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.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/K7VH5KTV
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