Kereta, a rural Balinese man in his sixties, who lives in two worlds: the world of his family and community and the world of the spirits. Kereta has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia but his experiences skirt the borders of cultural and spiritual norms, simultaneously manifesting and exceeding Balinese beliefs about the supernatural world and the possibilities for human interaction with it. After presenting Kereta’s life story, the chapter explores how culturally non-normative states of consciousness and their developmental, biographical, and historical roots and connections are subjectively experienced and socially contextualized, with a particular focus on ngeb, a Balinese idiom of distress encompassing trauma reaction, social withdrawal, and silent political protest.

Ritual Burdens: Culturally Defined Stressors and Developmental Progressions

The ethnographic film Ritual Burdens follows Ni Ketut Kasih, a Balinese woman whose ceremonial obligations trigger episodes of behavioral disorder and emotional disturbance for which she has been hospitalized over 35 times. Ketut’s case exemplifies a personal schema of stress wherein cultural obligations, traumatic historical events, biography, and neurobiology overlap to trigger cyclical episodes of mental illness. At the same time, Ketut’s story exemplifies the benefits of family support, impersonal attribution, and non-stigmatizing labeling when living with a chronic, disruptive, and emotionally dysregulated condition. The chapter discusses Ketut’s shifting attitudes toward the filmmaking process, from enthusiasm to the pain of watching herself age, struggle with illness episodes, and exhibit the side effects of her tardive dyskinesia on-screen.

Memory of My Face: Globalization, Madness, and Identity On-screen

The ethnographic film Memory of My Face features Bambang, a university-educated Indonesian man living in the outskirts of Jakarta, Indonesia’s largest metropolis. Now in his mid-thirties and diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, Bambang has had episodes of euphoric mania and delusions since he was a sophomore in high school. After sharing his life story, the film and the chapter pay particular attention to the way residues of colonialism and the pervasive influence of globalization affect the subjective experience of his illness, moving beyond biological psychiatry to demonstrate that the content of manic speech and delusions has meaning. This ethnographic argument is mirrored in the filmmaking process and the film narrative, which moves from a sense of strangeness to one of empathy.

Kites and Monsters: Continuity in Cultural Practices

The ethnographic film Kites and Monsters follows Wayan Yoga, a Balinese boy diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome, discovering the protective aspects of culture that may interact with developmental neuropsychiatric processes. At six years old, Wayan Yoga is energetic, loves to fly kites, and is obsessed with the monsters of Balinese mythology. His various movements cause his parents to seek diagnosis and treatment, but a stable cultural context that provides opportunities for normalization helps successfully guide Wayan into a well-adjusted and productive Balinese adulthood. Discussion addresses the special circumstances and opportunities that arise in longitudinal filming with a child maturing into adulthood. In closing, this chapter re-visits the “outcome paradox” in the cross-cultural study of mental illness and neuropsychiatric disorder.

Family Victim: Encountering Deviance and Representing Intersubjectivity

The ethnographic film Family Victim explores the bi-directionality of cultural and family context in the development of someone behaviorally quite different from the norm. Estu is the so-called “bad coconut” of a respected Javanese family. His disruptive patterns of conduct have stressed his relationships and threatened his marriage, eliciting multiple explanatory models for his “troubled and troubling” life course, including the Indonesian idioms of distress amok/ngamuk and spirit possession, and the globalized folk diagnosis of psychopathy. By tracking the anthropologist’s attempts to understand Estu’s deviance and his family’s response to it, the film and the chapter demonstrate the forms of analytic consciousness an anthropologist goes through in making sense of a subject, and illustrate how the intersubjective reality that takes shape influences relationships, the filmmaking process, and the finished film.

Collaboration, Intervention, Compensation, and Ethics

The chapter turns to interpersonal and ethical issues in visual psychological anthropology (VPA), self-reflexively using the Afflictions films as examples. First addressed are models of collaboration with filmmakers, professionals, and local colleagues in the field; next come interactions with and impacts on film participants. The authors question academic and personal outcomes of using VPA; whether or not participation in VPA could be considered “therapeutic”; and how to approach covering long-debated issues of compensation and intervention. The subsequent ethical discussion follows American Anthropological Association guidelines. Topics covered include the expression of these in VPA, and how to adhere to them when conducting research in contexts of violence and trauma; the complexity of obtaining true consent from film participants who are also friends and who may be at times compromised due to mental illness; shifting motivations for participation and the way off-screen relationships impact filmmaking process and final choices made in film.

Perspectives on Integrating Ethnographic Film into Psychological Anthropology

The chapter reviews different historical and theoretical movements in ethnographic film and psychological anthropology that provide a foundation for visual psychological anthropology (VPA). It traces 20th-century developments in popular cinema and documentary, attending to ethnographic film pioneers such as John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson; exploring relevant trends such as direct cinema and experimental ethnography; and drawing parallels to the methodology, main concerns, and trajectory of psychological anthropology—as reflected in recent theory—and ethnography, in the increasing concern with subjectivity, phenomenology, and textured individual accounts. VPA proves to be a synergistic practice that extends the toolkit of psychological anthropologists while offering an invigorating approach towards ethnographic film, even when depicting sensitive and fraught issues around mental illness.

Visual Psychological Anthropology: A Vignette and Prospectus

The chapter proposes that ethnographic film can be a meaningful method in psychological anthropology, specifically recommending adapting the technique of person-centered ethnography to visual psychological anthropology (VPA). VPA can be used to create films that are character-focused, affective, and experience near, rendering internal and intersubjective worlds in a culturally contextualized manner. VPA can faithfully depict the subjective experience of mental illness specifically by de-emphasizing diagnosis and symptomatology in favor of emotion and character development. Calling upon the six-part Afflictions series, the first documentary series about mental illness in the developing world, as an example of VPA, the chapter introduces the films to be discussed throughout the book: The Bird Dancer, Kites and Monsters, Family Victim, Ritual Burdens, Memory of My Face, and Shadows and Illuminations.

Visual Psychological Anthropology: Implications for Teaching and the Future

The book concludes with recommendations for the dissemination of visual psychological anthropology and its use in psychological anthropology pedagogy, public presentations for colleagues and specialists, and the wider digital public sphere. The chapter puts forth some potential directions and prospects for a visual psychological anthropology, gesturing toward the challenges and opportunities ahead for an ethnographic film that is resonant and integrated with the methods and insights of contemporary psychological anthropology.