Diversifying Mental Health - Therapeutic Placemaking within Brazilian Spiritism

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Helene Basu
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2015 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 273588344

This project is situated at the intersection of medical anthropology and the anthropology of religion with a special focus on trans/cultural psychiatry. It explores the making of spiritist healing places in Brazil and Germany by directing attention to embodied experiences mediated by the senses. Drawing on the notion of diversification, the project inquires into role of the work of the senses in the making of places engaged in healing mental distress and/or disorder. Place making will be ethnographically explored in a psychiatric-cum-spiritist hospital and a centre of Umbanda in the context of medical pluralism in Brazil as well as in a spiritual Umbanda centre in Germany frequented by Brazilian immigrants along with German health seekers. The concept of the mindful body gave rise to new anthropological perspectives on the embodied nature of consciousness embedded in an emerging interdisciplinary field of sensory ethnography. The project is oriented along the lines of recent research demonstrating the intertwinement between biological conditioning and the socio-cultural production of sensual experiences. Studies attending to processes of perception and structuring of spaces and places emphasize embodied practices generating and reproducing knowledge, memory and imagination in interaction with multi-sensory environments referred to as emplacement. The double face of the notion sense referring to media of experiences and sense- or meaning-making is of great significance in variable constructions of social order and socio-cultural definitions of disorder and the abnormal. The latter impact upon both processes of boundary-drawing and mixture of psychiatric, religious or spiritual classifications of pathologies. How this happens will be explored with ethnographic methods. The project builds upon the hypothesis that processes of diversification in the realm of mental health involve the senses and emplacement thereby creating hybrid, socially and culturally specific places of healing. By addressing these objectives the project aims at producing a novel anthropological contribution within the interdisciplinary field of trans/cultural psychiatry directed at both knowledge of experiences of suffering, health seeking and healing and at the possibility of the latter s reflexive application in settings of care. The results of the project will be published a) as a contribution to a general and comparative anthropological introduction to the field of trans/cultural psychiatry; b) in a monograph about therapeutic-spiritist movements in Brazil and Germany.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants