Author's Department/Program
Anthropology
Language
English (en)
Date of Award
1-1-2010
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Chair and Committee
Carolyn Sargent
Abstract
This dissertation looks at "specialized" mental healthcare expertise in France as a lens through which to address the institutional management and representations of cultural difference in France today. By "specialized" mental healthcare centers, I refer structures that provide culturally-sensitive mental health services to immigrants specifically. I identify and explore three contemporary expert approaches: namely, transcultural psychiatry, clinical medical anthropology, and ethnoclinical mediation. By providing a genealogy of specialized mental healthcare institutions, and by construing them as "meta-discursive nodes"--that is, as points of encounter between state, institutional, and individual ideologies--I provide an analysis of the cultural anxieties, contradictions and double-binds that arise from the opposition between a regulative, universalist republican ideology, and a field of expertise which strives to promote culturally-sensitive mental healthcare for immigrants. I argue that, as a product of the conflation of the "immigrant issue": la question immigrée) and the "social issue": la question sociale), "immigrant suffering": Sayad, 2004) has become a medium that problematically couches immigrants' "difficulties"-- whether they relate to mental health pathology or structural problems--in terms of cultural difference. As a result, generic cultural representations of immigrants are uncritically reproduced, making it difficult to identify and address the structural inequalities that do engender suffering.
Recommended Citation
Larchanché, Stéphanie, "Cultural Anxieties and Institutional Regulation: "Specialized" Mental Healthcare and "Immigrant Suffering" in Paris, France" (2010). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 193.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/193
Comments
Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K7VH5KTV