The Politicised Child, Transcultural Constructions of Childhood, Psychological Trauma, and the Mind in the Modern World: Afterword
Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Ana Antic notes in her Introduction that this edition addresses the public emergence of the harmed ('traumatised') or politically tainted child-shades of Kipling's 'half devil, half child' or, here, Wagner's 'white child gone bankrupt'.Souls to be saved which would otherwise be 'lost'.These essays seek to interrogate the subject across disciplines and domains: social history, social anthropology, psychology, humanitarian and human rights discourses.In part this is a critique of the conceptual assumptions and limitations of Western scholarship, particularly so in relation to psychology, whose universalist and biomedical underpinnings present a barrier to nuance and complexity.I would like to reflect on 3 key poles.Firstly, what is 'psychology'?Is it only what the clinical psychology profession says it is?Is it a moral philosophy of the self?Is the business of other people's minds more a matter of philosophy than of science, which cannot separate fact from value?Can 'psychology' be distinct from 'culture'?From an anthropological point of view, what psychology invokes includes personal identity, selfhood, subjectivity, memory, consciousness, emotion, motivation, cognition, madness, and 'mental health'.In modern Western society the backdrop is of the medicalisation of everyday life, the commodification of 'mind', neoliberal injunctions towards self-improvement, and the insertion into public consciousness of the language of psychological deficit.How far does it take us to use the Western ethnopsychological definition of 'emotion' as: internal, often biological, unintended, distinct from cognition, and a feature of individuals not situations?There are non-Western tribal societies who do not recognise our separation between 'emotion and 'cognition'-though in fact the
Source: Culture Medicine and Psychiatry
Author: Derek Summerfield
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,890
OpenAlex ID: W4291189685