Troubled Lives - Healed Bodies: Perspectives on conflict, suffering
and compassion in the Middle East and Western Asia
Organizer: Nefissa Naguib, Unifob Global, University of Bergen, Norway.
CfP Panel: Medical Anthropology at the Intersections: Celebrating 50
Years of Interdisciplinary. September 24-27, 2009
Yale University.
Medical anthropology is currently engaged in understanding how
violence and suffering alter even the most mundane of everyday
cultural activities and human health. While increasing research
attention is devoted by anthropologists to contextualizing and
documenting public health within milieus pervaded by brutal
disruptions, comparatively little attention has so far been given to
the stories of recovery, rebuilding of lives and compassionate
practices. This panel is an attempt to chart the interstices between
pain, compassion and recovery during moments of ongoing strife in both
the Middle East and Western Asia. It takes as its starting point that
out of the worse social violence often comes the most profound social
concern and healing. The panel welcomes ethnographic accounts of how
chaotic frictions and multidimensional crises impact public health and
generate concern, compassion and healing. Papers could refer both to
contexts of care and healing; relationships among individual and
institutional providers of care; frames of traditional compassion,
religious and formal professionalization of care. The panel further
encourages interdisciplinary dialogues between medical anthropology
and other disciplines and public health professionals. The aim is to
bring out a more applied perspective with a theoretically framed
analysis, and to reflect on the epistemological challenges of an
increasingly conflict oriented medical anthropology, where armed
conflicts and reconstructions of lives demand reviewed or new
conceptual frameworks and methods.
Participants are invited to engage with topics which may include:
* Categorization and conceptualization of sufferance,
compassion and healing.
* Bio-medical cure and alternative practices of healing.
* Dynamics between public health care and religious (broadly
constructed) curing systems.
* Bio-medical and religious practices of therapy.
* Restoring mental health disorders caused by war and refugeeism.
* Symptoms of war, public health and traditional healers
* Individual, familial communal networks and ties during
conflict and post-conflict periods.
* Infrastructures of health humanitarianism and relief.
* Aesthetics of care and healing
* Narratives of pain and compassion.
Ultimately the panel seeks to think about medical anthropology's
unique contribution to the study of disrupted lives during lives and
processes of restoring human health.
If you would like to join this session, please send your abstract (150
words) to Nefissa Naguib, nefissa.naguib@global.uib.no by April 10,
2009.