Roberto Beneduce

Politics of healing and politics of culture: ethnopsychiatry, identities and migration.

Ethnopsychiatry is today a contested field, in which concepts and terms such as ethnicity, identity, culture, citizenship, traditional therapies or symbolic efficacy are used in a very controversial way. Recent accusations of ‘racism’ against some ethnopsychiatrists have contributed to making more obscure the deep roots of these issues and controversies. Little attention has been paid to analysing the complex legacy of colonial psychiatry, as well as the relationships among current definitions of ‘culture’ and ‘belonging’, post-colonial subjectivities and migration. In this article, the authors briefly analyse the contributions of Italian ethnopsychiatry and investigate the hidden expressions of racism and prejudice still characterizing mental health workers’ attitudes toward immigrants. It is argued that a ‘generative’ and community-based ethnopsychiatry can challenge the hegemony of western psychiatry and improve the quality of therapeutic strategies.

The Moral Economy of Lying: Subjectcraft, Narrative Capital, and Uncertainty in the Politics of Asylum

Based on narratives of asylum-seekers from sub-Saharan Africa in northern Italy, in this article I analyze the narrative strategies used by immigrants to meet the eligibility criteria established by asylum law. For many of them, this means “arranging” biographical details within what I call “a moral economy of lying.” The first question I discuss is what types of experience and ‘subject positions’ these narrative strategies reveal or generate. I then examine the arbitrariness and the bureaucratic violence of the asylum evaluation process, and the role of these procedures in the making of nation-language and current technologies of citizenship. Finally, I consider the politics of testification, recognition, and memory these discourses and practices combine to shape. I analyze these issues from an historical point of view of the politics of identity, truth, and falsehood as imposed in a recent past by colonizers onto the colonized.

Traumatic pasts and the historical imagination: Symptoms of loss, postcolonial suffering, and counter-memories among African migrants

This work aims to rethink the relationship between anthropology and cultural psychiatry from a historical perspective, through reflections on the dynamics of forgetting and remembering in the context of migration. While migrants’ symptoms often bear cultural hallmarks of suffering, they also reveal images of a traumatic history, which resurface in moments of danger, uncertainty, and crisis. I claim these symptoms are allegories of a dispossessed past, and can be interpreted as counter-memories, as “palimpsests” of an eclipsed script. Trauma symptoms keep returning to a collective past, and thus can be considered a particular form of historical consciousness. Psychiatric diagnoses may obscure these counter-memories. In particular, the diagnostic category of posttraumatic stress disorder that is commonly attached to traumatic experiences in current clinical practice recognizes the truth of individual traumatic events, but at the same time contributes to concealing the political, racial, and historical roots of suffering.

Mental Disorders and Traditional Healing Systems Among the Dogon (Mali, West Africa)

Based on research at the Regional Center of Traditional Medi cine of Bandiagara (Mali), this paper outlines characteristics of the Dogon systems of traditional health care, with particu lar reference to mental disorders. After considering the characteristics of some therapeutic figures (diviners, healers, etc.) and discussing the major nosologic categories inherent in mental disorders, the role of a complementary (semantic, hermeneutic) approach is emphasized together with the need to correlate the use and social significance of nosologic and therapeutic ritual categories with present cultural changes.

Nancy Rose Hunt, The Nervous State. Violence, Remedies and Reveries in Colonial Congo. Durham & London:Duke University Press, 2016, pp. III–353,

the colonial project. Chapters 4−7 analyse the impact of Zimbabwean urbanization in towns such as Bulawayo or Salisbury (as it was known in colonial times – it is now Harare). These chapters present the study of local musical culture in the so-called high-density areas in which a new form of jazz and swing became popular in the townships such as AyaMahobhoor Skokiaan. These chapters examine the different aspects of Zimbabwean jazz in two main urban contexts: townships for black Zimbabweans and colonial venues for white Rhodesians. In Chapters 8−9, there is a reconsideration of the historical memory regarding the songs used for the second liberation war and its context during the 1970s. The author does not repeat gun-centric statements related to the liberation of Zimbabwe from colonial power. In contrast, he states that multiple musical styles and different political and nonpolitical actors participated in the making of Zimbabwean culture during the colonial period such as jazz, Christian hymns, bira ceremonies or chimurenga music among other styles. In the final chapter, the author offers a transcription of two interviews with the historian, musician and activist, Gogo Jane Lungile Ngwenya. This chapter provides a relevant criticism of how the so-called “native informants” (p. 18) during the colonial period, at present, Ngwenya becomes an essential figure for “the production of... [ H]istorical knowledge” (Ibid). In general, this book provides an interdisciplinary perspective for future studies on Zimbabwean music during the colonial era. In addition to this, the author analyses multiple local actors who contributed to the advents of musical realities either through the new Christian beliefs, pure entertainment music through jazz or the reaffirmation of local culture through chimurenga music. On the other hand, there are two main aspects that this book could have included in order to embody more musical realities during the colonial period that interconnect with present studies on Zimbabwean music, such as: the impact of ethnic and linguistic divisions between Ndebele and Shona people – including the ways in which these were manipulated by the colonists − and how this affected the interaction in relation to music; and the possibility of connecting past and present narratives in the book such as the musical and historical links between music created during colonial times and yet still performed in postcolonial Zimbabwe. In conclusion, there is a need for more studies on Zimbabwean music during colonial times to open up a platform for future studies that connect colonial and postcolonial narratives. There is a need, in particular, for more expansive and inclusive studies. However, the interdisciplinary nature of this book provides an innovative and valuable study of Zimbabwean music. It will be particularly useful for the discipline of ethnomusicology.

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Ce qui resiste a l’analyse ethnographique des migrants, ce sont les politiques qui instituent l’illegalite des immigres. Il y a pourtant dans les recits des demandeurs d’asile un appel a l’aide qui nous est adresse et qui forme une contre-histoire du present.

Une autre contre-histoire

Nello sviluppare una riflessione sui temi della violenza all’interno di un corso rivolto a studenti dell’Universita di Torino, ho provato a disegnare un percorso teorico e bibliografico che offrisse loro punti di repere per orientarsi in una letteratura ormai sconfinata, ma ho incontrato non poche difficolta nell’individuare un itinerario che evitasse le insidie dei discorsi antologici (che spesso raccolgono saggi sul problema della violenza, delle sue manifestazioni piu evidenti – la guerra ad esempio, senza definire pero preliminarmente un orizzonte metodologico e il proprio campo discorsivo), o i rischi derivanti dal progetto di situare le ragioni della violenza in un locus particolare (di specie, psichico o tout court universale), abdicando per cio stesso a un approccio storico-etnografico.