Gilles Bibeau - Halt to the Abuse of Globalization in the field of Mental Health (ASI 2012)
Channel: Transcultural Psychiatry
Date: 2012-12-03

The notion of culture has been under attack in anthropology during the last decades. People have particularly denounced what appears as a double process of objectification: internally, when cultures are presented as coherent and homogeneous entities; externally, when societies and cultures are presented as well-bounded and clearly separated from one another. These critiques have been formulated against a double horizon: (i) a historical one where colonization is analyzed as having produced a certain vision of the Otherness of the alien cultures: a vision built on processes of exoticization that facilitated the colonizer's domination and the play of power relationships; and (ii) a transversal horizon with the current awareness of the power of globalization forces including the importance of large-scale movements of populations, the circulation of images and products through trade and the media, and individuals' concrete and
imaginary travels throughout societies and cultures where they can live and imagine themselves as participating in multiple worlds. It is striking to see that at the very same moment when anthropology was criticizing the notion of Culture, mental health clinicians and researchers seemed to have discovered Culture. However, most of them seem unaware of the traps that this notion entails. Cultures are generally heterogeneous, plural and paradoxical; they are infused and modulated by power relationships at the global and local levels. Individuals circulate between various cultural worlds and often belong simultaneously to several of them. This paper will discuss the implications of a critical medical anthropology for global mental health.